Are You A Marketing Strategist Or A Tactician?
Shift online consumers' buying criteria in your favour by using new technologies.
As marketers we all share the same ultimate goal which is to gain top of mind awareness for our brand. When asking people to give a name of a very successful sportswear company it won’t be very difficult to guess what will be the first name that will come to mind for most people… Nike right? How about computers? Apple (wasn’t the same story a few years back).
However, in trying to reach the goal of top mind awareness most marketers carry out the same mistakes by using old product data marketing tactics to sell their products and fail, as opposed to innovative market data marketing strategies the top 1% of marketers use to sell their products and succeed. Below are 6 of the most successful strategies I’ve found along my endeavors to gain top of mind awareness for convertiFIRE.
Utilizing ROI-Driven Metrics
Bottom line, what gets measured, gets monitored. Nonetheless, its worth having in mind that measuring too many metrics can be very counterproductive thus meaning, focusing on a few key metrics is key to marketing success. Many marketers sin by measuring every metric they have access to, rather than focusing on a few core metrics.
Similar to the “Pareto Principle” less than 20% of your metrics account for more than 80% of your results, thereby establishing a clear focus on a handful of metrics is the most important factor in marketing analytics & insights.
The first step in making the shift towards becoming a marketing strategist is to analyze your current marketing funnel thoroughly by asking yourself the following questions:
- What are the steps my customers go through in order to convert?
- Where am I currently struggling the most?
- How can I improve each step?
Next, make a list of all the metrics you want to measure and ask yourself: “What decision would I make differently after I’d get this number?” If you find it hard to come up with a clear cut answer, remove it from your list. The most important thing to discern from the new age of marketing is, that if in the past marketing was a lot similar to what you’d see in “Mad Men” by making stylish creative ads for newspaper and magazines with no real data to back it up and thereby when the marketers excuse was that they can’t be held accountable for their marketing spends, in 2014, every dollar needs to deliver significant ROI in order to be justifiable.
Behavior-Based Marketing
The common misconception of most marketers is to assume they understand everything about their customers. The truth of the matter is, many probably do – to a certain degree. However, the best rule of thumb for us marketers is to acknowledge the fact that you’ll never know your customers better than they know themselves.
In our times, where big data analytics is increasingly playing a bigger role in our lives, there’s no reason whatsoever to try and guess how your customers will behave. At your disposal are tools like Google Trends and Social Mention to assist you in making intelligent, data driven decisions pertaining how your customers are behaving as opposed to how you think they’ll behave.
In addition, a data driven approach to marketing will often uncover new opportunities. By analyzing this data, you’d be able to establish actionable plans that impact pricing, features, sales, customer service.
Create an Optimized Customer Experience for Every Type of Offering
Increasing online lead conventions can’t be achieved by using a “one size fits all” approach to customer experience. Thus meaning, your offerings should be fully optimized to match your client’s buying criteria in order for you to maximize your marketing ROI, which is virtually impossible to achieve by referring all of your traffic to the same homepage that will not, no matter what, match the desired customer experience of every single one of your offerings.