Get Smart, Get Strategic, Get Data-Driven … but how?
We all understand that new technologies and relatively new channels such as social media are transforming the marketing landscape. More and more prospects venture online and leave interesting insights for us to evaluate, analyze and act to help sharpen our respective messages. The million dollar question is — how?
Following are some quick thoughts to help get the ball rolling:
- Customer/Prospect Engagement — Understand where the prospects procure their information. Ensure congruency of a prospect’s evaluation/buying criteria to the current marketing process/touchpoints/content served, etc. The critical goal is to create a consistent, omni-channel prospect journey that guides a prospect through the buying phases.
- Analytics Strategy — Beware of analysis paralysis! Two main areas to evaluate – Quality of Leads and Marketing Effectiveness (RoMI). To help sharpen the quality of leads, evaluate the various touchpoints through the marketing campaigns and analyse the information shared by the prospect. This information should help determine the sales-readiness of a given prospect. Gather feedback from sales on a consistent-basis to understand its definition of a good quality lead and the persona of those leads that do convert. On the other hand, for Return on Marketing Investment, identify how the marketing organization is being gauged, the true impact of the team to the sales funnel (influenced and sourced sales pipeline) and the lead velocity from generation to conversion. That should paint a relatively clear picture around the effectiveness of the marketing organization.
- Data Strategy — Identify the traditional silos of information across the entire organization. Consolidate the data and rank it along completeness of all the fields, recency of the last update and the last interaction with the prospect. In order to accomplish this goal, it may require a partnership between IT, Marketing, Sales and any other key business functions.
- Organizational Strategy — Since data-driven marketing transcends all departments and challenges conventional approaches, it may be disrupting traditional organizations and structures. This approach will require a lot more collaboration with key functions such as IT, Sales and such. Hence, getting the C-Suite on-board with the overall goal and vision is critical.
- Technology Strategy — Successful organizations not only nurture strategic partnerships between CMO and CIO but also marry business and technologies strategically. Given the advent of Marketing Automation Platforms, Social Media monitoring tools, Modelling and Analytical Engines, it is imperative for an organization to leverage these off-the-shelf tools to help ‘do more with less’ while quantify the overall contributions of the marketing team towards the bottom line and the long-term business goals.
Hopefully, these points help get you thinking around the key spokes needed to run a marketing organization of the web 2.0 world. Explore, test and scale is the new mantra. Enjoy the journey!
With over two decades of experience, Parin leads an expert demand-generation agency, StratMg, that helps industrial manufacturing clients achieve unambiguous and quantified organic sales growth across the US, EMEA & APAC.
Parin has built & positioned StratMg to be a value-added marketing services provider that strives to create a culture of quantified sales-driven marketing initiatives leading to sustained business growth through channel management, diversification, new customer acquisition and retention strategies and tactical execution.
