Category: Product Updates

Marketing-as-a-Service: what it is and why you need it

Posted on December 12, 2021 by - Product Updates

When you’re spending yet another late-night Googling ‘best marketing strategies for my business’ and ‘how to send profits soaring’ the options can feel overwhelming. Agencies remind you of the time you got stuck in a merciless contract like those ankle chains they use in Saw. Finding the right freelancer will probably take 4 – 8 weeks, just like their turnaround time. Hiring an in-house employee gives you an early-onset HR headache. Let alone the risk of choosing marketing that misses out on the latest trends when they’re at their most lucrative.

Maybe you’re one of the lucky business owners who already has a marketing team – but you run into issues when you don’t have the experts needed to complete a unique task. The truth is, the modern consumer has developed unique needs. As a result, marketing needs to be aimed at meeting those new needs if you really want to see ROI.

So what exactly is MaaS?

If you haven’t heard the term Marketing-as-a-Service or MaaS before, you’re probably scratching your head, wondering if it’s new. The short answer: sort of. The long answer: MaaS is a modern solution for businesses that want to overcome the restrictive limitations of traditional marketing. In a nutshell, MaaS provides you with any (and every) marketing service you can think of – but without the skyrocketing costs. So the individual services are proven and well-known, but MaaS overall is a revolutionary newcomer to the marketing scene.

How is MaaS different from a marketing agency?

The way MaaS works for your business depends on the company that provides it. However, at CODESM, there are certain things you can expect:

• It’s faster

A quick glance at some marketing agencies shows an average turnaround time of 10 days for standard tasks and 72 hours for accelerated tasks. Of course, freelancers without this rule of thumb can take even longer. With MaaS by CODESM, you don’t get lost in the production line. Our team is spread across various time zones to accommodate requests on the same day they’re briefed in. Whenever there’s an urgent turnaround task, we get it done in 24 – 48 hours.

• You save enough to scale

None of this grow expenses to grow revenue nonsense, MaaS is full-service marketing. There’s no need to add every little task, urgent turnaround, quick Facebook ad, or new freelancer to your invoice. Since you already have a full team of experts at one flat fee, this cuts marketing costs in a way that helps you scale.

• Everything is more personalized

From the unique strategy based on your short- and long-term goals to the dedicated account manager who serves as your right-hand marketing guru, it’s all tailored to you. You speak to actual people who regularly update you and your marketing never takes a cookie-cutter approach.

• You get more done

Where traditional marketing models have certain limitations like delayed timelines, limited scope, or exorbitant costs, MaaS gives you the ability to do anything your business needs at that moment. Radio ad? Done. Billboard? You got it. Animated explainer video? We’re on it. When we say full-service, we mean full-service.

• You also just get more

Marketing and sales are unique in how they operate. So we give you free access to our custom-built Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, known as GoCRM. This helps automate your follow up, organize your sales team, and, ultimately, boost your conversions. You also get full transparency on our custom project management dashboard where you instantly get a bird’s eye view of all work and can be involved as you wish.

How does MaaS work?

MaaS gives you the dedicated attention of a full marketing department. You decide how many hours you need per month and what the team works on during those hours. (Don’t worry if you don’t know that – MaaS also involves marketing strategy to help plan campaigns and tasks.) For less than the cost of a single employee, you get the best talent in the industry meeting your marketing needs. Think strategy, SEO, copywriting, design, development, animation, social media management, videography, the works. That’s worth over $1 million in payroll for one flat monthly rate.

If you’re reading this screaming “YES! This is totally right for me!” then schedule a no-obligation consultation call with a CODESM expert. If you’re still not convinced (have to do that due diligence, we get it), here’s a free Marketing Strategy Roadmap.

Marketing Attribution

Posted on July 20, 2020 by - Marketing, Product Updates, Web

How To Track Your Marketing

If you can measure it, you can manage it. Tracking your marketing is about more than just numbers. If you do it right, you can use the data to determine what is or isn’t working and to measure the efficacy of different channels and campaigns. Ultimately, this puts you in a position where you’re able to decrease marketing spend on underperforming channels to maximize results from high-performing channels, thus creating a cost-effective marketing strategy that gives you the results you want.

GoCRM offers advanced marketing attribution features that collect valuable in-depth data and help you find out exactly how you should adjust your marketing strategies to increase their results. With so many different marketing campaigns and channels, GoCRM helps you track the detailed performance of each. Let’s understand how to track your marketing with GoCRM.

Marketing Channel & Campaign Tracking

Regardless of your industry, any effective marketing strategy relies on an omnichannel approach. This means you use various channels – like radio, magazines, email sequences, social media ads, SEO blogs, etc – to attract leads. And often, a channel can have multiple marketing campaigns running at once. A singular marketing campaign can also span across various channels. This can get tricky to track if you don’t have the right system, but GoCRM tracks your marketing results across every channel and every campaign.

It assigns specific phone numbers or URLs to your marketing channels and campaigns. This tracks where leads come from and show exactly how many leads a specific source is bringing in. This helps you to get a better idea of how your different marketing channels and campaigns perform. The GoCRM system automatically organizes all your leads into one centralized location where you can see every lead’s exact journey. You can easily view any contact to instantly see their origin, channel, and campaign.

The Methods:

GoCRM offers attribution features that act as the perfect tracking toolbox. Because the system is integrated with all your marketing efforts across the board, it collects valuable data and helps you track your marketing in three main ways:

Call Tracking

Call tracking gives you in-depth information on every person who calls your business and correlates incoming calls with different ads or marketing campaigns. This helps you understand which campaigns are working and how you can adjust your marketing strategies for improved capturing and conversion.

GoCRM helps you detect leads by assigning different phone numbers to different marketing elements. Whenever a lead uses a specific contact phone number to contact you, you will know which marketing material they engaged with. This way, you can connect leads to the right channel, measure different channels, and analyze whether results match spend.

Dynamic Number Insertion & Form Tracking

Instead of just knowing a lead came from your website, GoCRM integrates with your website to track all forms and phone calls and the lead’s entire session data. Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) integration changes any phone number from within the website to update in real-time in every place where it’s listed to measure the impact of marketing efforts on inbound contact.

Through DNI, GoCRM integrates with your website and tracks all website form submissions and calls to collect the following information: Page URL, Referrer URL, Landing Page URL, UTM source (tracks which platform the traffic comes from, like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter), UTM medium (shows what kind of traffic it is, such as paid, referral, organic, etc), and UTM campaign (pinpoints the specific campaign that resulted in the traffic.) This way, you can see the lead’s behavior and their steps taken while engaging with you. GoCRM’s web tracking can also be used for designated URLs to gauge how certain campaigns, products, or special offers compare to each other.

 

Direct Lead Integration

Even direct leads can be tracked with GoCRM’s advanced direct lead integration. It uses third-party Zapier integrations to collect leads which can then be automatically assigned to a source from within GoCRM.

Examples:

Wondering exactly how these tracking methods work? Here are some examples of what you can do with your GoCRM tracking tools:

Offline Channels

With the GoCRM Channels toolset, you can create unique phone numbers and track custom URLs for your marketing pieces. So say you had a promotion being advertised through direct mail, this postcard will have a designated phone number and/or URL so that if somebody calls you from the postcard, the system will know where the call originated. If somebody visits the landing page, then makes a phone call or submits a form, through DNI, we’ll be able to trace it back to the source direct mail.

 

Online Channels

Leads come from various places online, like Search Engines or Social Media. GoCRM combines call and URL tracking to accurately determine where leads found you. It determines what post, ad, campaign or other element lead them to you. This example shows how GoCRM tracks incoming leads from Facebook through a variety of methods. It also demonstrates how a lead is tracked if they directly called the unique number listed on a Facebook page.

Third-Party Direct Sources

Whenever a form is filled out by a lead, whether it’s online or offline, it will be tracked. GoCRM also lets you integrate direct sources from a third party with Zapier integration. The system uses all the information available on a lead to autofill forms with their right details and ensures all third-party forms are captured as well.

Don’t Forget About Reports

While having access to data about your marketing performance is great, it’s only one part of tracking. The other part is being able to view all of this information in a way that helps you understand what is happening and learn where you should make changes. This is why GoCRM also gives you the option of creating detailed reports of your data.

The system compiles all tracked data into an in-depth report that breaks down your marketing performance. These results can be viewed by channel, show the month-to-month growth of each, as well as how many deals were closed from every channel. These reports measure your marketing spend compared to the results to tell you what the ROI of different marketing tactics are. Essentially, detailed reports help you minimize marketing spend while maximizing results.

Curious about GoCRM? Try it free for 30 days to see these tracking features and much more in action.

Zapier Integration

Posted on June 24, 2020 by - Product Updates, Web

Zapier allows you to connect the many apps you use daily and eliminates the repetitive busywork required between them. Currently, there are 750+ apps that can be linked to your GoCRM account through Zapier in the form of Zaps. For more information on Zapier and how it works check out their website. In order to use Zapier with GoCRM, you must first sign up for a Zapier account here.

Automations Beta Now Available

Posted on February 28, 2020 by - Marketing, Product Updates, Web

Automations are flows that you build out in a visual canvas by connecting shapes, these shapes create different personalized pathways, that contact would progress to when interacting with your business. It allows for the easy and efficient delivery of information to your contacts.

Automation Settings

Each automation starts with a segment, the segment defines which contacts should enter the automation. It may be that they are on a static list or they submitted a form.

Workflow

There are 3 different types of shapes in GoCRM, these are filers, events, and actions.

Actions
Actions are things that happen to contacts when they are in an automation. You may want to send them an email or an sms or wait for a certain period of time to pass to follow-up. You can also do updates like adding contacts to a list, or creating a task.

Filters
Filters are the traffic directors of the automation, they check if a contact meets certain criteria and then routes them accordingly. For example, I may want to send a different text message to contacts depending on the time of day, or if it’s a weekday or a weekend, or if they have responded in the past or not.

Events
Events are conditions in order for the next step to continue, the automation waits until the user or contact has completed one of these steps before progressing to the next shape. For example, the automation may wait until the contact has replied to a text message, or the deal stage has been changed by a user.

Now we will connect each action shape together, when connecting a filter, make sure to select the appropriate option to stop or progress contacts through the automation. When these shapes are connected into sequences the automation will progress through each stage doing exactly what you tell it to. Automations will not become active until you’re completely ready to go, this means there are no accidental emails sent or confused customers.

When you’re ready you hit Start Automation, and the automation will do the busy work for you. For ideas on how you can use automations, visit our blog! But for now, that’s what is an automation.