Gone are the days where marketing involved a few pretty brochures and a trade show booth. In today’s environment of ultra-competitive companies, marketing automation tools, and more demanding customers, the top players must have a keen sense of what prospects are thinking, where they are browsing, and how they make buying decisions.
Software solutions, automation tools, and mobile apps have flooded the market, proposing to help companies do just that. As a result, many businesses may have implemented tools and adopted some new concepts in an effort to stay ahead of the constantly moving curve. But how’s that working?
Not very well, according to the Gartner Marketing Technology Survey 2019. Analysts reported that marketers are using just over half of their marketing tech stack’s features, leaving many capabilities untouched and lucrative opportunities on the table.
In the quest for ongoing continuous improvement, it’s time to step back and evaluate current systems, strategies and processes to see what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not. Consider using a mathematical model to help you improve your marketing decisions based on hard calculations. For example, a marketing sensitivity analysis can help pinpoint the ideal data to be collected, which can help you establish a better lead scoring model. By investing the time and resources to conduct a big-picture, integrated review, you’ll be gathering the information you need to illustrate your successes and identify opportunities for the future.
Refine Your Target Audience
Most companies have at least a general idea of their target audience. Ideally, you’ll be able “to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself,” as famous consultant Peter F. Drucker advises. You can get a better idea of your target audience by looking at your happiest and most loyal customers or conducting a little market research. This may give you some basic tips on the best groups to target.
However, the problem today is that basic level of information is no longer enough to remain competitive. Put your own customer hat on for a moment. Have you noticed how the advertisements, emails and other marketing communication that you see is more refined than ever? Do you find yourself wondering “how did that company know that I was thinking about buying that?”
This is almost like cheating; like getting the exam paper weeks before the final. Instead of trying to guess what matters, I now know not only what the customer wants—I realize how she goes about it.
The truth of the matter is that marketing tech stack tools are growing in sophistication every minute, allowing microtargeting of audiences. Customers are no longer classified only by things like gender, age, and geographic location, but instead hyper classified by all of these factors as well as buying behaviors, hobbies, and opinions. Understanding your target audience in the context of your overall systems, strategies, and processes is the key to refining it.
Review Your Lead Qualification Process
The process of generating leads and then shepherding those leads to become actual sales is the core of any successful marketing program. In recent years, email marketing, for example, has become an easy way for companies to generate qualified leads. The finer you can segment your target audience, the more likely you’ll be able to boost prospect engagement. In turn, this should increase the already high return on investment of email marketing programs.
Tools aimed at increasing behavioral intelligence, gleaned from technology designed to map things like a website visitor’s clicks, attention, and scrolling, can help companies better understand what sections of websites are effective or confusing.
Mathematical models designed to calculate how many marketing leads are being generated along with how many of those leads turn into sales allow businesses like yours to refine an organization’s qualification process.
Identify Your Most Successful Marketing Campaigns
In an ideal world, companies could take the sales generated in a particular region over a set period of time, subtract the cost of said marketing campaign and determine if it was successful. Unfortunately, the connection between marketing and sales is frequently less clear cut.
Industry experts suggest looking at some other indicators such as whether your company expanded into a new market as well as how competitors reacted to a particular campaign to gauge success.
Tools such as a marketing sensitivity analysis can help you review your basic expectations about return on investment, recent customer relationship management initiatives or the effectiveness of existing marketing campaigns. This analysis can then drill down to not only identify the campaigns that have generated the highest number of opportunities, but also the components that made the campaign successful. Understanding the level of and reason for successful campaign engagement is critical to better plan and forecast future marketing efforts.
Evaluate Your Revenue Repeatability
The amount of data available for predicting future market behavior has reached astronomical levels. According to Domo, a leading data integration company, 1.7 MB of data is created for every living person each second. The best marketing tech stack tools are working to use that data more efficiently in order to provide companies with unique, customized direction for the future.
The field of predictive marketing analytics, which is designed to make sense of all that data, is one of the evolving keys to future marketing results. Tools that incorporate machine learning, data mining, mathematical modeling, and artificial intelligence feed into predictive analytic systems, which can help companies gain a clearer picture of the future in terms of revenue as well as opportunities.
Conclusion
The tools and technology of today’s marketing tech stack continues to evolve at an astonishing pace. However, buying the latest and greatest solutions is often not the right path. Instead, businesses that take a step back to evaluate their current systems periodically in order to build on successes and find alternatives to failures will win.
Be selective about the tools you choose and how you use them. Continuing to customize and refine your marketing tech stack to meet your unique business needs as they change will be the key to long-term success. A discovery session is a great way to kick off your year, make a plan to clean up your systems, strategies, and processes, and refine your direction for 2020. Contact us to schedule yours.
