What a year 2021 was. While the pomp and circumstance of new opportunities has passed, it’s important to have a quick snapshot of what worked and didn’t work the previous year. As you plan and build resolutions for your team throughout 2022, be sure to revisit this blog as a refresher on the key marketing learnings of the previous year.
Before you dive in too deep, don’t forget that we’re offering a FREE discovery session to help you identify opportunities for growth and change. It’s a great place to start to ensure you’re headed in the right direction.
To kick things off, here’s a rundown of what we learned by way of a quick and easy reference list:
The 4 Key Takeaways Infographic
Long articles are so mid-2010s, so we’ve created a quick guide for you to download and reference throughout the year. Chances are, one of these trends could help spin up a new idea or simply help you fix an age-old marketing problem. Whatever the case, don’t forget to look back to check some sources before you hit the ‘go’ button.
Finding Lead Management Success
Yes, lead management is really about good housekeeping, but for your CRM. Set checkpoints throughout the year to check yourself before your sales pipeline even has the opportunity to get out of hand. We talked about successful lead management around this time last year, so here are the key points to remember as you manage leads throughout the year.
- Lead management can only happen after you’ve set up successful lead generation tactics across your website.
- One of the most common mistakes made from a lead management standpoint is not keeping a direct line of communication between your marketing and sales teams.
- Use behavioral data to create a lead scoring foundation.
- Organizations with effective lead generation and management strategies yield about a 9.3% sales quota completion rate.
- Lead re-nurturing is a fine art that should be informed by demographics, behaviors and reinforced by your lead scoring.
Mapping the Modern Customer Journey
Did you map your customer journey this year? Defining your audience is helpful, relevant, but it’s also constantly changing. Be sure you’re always re-aligning across these steps:
- First off, ask yourself: Is this still a highly relevant customer journey? Does it align with our desired customer experience?
- Are you experiencing drop-off or existing gaps in the journey? This is the point where you have an opportunity to assess and determine what touchpoints may be missing from your journey.
- Have your objectives shifted over the past year? Don’t let new data collect dust, leverage it to improve your strategy.
- Remember your CRM can help you find all the data you need to ensure you’re able to successfully assess campaign successes, level of engagement, opportunities won versus lost, and all other data.
- Massive digital transformation is not for the weak. You’ll want to start leveraging self-service tools and landing pages now to ensure you’re up to speed with emerging content trends.
- Refreshing your Customer Journey Maps can be daunting, but it’s a necessary task. Knowing your customer well means your brand can always meet them on their journey.
Recipe for a Great Content Strategy
We talked about the four core elements of content and how to craft the perfect content. Understanding how content currently exists within your site is all about establishing content across information, context, medium, and form buckets.
Making sure these elements are ingrained into your content strategy development process can help ensure your team is always aligned and focused on the end goal of improving business outcomes despite what industry you’re working in.
Don’t forget to:
- Know who your ideal and current audiences are.
- Always think about their existing challenges and how your product or offering is helping them address their problem.
- Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. Don’t just think about your direct competitors, but also think aspirationally.
- Create ample opportunity to replicate what works, but to also innovate and create.
- Consider what types of topics are important to your audiences and what emerging trends are relevant to your industry, then build some goals around how often you’d like to see engagement on those topic clusters or content pieces.
Intro to Multi-touch Attribution
Our guide to multi-touch attribution is aimed at helping you look at the full picture, rather than a piece of your marketing efforts. Looking at different types of data with a variety of marketing lenses. Here are some types of lead attribution options to help you get a good start.
- Multi-touch attribution gives revenue credit to each customer touchpoint that helped close a deal. The goal of multi-touch attribution is to help you allocate future marketing dollars toward the most effective touchpoints.
- Linear Attribution focuses on splitting conversion credit equally across each customer touchpoint or interaction.
- Time-decay Attribution focuses on organizing your touchpoints based on their overall influence.
- U-Shaped Attribution is a position-based model that gets its name because it resembles the letter ‘U’ when you visually look at the way it assigns credit.
- W-Shaped Attribution as the name implies resembles a ‘W’ when you visually look at the way it assigns credit.
- Full path attribution takes into account major milestones across a customer journey.
- While the models above can be effective for many use-cases, there are very particular times when they simply don’t fit your business. That’s why we’ve introduced the ‘wildcard model.’
Content Marketing and Automation
We’ve saved the best for last, a match made in marketing heaven: content marketing and automation. Reaching your customers is all about being timely, relevant, and actionable and that’s a tried and true strategy no matter how much time passes.
Think about it this way, marketing automation amplifies your message, but if you don’t have the right message, it won’t land or resonate the way you expect. To be an effective marketing engineer, you’ll need to:
- Focus on Your Channel – you’ll want to make sure your content is appropriate and well-formatted across all touchpoints, whether it be email, text or mobile.
- Be Personalized, But Relevant – always tailor your content to the right person, rather than just blindly distributing or using tokens to make magic happen. Automation is fair game when you’re got the right dots connected.
- Always Consider the Future – People are consuming content at a much higher rate than anticipated, so while creation is on the rise, so is consumption. Channel your time into a good content piece to yield the results you truly want.
