Marketing, in a way, can be described as just initiatives based on failure. If your KPIs were test grades, you’d be flunking the class miserably. Look at the analytics in a typical email marketing campaign. Open rates hover around 12 percent across industries with click rates clocking in near 1 to 1.5 percent on average, and the average conversion rate for an online advertisement is about 2 percent. And this is when marketing response is doing well! This is the business equivalent of “you’re going to need to kiss a few toads to.…” However, with the marketing technology available today, the days of best-guess marketing are over. With the boom of digital marketing, you now have the ability to gain insights into customer behavior like never before. But are you utilizing this technology to its fullest potential?
Take a moment to think about the analytics mentioned above. In the days of print direct-response marketing, there was no way to tell how many people put eyes on your mailer or magazine ad except for an inbound phone call or visit to your booth at a trade show. Now, every step of the customer journey is tracked and analyzed for you to be informed on the performance of your campaigns in real time! The data is endless and, in some cases, causes more noise than clarity.
We are in the midst of a marketing revolution as the Internet becomes the largest consumer touchpoint. For the CMO who may have started his or her career before the age of digital advertising, this revolution means that agility is a key factor in determining the success of their department (and therefore company).
All this data means more money spent on marketing technology and more responsibility on the CMO’s shoulders to show exactly where amongst the available data they can prove the ROI of their increased marketing budgets. According to Gartner’s 2017 CMO Spending Survey, marketing technology now accounts for 22 percent of marketing budgets, and marketing analytics are the number one area of spending for marketers in 2017-18.
However, the access to data has outpaced our ability to know what to do with it. You must determine which data metrics you will need, both to support achieving your goals and to measure your eventual rate of success or failure. If you aren’t using customer and inbound data to inform your marketing decisions, you’re going to be woefully behind the curve soon (if you aren’t already). Not only does this waste precious dollars in your marketing budget, but if you don’t know the questions you need answered by your data, you’re in trouble. More than just your budget could be on the line.
As CMO or head of marketing, you’re constantly fighting a battle to give the sales team qualified leads, and that costs a lot. So, you must find a delicate balance of nurturing cheaper leads (from web sources) and expensive leads (from higher cost items like trade shows). Along with these leads, though, you need lead scoring and a marketing automation system to help turn MQLs to SQLs. Then you must have a good enough sales team to close them, which takes training and good messaging and internal communication. If you can’t do this, it can cost you your job… and perhaps the CEO his job for putting so much confidence (and money) in the sales and marketing department.
Perri Marketing understands the increased pressure the CMO faces, and we’ve written a thought leading whitepaper to help you understand how to navigate today’s data landscape titled, “The expanding role (and budget) of today’s CMO and 5 critical success factors.”
From our whitepaper, here are 5 things you can do to build a strategy that will have the best chance to succeed:
Determine just one or two clearly defined and concise goals with your CEO or board.
Have effective technology such as your marketing automation system and CRM. You must organize and optimize and — most importantly — work within your lead scoring system!
Have a plan for achieving goals — not just marketing-activity boxes to tick — that spans the next six months to a year or, depending on your sales cycle, perhaps longer.
Keep in mind: Content is king. It must be actionable, searchable, and complementary to the stages in your sales process within your pipeline. Your content shouldn’t be created to win a deal. Its purpose is to get you another meeting, which brings you that much closer to negotiation stage.
Measure and understand your norms when it comes to analytics to establish a baseline to judge success or failure. Your norms might be lower than the numbers we stated above, and that’s fine. The key is to gather data for your baseline and move forward from there.
To read more in-depth about these 5 tips, download our latest whitepaper, “The expanding role (and budget) of today’s CMO and 5 critical success factors.”
WHITEPAPER DOWNLOAD:
SMB Software Vendors: You Don’t Need a Big Budget to Compete With The Giants, But You Do Need to Be At the Right Place At the Right Time.
