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Closed-Loop Marketing 101: Enhancing Your Campaigns

Optimize Digital Marketing
February 9, 2023

Closed-loop marketing has become a go-to process for businesses that are looking to build high-quality marketing campaigns. In modern businesses, a company that relies on data to make decisions not only can market a product or service better, but they can also improve the quality of their products and services altogether. 


The automotive industry is no different. Websites can track users and their behavior within that website. The products and services that people search for give great insight into what they want and need. This blog discusses what closed-loop marketing is and how it can serve your business. 


What is Closed-Loop Marketing? 

Apart from maintaining your business and your employees, marketing may be the most important aspect of your business. Marketing allows businesses to reach their target audience through digital and physical means. 


The term, “closed loop,” refers to the relationship between your sales and marketing teams. They work together to better understand your lead sources. 


What are the Steps of Closed-Loop Marketing? 

The key to closed-loop marketing is creating a plan based on four principles: planning, execution, conversion, and analysis. Let us dive deeper into each step to see what differentiates them and how they all work together to grow your business. 

A diagram of the closed loop marketing process


Planning 

Developing a plan for your business is the first step. That plan starts with creating your target audience by determining what demographics (age, race, location, etc.) and psychographics (values, interests, and desires, etc.) you want your target audience to have. After figuring out what your target audience is, you can then start to analyze customer behavior. What platforms are they most active on? What topics are they most interested in online? After that, you can then move on to the execution phase of closed-loop marketing. 


Execution 

As it pertains to the content on social media and ads, developing an overall content plan will set your business up for success. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly content comes in many forms. From social media posts to blogs, and paid advertising to email advertising, there are many avenues you can use to deliver your message. 


This content will be created with building an online foundation in mind, grabbing the attention of potential customers through clever posting and engaging content that is relevant to the audience you want to target. Creating high-quality content that is relevant to the audience can transform those leads into customers. 


Conversions 

Conversions occur when a person receives a message, like an ad or social media post, and that message entices them to perform the desired action. In this case, if you were to send out an ad on Facebook that discusses a discount on a specific service, and a consumer clicks on it, that counts as a conversion. The point of a conversion is to see how effective your ads and content are. 


If you create an ad and it does not perform well, what factors are at play? Well, it could be a few things. You may not have used the correct keywords to encourage consumers to act. If the ad is not relevant, people will not engage with it. Making sure that you stay on top of trends and keywords will ensure that your ads are seen and engaged with by your target audience. 


SMS and email marketing are also factors in closed-loop marketing. These leads have already shown interest in you and your services when they first gave you their contact information. These leads can consist of past customers or those who may have contacted you at some point inquiring about your services. These are perfect leads to be sending messages regarding maintenance reminders or promotion announcements that your shop is putting on. 


Analysis 

This is where you can see how your campaign performed. Do some posts or ads engage with consumers more than others? Are you not seeing the action you want on specific platforms? Closed-loop marketing tends to assist in determining where your money is best spent and what type of message works best with your target audience. 


After analyzing the content, you can use the valuable information that you have gathered to enhance your plan and create higher-performing content for your audience. This is where the cycle would back up to the planning stage for the marketing team to develop a new and improved campaign for your business. 


Why is Closed-Loop Marketing Important? 

Closed-loop marketing is important for all businesses because it can create constructive collaboration between your business and the customer. Improving customer relations allows you to better understand what your customers like and what they do not like. With the information provided by your customers, you can improve maintenance services and repairs, so why not take advantage of their opinions? 


The point of closed-loop marketing is to analyze consumer behavior and then market products or services accordingly. Closed-loop marketing consists of two moving parts. The sales team is tasked with analyzing consumer behavior. After the data and insights are gathered, it is then packaged in a way that the marketing team can understand. They will then create messages that resonate with their target audience. 


What Are the Benefits of Closed-Loop Marketing? 

There are plenty of reasons why marketing efforts that ignore the closed-loop marketing approach lack success. If your sales team lacks communication with the marketing department, you will not know where the leads come from or how to better leverage those leads for the future. 


Another benefit is to see how you can improve your business’ website and social media pages. With closed-loop marketing, you will see if your website or social media platforms are effectively influencing consumers to visit your business for services. 


Using closed-loop marketing also grants the ability to be more specific with monetary targets, as well as sales goals. 


Closing the loop brings the execution of marketing and execution of maintenance services and repairs together to create one cohesive unit. 


Adopting a plan for customer relationship management starts with understanding what closed-loop marketing is and what you can do to make it beneficial to your business. 


How Can I Use Closed-Loop Marketing to Benefit My Business? 

Using the closed-loop marketing process will yield many results that will benefit your business. The first one is one of the most important: lower costs to market and a potentially higher conversion rate. 


Another important benefit is a better experience for your customers. With closed-loop marketing and an analysis of those findings, you can tailor your campaigns around services that matter to them. Creating effective marketing messages will increase ROI (return on investment) and give businesses a chance to put more money behind highly producing lead generators. 


Adapting to modern business practices is necessary if you are to market your products and services online or in store, and having the necessary tools to do that will bring about those benefits. 


What is Required for Closed-Loop Marketing? 

Two tools are required for your business to participate in closed-loop marketing: CRM (customer relations management) software and marketing software. CRM software allows for bringing all aspects of your business together, from sales, to leads, and ad campaign management, while marketing software is used to store the data collected so that you can improve your customer experience. 


In November of 2022, Optimize Digital Marketing partnered with Epicor to provide the Epicor Service CRM solution for businesses within the automotive industry. The Epicor CRM Solution, along with Optimize’s digital marketing solutions, will provide your business with the tools it needs to engage with customers and facilitate their needs. 


While the CRM solution provides you with knowledge as to what your customers are looking for, the solutions provided by Optimize are leveraged to build long-lasting relationships with your customers by providing high-quality content, reputation management, and even website creation and management. 


Whether you are a new or old customer of ours, Optimize can manage the digital side of your business and create a closed-loop marketing plan, so that you have more time to manage your team of automotive technicians and become more client facing. 


We manage your presence online, so you can present offline. 

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