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5 Questions
Keeping
Marketers
Up at Night—
and 5 Experts
with All the
Answers
Email and Marketing
Automation that’s complete.
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5 Questions
5 Questions Keeping Marketers Up at Night—
and 5 Experts with All the Answers
Today’s marketing landscape has changed dramatically from just a few years ago.
Buyers have more information than ever at their disposal, and while they need early
sales involvement less, they still crave relevant, personalized educational materials that
can help solve their problems and aid their search—particularly if they’re delivered when
and how buyers want them. Meanwhile, the C-suite needs the marketing department’s
help more—despite often cutting budgets—with longer buying cycles requiring
additional touch points in more channels than ever.
While it’s a challenging time to be a marketer, the best are always looking for ways to
adjust to this changing landscape and improve their programs, generate more leads,
nurture contacts more effectively, drive revenue and boost loyalty. They’re constantly
searching for new strategies and tactics that will help them improve their programs and
gain an edge over the competition. And to that end, they’re always asking themselves
questions about what they can to do to make their jobs easier, do their work faster and
perform better.
But what are the right questions to ask, the ones that will help rather than hinder progress? Looking at the current marketplace, it’s clear that marketing departments must
take their programs up a notch to meet both the expectations of prospects who expect
responsive communications across a range of channels, and executives who demand
increased efficiency with results that are tied to hard data. Within this context, there are
five key questions Silverpop believes all marketers should be asking themselves:
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- Mo
ss
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YOU
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And since Silverpop wants to make the path to
success as easy as possible for marketers, we
brought together five industry experts to help
answer these questions and provide strategic
insights into why these topics are particularly
critical in today’s marketplace.
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ic a
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By taking a step back and focusing on these
questions (and better yet, doing a little soul
searching to see how your organization currently
measures up), you’ll be better positioned from
a strategic standpoint, better prepared to
tackle the daily challenges facing today’s online
marketers, and ready to conquer a host of new
opportunities that lead to more buzz, more
conversions and more revenue.
...MARKETING DEPARTMENTS
MUST TAKE THEIR PROGRAMS
UP A NOTCH...
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re you as social as your prospects?
A
Are you as strategic as you want to be?
Can you automate the tactical?
Do you wish you could do more with less?
Can you prove your value?
So c i a
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YOUR
CLIENT
Silverpop
5 Questions
Question #1:
Are you as social as your prospects?
Social media is a potent tool for companies looking to fine-tune the art of listening, which
has become increasingly important in an era in which prospects are tired of generic
messaging and overflowing inboxes. For savvy marketers who understand that they
need to be where their prospects are, that place is increasingly on social networks.
From social media sites to mobile apps, smart phones to local check-ins, the
emergence of new communication and marketing channels has made it critical that
companies engage with prospects on their terms. And with social communities, blogs
and online videos exploding in number and popularity in recent years—and with many
of these types of content showing up in search engines—many B2B marketing leaders
have been grappling with what this means in terms of the buying cycle, how they can
use social to educate and nurture prospects, and how much time they should invest in
social overall. To help marketers harness social media data and connect more socially
with customers and prospects, companies such as Janrain are now offering social
Web management platforms.
“B2B marketers are all about solving problems for their customers, so the big challenge is discovering who’s having the problem that you know how to solve right now,”
says Jamie Beckland, digital and social media strategist at Janrain. “Social networks
are hugely valuable in identifying who those people are. Status updates, questions on
LinkedIn and forums focused on a particular industry subset can be deep resources
for finding out about a marketer’s space—who has questions and where B2B marketers can position themselves as the expert advice giver, the person/brand that’s
knowledgeable about the industry, and then lead them back to a solution that the B2B
marketer is well positioned to solve.”
And with the rise of the Internet and
social media, the buying cycle itself has
changed, with the majority of buyers
starting the decision-making process
via online research and talking to other
users1. For many buyers, this research
involves search engines that lead them
to blogs, white papers and Webinars.
They may then move on to seek out the
opinions of others via social sites such as
LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Often, it’s
only at that point that they want to talk to
vendors. How can marketers adjust?
P3
“What you can do is engage in a way
that’s appropriate for each social network
and the discussions taking place there,”
says Beckland. “For LinkedIn, for example,
that might mean sharing industry content
and best practices, acting as a resource.
It might mean finding white papers and
blogs that you’ve already created and are
relevant to these conversations that are
happening ‘in the wild’ and linking back to
pieces of the puzzle that you have in other
places. By doing so, you can move the
user from a more general conversation in
that social channel to a more specific conversation that you have more control of.”
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5 Questions
The good news is
that for marketers who are looking to
become more social, there are numerous
tactics that they can employ, such as:
P4
i
i
u Offer social sign-in options: By
allowing site visitors to register for online
offers by signing in with their existing
social network accounts, the process
is simplified for registrants, increasing
conversions. And marketers are able to
connect contacts to their social profiles,
providing them with valuable information
about their site visitors. “Let’s say you
offer a selection of four or five social
networks where they can use their
identity—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and
Salesforce, for example,” says Beckland.
“As you start to aggregate that sign-in
data, you can see where those people
are actually coming from and which social
identity they associate with your brand.
That can help inform which channels you
should start to build out as well as your
content development strategy.”
i
u Make your website more social:
One of the easiest, most effective things
to do is to figure out what levers you can
pull on your site in order to encourage
social activity. That could be as simple as
having a comments section or a content
aggregator that takes topics, hashtags
and other information that’s coming from
social channels across the Web and
flowing it into pages on your own domain.
That way, you’re showing social activity
from around the Web that’s relevant to
your audience.
i
u U
se social lead gen to build your
database: The key to success in today’s
multichannel world is using each medium
to help leverage the other. You’re already
driving traffic to your Facebook page, so
why not take the opportunity to gather
registrations? And don’t forget about the
power of Twitter. Make sure your followers
are alerted to new white papers and
upcoming Webinars, and then drive them
back to your site to download, register
and, most importantly, share important
contact information with you.
Silverpop
5 Questions
u Make your content shareworthy and shareable: People like to share cool
stuff that helps them solve their problems and do their job, so if you make an effort
to include educational info in your messaging mix and make it easy for recipients
to share with their networks, you’ll expand your reach exponentially. Make sure to
prominently feature Share-to-Social links in your emails where applicable, as well as
adding share call to actions into your white paper, how-to guide and ebook pdfs.
Including Facebook “Like” or Twitter “Follow” buttons in every email, inserting share
options into your landing page offers and incorporating share call to actions into
Webinar and event reminder emails can expand your message reach. And plan your
nurture campaigns around the idea of facilitating a social dialogue, encouraging
sharing in multiple emails and enabling conversations around your content.
u Be sociable: In many cases, your contacts want to feel like you’ll help them
learn, but they don’t want to be sold to. Keep this concept in mind when building
your messages—recipients want the content to sound like it came from a real human
being, not some kind of robot delivering corporate-speak. Consider entertaining
your recipients with humor, adding customer comments and incorporating employee
stories for a more personal touch.
u Target social sharers: Instead of just blasting your entire database with share
call-to-actions, consider identifying your most active social sharers and using dynamic
content to deliver shareworthy content specifically aimed at these social influencers.
be sociable
ET
RG
TA
The endless possibilities can be
overwhelming, so keep this basic mantra
top of mind: With all the social activity
that your contacts are engaging with,
you want to create a bridge that leads
them back to a social experience on
your site or in your communications.
Starting to build that connective tissue by
empowering social activity on your site
and in your messaging is an important
first step—and one that’s usually pretty
easy to get your hands around.
SO
AL
CI
AR
SH
S
ER
>
P5
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5 Questions
Question #2:
Are you as strategic as you want to be?
Today’s buyers are seeking out information proactively, on their own and at their own
pace. Substantive content matters, as does when and where buyers seek this content.
Translation? Your buyers are smarter and more demanding than ever, and you need to
stay a step ahead to be effective. That makes it essential to have a carefully planned
strategy to meet their needs and deliver the information they want, when they want it.
Yet while the need may seem obvious, many marketing organizations, hampered by
shrinking budgets and overwhelmed by the growing number of communication channels, are stuck in a repetitive rut of barely getting the next campaign out the door. This
short-term, patchwork approach can lead to a “garbage in, garbage out” scenario in
which poorly thought-out strategies and processes result in a lack of actionable data or
quality leads, thereby decreasing ROI and necessitating the need for companies such
as the Annuitas Group which helps marketers develop a process-based approach to
lead management.
Jay Hidalgo, President of the Annuitas Group, likens marketers who don’t think about
strategy to a football team that decides it doesn’t need to practice during the week.
“You can’t go out there without a game plan, you have to take the time to prepare,”
says Hidalgo. “No matter what the sport, most successful teams are the ones that
spend a lot of time preparing, practicing and planning for that small three-hour window
when they actually play the game. The same concept applies to marketing.”
When you’re ready to tackle strategic planning, timing will vary based on type and size of
organization, but as a general framework, Hidalgo recommends an approach as follows:
Annually: planning process with other
parties (e.g. sales, executive team)
Quarterly: strategy reviews looking at
what worked and what didn’t
Monthly: review of approach and
fine-tuning as needed
Weekly: get-together of marketing
team to review tactical
P6
Taking time out of an already busy schedule to think about strategy may seem
counterintuitive, but it can actually save
you time in the long run. “The typical
marketer is saying I don’t have time to
think about strategy—I’ve got to get A, B,
C, D and E done from a campaign execution perspective,” says Hidalgo. “In reality,
taking some time to strategically look at
what needs to be accomplished would
often allow that marketer to see that A, B
and E need to be done, but C and D are a
waste of time and don’t fit into the overall
strategic approach. By not taking time to
strategically plan, marketers are creating
more work for themselves, and as a result
getting less than desired results.”
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5 Questions
Taking time out of an already busy schedule to think about strategy may seem counterintuitive, but it can actually save you time in the long run. “The typical marketer is saying
I don’t have time to think about strategy—I’ve got to get A, B, C, D and E done from a
campaign execution perspective,” says Hidalgo. “In reality, taking some time to strategically look at what needs to be accomplished would often allow that marketer to see
that A, B and E need to be done, but C and D are a waste of time and don’t fit into the
overall strategic approach. By not taking time to strategically plan, marketers are creating more work for themselves, and as a result getting less than desired results.”
Of course, some marketers think they’re doing the right strategic things, but have
erroneously focused on the wrong goals and metrics, such as zeroing in on click
rates and total Web traffic rather than conversion rates and total number of qualified
leads derived from Web downloads. The answer lies partly in deciding which strategic
priorities and initiatives to pursue with an eye toward aligning your teams and initiatives
toward overall goals and ROI.
Hidalgo suggests starting at the end, defining your ultimate objectives and your
revenue goals. From there, you can work backwards, asking questions such as:
To get “X” number of new customers,
what does that mean in terms of how
many qualified leads we need to generate?
To achieve revenue objectives, how
much will come from existing customers
versus net new business?
ow many touches does it typically
H
take to most effectively nurture leads
from first contact to sales-qualified?
Once those and other questions are answered, then marketers can start looking
at the methodologies that they can utilize
strategically to obtain those objectives,
as well as matching those methodologies with whatever resource, budget or
personnel constraints they are faced
with. This allows you to then to build out
strategy. The bottom line? Unless you
know the objective first, it’s very difficult to
create that strategy.
Remember to involve sales in the annual planning process to improve marketing
and sales alignment. This doesn’t just mean getting their approval; rather, it means
developing a program that’s jointly creates by sales and marketing. When that plan is
created together and then executed effectively, the result will likely be alignment—the
result of both organizations marching to the same objective and marching to the same
tune in terms of strategic approach.
Being strategic means listening to the buyer, understanding what the buyer wants and
then providing what the buyer needs. “Ask questions, listen and then provide answers
to those questions and solutions to the problem,” says Hidalgo. “That’s an approach
I’ve seen work. Yet most don’t ascribe to that approach, primarily because it takes time
and patience. Listening is hard work.”
P7
Lastly, when it comes to developing and executing a strategy—particularly in the
B2B world with its large-ticket purchases and longer buying cycles—it’s important to
remember that’s there no “silver bullet” that can be applied and instantly guarantee
massive revenue increases, whether it’s a proper process, strategy or technology. But
although the reality is that true success takes time, if you make the effort to apply a
strategy and build relationships with prospects and customers, you’ll see incremental
success that will add up to big results over a longer period of time.
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5 Questions
Question #3:
Can you automate the tactical?
In the new age of marketing, companies must engage with contacts through highly
relevant messaging that incorporates elements of social media and feels more human.
But how can you reach more people with more targeted messages, more often and
more quickly than ever? Ironically, to become more personal, marketers must become
more automated.
Look at it this way: Every interaction that a brand has with its audience happens at the
tactical level—an open, a click, a website visit, a retweet or a download. Those interactions represent prospects telling you about their interests, problems and needs, but it’s
manually impossible for a human being to respond to each one in real time. Marketing
automation enables you to leverage your thought leaders en masse, delivering their personalized voice to countless prospects in a one-to-one manner—a virtual guide providing a tour of your products, services and educational materials.
As buying cycles become longer and more complex, so has the need to find ways to
automate manual tactical processes so you can focus more on developing strategy,
processes and more complex campaigns. Whether it’s a basic business process or a
behavior-driven triggered marketing campaign, automating the tactical has become
top of mind for marketers aiming to lower costs, increase process efficiencies and drive
revenue. To help fill this void, companies such as Whereoware have emerged to help
marketers use automation to combine online behavior with customer data to deliver
more relevant messages.
P8
“From a lead-nurture standpoint, one
of the most tactical operations B2B
marketers face is engaging prospects
whose business cards they receive at a
trade show,” says Bill Haskitt, partner at
Whereoware. “In many cases, marketers
don’t follow up with these leads because
they haven’t established any method
for doing so. But by building out an
automated campaign that reacts in real
time to data on new leads, marketers
can quickly engage prospective clients
before the trail goes cold. A process
is required for uploading batch data
collected during each trade show. That
data can then trigger an automated
campaign that sends leads targeted
email communications. Each lead will
react differently to the messages sent,
revealing interests and behaviors that
guide future communications and,
further down the line, provide actionable
information for sales reps.”
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5 Questions
For marketers interested in automating the tactical, the possibilities are endless. Haskitt
recommends incorporating welcome campaigns and “super opt-in” lead-nurturing messages into your marketing mix as a starting point:
u Welcome campaigns: Whether a
prospect signed up for your newsletter,
downloaded a white paper or signed up
for a 60-day service trial, it’s essential to
engage this contact while he or she is
interested and highly engaged. Reach
out immediately with a multipart welcome
campaign that introduces new subscribers
to all the benefits of your email program;
highlights your website, social media
pages and SMS offering if applicable;
and provides links to helpful resources
you offer. “How many times do people
register on a website or fill out a lead-gen
form, and then 30 days later they get the
first email and forgot they ever did it?”
says Haskitt. “A good welcome program
immediately positions you as a trusted
sender and establishes credibility that the
content you’re going to send is something
they’re going to want to open.”
u “Super opt-in” lead-nurturing
message: The more you know about your
prospects, the more relevant messages
you can send. Try setting up an automated
email asking users what they want to
hear about and how often they want to
hear it. Whether you do so by directing
the recipient to a landing page with a
progressive Web form, sending a survey or
directing them to your preference center,
you’ll discover more about your contacts
and increase future email engagement.
And as an added bonus, you’ll send
an important message to time-starved
prospects: Not only are you going to send
them good content, but you really care
about their time, and you only want to
send them the things they want to see—
when and how they want to see them.
Regardless of where you choose to start,
automating the tactical can increase your
chances of delivering the right message at
the right time, a recipe for relevant content
that delivers high ROI.
P9
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5 Questions
Question #4:
Do you wish you could do more with less?
It’s a recurring challenge most marketing departments constantly wrestle with: Every
day, they’re faced with deciding the most important things they can do with the limited
time they have. And the question of whether to focus on A, B or C is often complicated
by small staffs and time constraints. Faced with this dilemma, most marketers today
wish they could do more with less, which is why some have turned to companies such
as Find New Customers, which specializes in helping marketers combine technology,
strategy and content to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
“I think a lot of doing more with less is harnessing all your major sources of unstructured
data, getting some intelligence on it and being alerted when something happens that
you need to take action on,” says Jeff Ogden, president of Find New Customers. “It’s
about focusing on the high-level stuff—who you’re targeting and what their business
problems are. You want to create content and message streams that move people
through the buying process, and with so many things on the plate of a marketer, if you
can take more off your plate by automating it, it can make a huge difference.”
One of the biggest appeals of doing more with less is the ability to scale your
marketing efforts so that you can reach more people, leverage your content and
nurture clients around the clock—literally, while you sleep.
Increasing efficiency means putting processes, people, programs and software
in place that basically take activities that consume time and automate them. For
example, with the right processes and technology in place, someone might fill out a
registration form to download a white paper, and this behavior would be automatically
scored and the prospect placed into a lead-nurturing program—without the marketer
lifting a finger.
“By being able to do more with less, you give yourself more time to think and make
more considered decisions about what you work on, what content you build or what
events you hold,” says Ogden. “You might want to do a road show, for example, but
you don’t have time to put it together. But maybe by automating things and giving
yourself more ‘free’ time, you can start to think about doing this particular marketing
event—and even have time to focus on doing it right.”
P10
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5 Questions
The concept of doing more with less
has potent real-world implications.
For example, General Growth Properties (GGP), the owner of 185 regional shopping
centers in 43 states, was bogged down in the labor-intensive process of creating 185
monthly newsletters. Using relational tables and dynamic content, it was able to deliver
personalized newsletter content based upon unique mall, promotion value and gender
with a fraction of the effort, decreasing the number of newsletter templates by 90 percent
and production hours by 60 percent. But perhaps the biggest benefit was being able to
move from a reactionary production-oriented group to a more strategic organization.
How can marketers looking to do more less move in a more efficient direction? Again,
there are many options, but Ogden highlights two keys steps involving building up your
behavioral database and then using that data to deliver relevant messaging:
u Harness the power of Web tracking: When prospects sign up for your newsletter,
fill out a form or otherwise register on your site, Web tracking enables you to connect their
email address to their future online behaviors. “One of the biggest things in marketing
automation is simply hooking it to your website so that you have insights into who’s on
your website, getting more information about those visitors and what content they’re
interested in,” says Ogden. That means tracking everything from Web pages visited and
white paper downloads to Foursquare check-ins and Twitter follows. Even better: Today’s
Web tracking technology enables you to connect these new subscribers to actions they
took on your site before opting in, increasing your chances of connecting more quickly by
immediately putting them into an email track designed for their interests.
u Set up emails and messaging streams triggered by behaviors: Sophisticated
marketing automation platforms provide a way for marketers to harness the detailed data
they’ve collected and use it to respond with timely, relevant, personalized content driven
by these behaviors. Whether it’s sending a Webinar registrant down a messaging path
with more offers aligned to that topic and non-registrants a survey or link to a progressive
form asking additional questions, or including a content block in a message that
dynamically populates based on the recipient’s past actions, behavior-driven messaging
is a heady way to send content tailored to each individual in your database rather than
generic “one-size-fits-most” messaging. “Once you’ve got the content and you’ve set
up lead nurturing in a problem-to-solution story format, marketing automation can be the
delivery mechanism based on behaviors and what pages contacts visited or what content
they engaged with,” says Ogden. “Contacts can be put into a specific lead-nurturing
campaign based on the problem they digitally told you they had.”
For marketers aiming to do more with
less, it’s important to keep in mind that’s
there more to the process than simply
purchasing a marketing automation
solution and turning it on. You have to
think about strategy, create compelling
P11
content, and build out programs tailored
to individual contacts’ preferences,
behaviors and position in the buying
cycle. Once that’s done, you can harness
the power of marketing automation to do
a lot more with less.
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5 Questions
Question #5:
Can you prove your value?
In the last few years, there’s been a gradual shift in the way businesses have evaluated marketing. Fuzzy marketing math is no longer enough. Marketers who previously judged their
success on activities such as events hosted or press releases produced have had to adjust
as new technological reporting capabilities converged with a greater emphasis on revenue.
This shift has been accompanied by an increased pressure on marketers to demonstrate
their value and impact on the bottom line by offering a clearer view into the results of their
efforts—from lead acquisition to account close and beyond. If you want to make the C-suite
happy, you’d better be able to show them how marketing is making money—not just
spending it.
But though this change in mindset presents challenges, it also brings potential benefits
for savvy marketers. As marketers transition from thinking about activities for their own
sake to measuring the impact of these activities on the full buyer’s journey, you can
begin to more meaningfully articulate the impact of what you’re doing on a positive
revenue or retention outcome. Helping marketers achieve this is part of the goal of
companies such as SiriusDecisions, which provides research and advisory services
aimed at maximizing top-line growth.
...you’d better be able to show them how marketing
is making money—not just spending it.
“Marketers at a lot of companies in years
past have been given a free pass on
having to quantify the impact of the work
they do in terms of pipeline and revenue,
but we’ve really passed the point where
it’s acceptable for marketers to point to
anecdotal evidence of success,” says
Megan Heuer, service director at Sirius
Decisions. “They really have to be able
to tie their effort and dollar resources
applied to some kind of positive revenue
activity. That doesn’t mean everything
you measure has to be about demand
creation, but it does mean that everything
you take on as a marketing organization
has to relate in some way to key business
objectives. We’re really encouraging
marketers to think about whether every
activity they undertake connects back to
a goal that relates to what the business
expects of marketing.”
P12
This shift in thinking means looking
beyond the marketing department. Do you
understand what drives management, what
their needs are, and which business goals
and objectives they value most highly?
Look for opportunities to address corporate
objectives—e.g. retaining customers—and
think how you can use your channels to
achieve these objectives and better align
your goals with those of sales and the
C-suite. Are you investing in the future, or
simply looking at the latest campaign? If
your objective is the former, that means
looking beyond process metrics such as
email opens, white paper downloads and
Webinar attendees and also measuring
conversions, revenue and marketingqualified/sales-qualified leads. By thinking
beyond marketing and looking at the world
from the standpoint of the CEO and CFO,
you’ll take a valuable step toward providing
value and proving your investment.
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5 Questions
As you’re taking a deeper dive into revenue reporting, it’s important to remember that
while marketers would like to be able to attribute revenue back to a specific activity, the
reality of a complex B2B buying process makes that a nearly impossible task. What you
can do, however, is understand which activities tend to be part of the path to a positive
revenue outcome so you can encourage people to follow that path.
...understand which activities tend to
be part of the path to a positive revenue
outcome so you can encourage people
to follow that path.
Some marketers fall into a reporting trap in
which they attempt to either assign random
weightings to activities based on instinct
or attribute a close back to the first or last
touch that was involved. Either one of those
approaches is going to lead to some flawed
assumptions about the best use of your
marketing dollars and resources. Instead,
seek a more complete picture of how your
marketing efforts are performing by looking
at first touches (how the prospect came
to know about your brand, as well as the
reason they decided to fill out your form)
and “influence” (all the things you did during
the buying cycle that convinced someone
to purchase from you).
P13
“What I think marketers need to look at is
the big picture of the buyer’s journey and all
the places where marketing has a positive
role to play based on actual outcomes,”
says Heuer. “When you win, what do different types of buyers do along that path,
and how can you best map what you offer
to them to the things that they need to
buy from you? And when things don’t go
your way, how do you know how it went
off the rails, so you can either stop doing it
or do something to fix it? To me that’s the
more holistic view of marketing’s complete
contribution versus just attempting to have
a simplistic view of ROI that doesn’t reflect
the reality of a complicated, multiperson,
multitouch long-term buying process.”
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5 Questions
For marketers looking to more effectively prove their value, Heuer suggests the following
tactics as a starting point:
u Understand how marketing objectives fits into the big picture: Seek to decipher
how marketing can better align itself with sales and overall corporate goals. With input
from sales and the C-suite, think about how marketing can best contribute given your
company’s position in the market—what you’re selling, who you’re selling to and where
you stand in relation to the competition. Determine marketing’s ideal role in the organization, what contributions are reasonable to expect from marketing, and how you’ll
measure your success.
u Have a system in place that enables you to measure marketing initiatives
across the board: By employing technology and strategy that captures all aspects
of your marketing campaigns, you’ll have the confidence of knowing you can accurately showcase how your lead sources and offers are capturing prospects’ attention
throughout the whole lead-management process, from capturing leads and nurturing
them through the funnel to ultimately influencing revenue. “It’s important that you have a
system—and data that’s delivered from that system—to show what you need to know
about all the ways marketing is contributing and be able to trace what’s happening
along a buyer’s journey, so that you can go back and claim victory in the places where
you want to say you made a difference,” says Heuer. “The key is that this isn’t going to
be effective without technology—it’s just too complicated to track, and there’s just too
much data collection involved. You can’t get to best-in-class marketing without the appropriate integrated technology in place and a data management strategy that lets you
collect accurate information about what you’re doing.”
In your quest to measure and maximize ROI, remember that it’s also important that a
small percentage of marketing’s budget be dedicated to research and development—
investment in marketing initiatives that are so new that it’s too early to have strong
metrics around ROI. This will enable you to pursue innovative marketing tactics while
still maintaining a strong foundation grounded in revenue.
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Silverpop
5 Questions
Conclusion
Have you gotten so bogged down in the everyday grind that your marketing
could use a jolt of inspiration and innovation? Make sure you’re periodically
asking questions about your marketing programs that enable you to fine-tune
your campaigns and improve your results. By thinking carefully about strategy
and how you can improve productivity and efficiency, you’ll be well-positioned
to implement multichannel marketing programs that ensure you’re where your
customers and prospects are engaged and deliver relevant content triggered by
their behaviors and preferences. And you’ll boost the odds that you’re focusing
on the right things, investing in your future by zeroing in on the areas that can
most contribute to your organization’s overall objectives and ensuring that
marketing is making a strong, tangible impact on reaching these goals.
Join the Conversation
What other key questions do you think
marketers should be asking themselves to
help guarantee success?
Tweet your thoughts using the hashtag
#SPOPquestions, and we’ll address these
areas in a future blog post.
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Footnotes
1-Enquiro, “Integrated Persuasion: Online and Offline,” Sept. ‘09