Behavioral segmentation is a way to organize customers into segments based on the actions they take with your website, marketing content, sales team, your brand–really, any interaction they have with your company. Once you organize customers into groups based on the actions they take, you can more effectively target and market to them.

When done correctly, it can seem like marketing magic. It’s something you should be doing and it’s not terribly complicated.

Let’s break it down together.

What is segmentation?

Segmentation has been around forever, both informally and formally. It means dividing customers into smaller groups and speaking to those groups in specific ways. Examples include dividing by location, gender, or age. 

When we talk to segments rather than a whole group, we can speak more specifically and therefore have a more personalized conversation. 

For example, if you’re a window installation company emailing your US customer base in January, you can segment using location and change the header image to something snowy for your contacts in Minnesota (north) and something sunny for your contacts in Florida (south). 

The benefit is that the customer receiving your message feels that it’s personalized to them. 

While standard segmentation such as age, location, and gender can be powerful and make customers feel known, behavioral segmentation takes it a step further.

Breaking down behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation in marketing uses data from actions your prospect or customer has taken and allows you to segment those contacts into lists based on those actions. 

For example, you can group prospects who visited your website 10 or more times in the month of January but did not purchase. These prospects show high intent and so may be on the cusp of a purchase. You might consider sending this segment a discount code valid through the first week of February to see if their behavior (site visits) can be turned into a purchase with the right incentive. 

In the first example, it was the person’s location (Florida or Minnesota) that determined the segment; in the second, it was the person’s behavior. The first is geographical segmentation, while the second is behavioral segmentation.

Behavioral segmentation goes beyond demographic segmentation to help you better understand your audience and give them the right message at the right time.

What are the benefits of behavioral segmentation?  

Personalized experiences: At its core, behavioral segmentation lets you create personalized experiences for your prospects and customers. When consumers feel as though a brand understands them, they react more favorably to that brand. This increases brand loyalty and, ultimately, revenue.

Data-driven decisions: Behavioral segmentation allows marketers to make more accurate decisions based on user data since your most (and least) engaged prospects are easy to isolate.

Budget allocation: Behavioral segmentation makes it more clear where to allocate resources. For example, prospects with multiple website hits are likely in-market vs. those with one or two.

How does Insightly Marketing enable behavioral segmentation?  

Tracked Custom Events

Tracked custom events allow users to create a custom event and when it’s triggered by a prospect’s actions, the behavior can be used to alter a prospect score or segment audiences and communications.

This can be useful when you’ve got a behavioral tracking use case that isn’t included out-of-the-box with Insightly Marketing For example, if there users are accessing an online portal, you might consider tracking behavioral data from their interaction with the portal. Or, you might want a combination of activities (clicking on an advertisement and visiting a specific website page) to be tracked or segmented for future communication, offers, and outreach.

Forms 

No matter the plan you choose in Insightly, you have the option to create multiple forms to support your marketing campaigns. To get granular, create unique forms for each campaign  so you can tie every form completion to the action that caused it. Then message those prospects based on the specific offer or asset with which they engaged.

Files

You likely have assets that speak to different phases in the buyer’s journey. Perhaps an article is at the top of your funnel, so you can create a follow-up campaign with industry-specific information for those who read the first article.. If you have a lower-funnel piece, like a pricing guide, your follow-up campaign may include a demo or trial call-to-action. 

Redirect Links

Again, there is no practical limit to the number of links you can have in Insightly. If an asset is ungated, meaning there is no form associated with accessing your eBook or article, append a UTM to the link so you can track the exact journey the prospect took to get to it. Then, segment based on that link to continue the conversation in context.

Use behavioral signals within Insightly Marketing

Your marketing team needs a powerful tool to drive leads and create opportunities. Behavioral segmentation is just one of the many features used to drive and nurture leads for your sales team. Insightly Marketing includes this feature, plus offers customizable prospect grading and scoring, an intuitive journey builder, beautifully formatted automated emails, and more.

Insightly marketing is also part of a powerful platform that puts your marketing automation tool in the same suite of products as your CRM and customer service app. This aligns sales, marketing and customer service teams on a single, powerful platform.

Get a demo of Insightly Marketing today.

The post How to use behavioral signals in marketing campaigns appeared first on Insightly.

This misalignment has led to tension between sales and marketing teams. It also leads to companies missing revenue targets. Because of this, many companies have made strides to align marketing and sales teams. You may hear these referred to as revenue teams. By putting sales and marketing in lockstep, these companies keep the bottom line top of mind.

If you’re a marketer, navigating a move toward marketing and sales alignment can be a challenge. You may need to make changes in your day-to-day work. Here are a few ways marketers can work with sales teams to achieve better alignment and exceed revenue goals.

Why marketing and sales alignment matters

Marketers and salespeople working together smoothly and aligning their operations can create advantages for both teams.

Improved lead management 

Your junior sales team likely spends the bulk of their time qualifying leads. They use an integrated CRM, online research, email, and phone conversations to determine if leads have the potential to turn into customers. Instead of following up on low-quality leads, sales can use this time to start to warm up leads who fit their ideal customer profile.

This gap begins to close when sales and marketing work together to create lead scoring and grading models to qualify leads. Once sales and marketing agree on lead qualification criteria, they’ll reduce friction between the teams and start improving lead conversion rates. It may take some time and testing to figure out the best lead qualification model, but as long as sales and marketing are working in tandem with each other, they’ll be able to find what works best faster. 

Sales can leverage marketing programs

Once these leads are qualified, sales teams are responsible for converting them to customers. Here’s where marketing can help. Marketers have content, programs, designs, and events that can be repurposed into sales collateral. Sometimes there is a dedicated product marketer who focuses on using marketing to enable sales. This is especially useful during a sales blitz, an outbound sales campaign common with account-based marketing (ABM).

A marketing blog post can become a case study. A webinar can become a product tutorial. A trade show can be a way for a potential customer to meet your team. By repurposing assets, marketing provides sales reps with more tools to help them guide customers through the buying journey and close deals.

Integrated programs have the best chance of success

Companies are moving to hyper-targeted, integrated campaigns. If your company is using account-based marketing, the buy-in of sales and marketing is crucial. ABM campaigns require sales results, account management expertise, agile digital marketing, and creative thinking. Your marketing and sales leadership must be in lockstep as to how the campaign will operate, who is responsible for each aspect, and how to measure its success. If your marketing and sales teams aren’t on the same page, your ABM campaign will struggle—or fail outright.  

How marketing can better understand sales

Even when teams are integrated, there are still fundamental differences between marketing and sales. There are a few things that marketers can do to better understand salespeople and improve the value they deliver to sales. 

Sit in on sales calls

The best marketers do this regularly. By sitting in on one with sales each week, marketers can get insight into the results of their programs. Learn more about the characteristics of a good (or bad) lead, what the biggest concerns are, how they describe a problem they are trying to solve, and if your marketing materials resonate with prospects.

Understand the sales funnel

Marketers know how the sales funnel works: leads get qualified, turn into prospects, then opportunities, then customers. Yet, sales teams know the ins and outs of their funnel specifically. Perhaps there’s a smoking gun that can tell a salesperson that someone is a great potential customer. Conversely, there may be a red flag that tells a sales rep that someone should be disqualified immediately. Are there specifics that impact your company’s sales process? As the marketing team learns these, they can focus on generating leads that are a better fit for the funnel.

Integrate and align your customer relationship process

We all know there’s a slew of sales and marketing tools out there. Yet, what about tools that align the goals of marketing with the goals of sales? A unified customer relationship management (CRM) system, like Insightly, is the first step in orienting marketing and sales results. Sales management uses a CRM to organize and manage sales processes and customer interactions. Marketing can use CRM data to extract customer insights and learnings to inform programs and initiatives. 

Review sales results 

We all know the sales process doesn’t end when we generate a lead. Your sales team is likely using their CRM to collect and crunch plenty of sales-related information. This shows how leads move through the funnel and how they convert to customers. 

Three ways marketers can become indispensable to salespeople

Once marketers understand how the sales process works, there are a few easy ways we can help sales close more and bigger deals.

Provide them with content to help warm leads and close deals

Create a comprehensive content plan that includes blog posts, tutorials, videos, and other agreed-upon resources that sales management and account executives can share with prospective customers. Also, figure out the best ways to repurpose materials in different formats so that you can maximize the value of every piece of content you produce.

Offer social media training and reviews

Many sales managers rely on social networks like LinkedIn to help them qualify or prospect. Marketers can offer reviews and recommendations to sales’ social media accounts, as well as provide a plan that includes post content and suggested language.

Create loyalty programs to improve customer engagement

Marketing doesn’t end once the deal is closed. Implementing best practices in customer engagement can improve customer experience. This gives salespeople more leverage in offering benefits to customers. 

How salespeople can help marketers

Sales teams can also help marketers improve programs, which in turn generate better leads. Here are a few specific ways that salespeople can provide insight to marketing.

Help marketers build an ideal customer profile

An ideal customer profile is a comprehensive account of your company’s perfect customer. Ideal customer profiles are crucial for account-based marketing and targeting enterprise-level customers. An ICP relies on sales information to understand the process by which the ideal customer goes through the sales funnel. Marketers can integrate both quantitative and qualitative sales results into the profile. 

Identify customer advocates

Customer testimonials strengthen marketing. There’s no better way to convince a new customer than the recommendation of a current customer. Along with customer success, salespeople can help marketing identify strong customer advocates who can be quoted on the website and speak at marketing events.

Measure marketing return-on-investment

You don’t know if your marketing program is successful until you get regular feedback from sales and see the final bottom line. Request regular reporting from the sales team on the results of marketing programs, including revenue generated from specific campaigns. Incorporating this assessment will ensure that marketing programs align with sales success. A unified platform for sales and marketing, like Insightly, can help to keep both teams in sync from lead generation through conversion and ongoing customer engagement campaigns. 

Conclusion

We are all striving toward perfect sales and marketing alignment. Consider the value that each team can provide to one another when interacting and planning your joint revenue efforts. What tools, processes, and elements of culture can help your sales and marketing teams to better collaborate and tackle challenges? 

The post How marketers can work more effectively with sales appeared first on Insightly.

Even though the marketing career path isn’t a straight one, there are a few steps you can take to advance your career.

1. Decide if you are ready for your next position

It’s not always easy to know when you are ‘finished’ with a current role. Marketing jobs are dynamic, and you may never feel like you’ve completed everything on your long ‘to-do’ list. It’s rare to feel like you’ve done all that you can do in your current position, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not time to move on.

An easy way to tell if you’re ready for a new position is to pay attention to how you feel about your current work. Do you feel challenged or do you feel bored? Are you excited about or dreading upcoming projects? If your work is not energizing you like it used to, you’ve likely outgrown it.

Another way to know if you’re ready to advance in your career path is by reading your original job description. Are you still working on the same primary tasks and projects? Or, have you moved on to more advanced work? If your role has already moved beyond what it was, you are likely due for a new position.

2. Set intentional career goals

It’s tempting to obsess over advancing to a new title—a little signifier of success that you can show off on LinkedIn. Stop to consider what exactly this advancement would mean. Have you mastered everything in your current role? Would a new title provide new opportunities? How would you use those opportunities to grow?

Make a list of your career goals outside of a certain job title or salary bracket. These goals shouldn’t be beholden to marketing career path titles, salaries and structures. Often, these are arbitrary and differ from company to company.

Here are questions to ask when thinking about your next marketing career goals.

Do I want to:

• Pursue a marketing specialty? (more on this below)
• Work in a certain industry?
• Be part of a large or a small team?
• Be on a founding team?
• Manage a large or small budget?
• Work with people I can learn from? If so, in what areas?
• Work remotely?

Not every position will meet all your goals. But it’s still helpful to have this list when you’re considering opportunities and planning career moves.

3. Determine an internal or external move

Oftentimes, this decision is made for you. Is there an open position at your company, or does your company have a dedicated career advancement path? In that case, pursuing your next move at your current company is often your best option. You get the benefit of learning and growing without the learning curve of a new industry, new co-workers, and a new office (or Zoom meeting code).

But, you may decide that you’re ready to move to another company. Or, as is often the case, your company may not have a clear next step for you. This is typical at startup companies or companies with small marketing teams. So you may have only one choice: spend more time in your current position or leave to pursue something new.

How do you know if you’re ready to move to a new company?

Learn a new skill

In my first marketing job out of college, I was a writer and content manager. I loved this work, but I felt like I had only seen one corner of the digital marketing career. It was important to me to gain more visibility and experience into other facets of marketing in my next job.

Try a new industry

One reason that I love being a marketer is because I not only learn a lot about the marketing world, but I also learn so much about every industry that I market to. If you’ve spent a few years marketing to healthcare, for example, you might want to try your hand at marketing to software developers. If you’ve spent your career in B2B, you may also want to try B2C, or vice versa.

Meet new people

We learn so much from every co-worker and manager. Advancing your career can sometimes mean shaking up your work environment. When you move to a new company, you can guarantee that you’ll grow by learning how to work with new and different people.

4. Understand your next step

Especially in the startup world, hiring for marketing can be fragmented. Some companies have a CMO or a VP of Marketing as one of their first five hires. Some companies wait until they have an entire sales division before they hire a marketer.

The typical marketing job titles hierarchy at a tech or software startup might look something like this:

Though it may seem like the hierarchy is well-established, it can vary. Each company is on its own marketing journey. They will make different hires at different times. Responsibilities and seniority can fluctuate from one company to another.

Because of this, your next title may be lateral, or sometimes a step back. In this case, it’s important to return to your career path intentions. If the position allows you to grow, it is a step forward regardless of the title.

Salary grade is often tied to job title. This also varies depending on exact job responsibilities, industry and geographic location.

Based on US national averages data from April 2021, Salary.com reports that average marketing salaries can range from around $38,000 to $297,000. Salary ranges vary based on industry, location, experience level, education, and other factors.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average raise for performance-based promotion is 3 percent. So, if you’re a junior-level marketer making $56,999 and get promoted to a marketing manager role, it’s unlikely you’ll make that big jump to six figures. This is a crucial decision when deciding whether to take a promotion at your current company, or fill a role at a new company.

5. Consider generalized and specific marketing paths

Marketers love to say that they wear many hats. One day they might be a designer, one day a journalist, and one day an analyst. When companies are beginning to invest in marketing, they are often looking for the type of marketer that can do it all, or a generalist.

Yet, at some point, too many generalists feels like too many cooks. When they start to grow, companies see the value of having a dedicated graphic designer, a content manager, a marketing analyst, a campaign manager, and/or social media manager, to name a few.

A full-stack marketing team might consist of 10+ specialists with concentrated experience. Marketing specialties include digital marketing, content, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click management, graphic design, public relations, brand management, product marketing, analytics, campaign management, marketing operations, events, customer engagement programs, and sales enablement. In some industries, there may be even more.

Most marketers spend some time as a generalist, and some time as a specialist. Often, generalist skills apply if you’re managing a team or heading up a department. Otherwise, special skills can take marketers far.

If you’ve spent some time as a generalist, consider a role that will allow you to focus on a specialty. If you’ve been in a specialty for a long time, consider expanding your skill set by spending some time as a generalist. This will provide you with an opportunity to grow and become a more well-rounded marketer.

6. Decide on whether you want to work at an agency or in-house

Marketers typically work in one of two environments. Agency marketers are contracted consultants who work with different clients to achieve specific goals. In-house marketers are hired by a company to run marketing programs full-time.

Agency marketers and in-house marketers often call upon the same marketing management knowledge. Yet, each environment requires different soft skills to succeed.

If you work in an agency, you’ll find yourself interfacing with clients. You’ll become a pro at communicating your process and results. Oftentimes, these jobs are less flexible because you’re working on your client’s schedule. Ensuring client happiness is just as important as marketing your product.

If you’re a marketer working in-house, you have more flexibility. You have the ability to work on your own schedule to make sure your goals are met. You have the luxury of long-term thinking and making investments for the company’s future. Yet, in-house marketing also requires interfacing with your company’s senior leadership. It’s important to effectively communicate how your programs impact the bottom line.

Most marketers have a personality for either agency or in-house. It’s worth it to try both and see which is a better fit for you.

7. Identify your gaps in knowledge or experience

How do you know if you’re a good fit for a new job? Review listed job descriptions on Indeed.com and LinkedIn. If you notice a certain skill or experience that you lack, note it.

Some missing skills are deal-breakers. If you’ve never run a marketing campaign, you may not get a job as a marketing campaign manager.

But, many listed skills are nice-to-have. Depending on the company, they may be willing to teach and train you on some of the less-crucial items. This is especially true for junior-level positions.

To learn more about which skills are deal-breakers and which skills are nice-to-have, consider interviewing some people who are in similar roles. You can learn a lot from speaking to other people about their journey and the skills that they have found most crucial to do their jobs well.

Remember that skill gaps are typical. No marketer can do it all.

8. Consider options for filling a skills gap

If you’ve noticed that one of your skill gaps is something that you want to fill, you have a few options.

Do a project

Let’s say your company has never had a social media marketing presence, but you’re looking at jobs that require at least two years of social media marketing management. How can you simulate the lessons that other marketers would have learned over two years?

Consider an independent project that allows you to test this skill. Design a social media marketing campaign that you can execute from beginning to end. Take on all responsibilities that a social media manager would. This includes copywriting, design, scheduling, engagement, and measurement.

Doing an independent project has a slew of benefits. You’ll learn the ins and outs of the skill you’re trying to master. You’ll show a level of initiative and an ability to learn on your feet, which are great skills for marketers to have. Additionally, you may be able to show your passion for something you’re interested in outside of work. This can give the company a little insight into your personality and passions.

Take a class

For some skills, you may need more of a broad understanding rather than a specific experience. Let’s say you’re applying for a product marketing job that works with a product management team. The job may require some experience working with a product management team. This would be challenging to simulate with a project.

Consider taking a course in product management. Sites like Coursera, edX, LinkedIn Learning, and a number of universities offer free courses at varying levels. These courses will give you exposure to the basics of product management. They may give you the opportunity to test some basic product management skills. Though this does not represent a replacement of the work experience, it will give you a foundational knowledge. It also shows an initiative for learning another part of the business.

9. Use your network and build a new one

The marketing career path isn’t always a straight line, and neither is the marketing job application process. It’s rare to get a job going through the typical pipeline of sending a resume, getting an interview, and then getting a yes-or-no to the job. Because marketers are usually so embedded in their industry, there is an element of ‘who you know.’

Focus on connecting with other marketers. With the advent of remote work, we are lucky that many marketing networking groups have moved online to Slack, LinkedIn, or Facebook. This makes the process of networking a little less time-consuming and a lot less awkward.

Here are a few networking groups to meet others in the industry:

BigSEO – for search engine optimization

MKTG WMN – for women in marketing

Online Geniuses – for tech marketing

Product Marketing Alliance – for product marketing

Vidico – for video marketing

Content Marketing Institute – for content writers and managers

Join your college/university alumni networks and regional groups. Find mentors you can learn from, who can also help you make career decisions and introduce you to people in their networks.

10. Set up informational interviews

You can be the greatest marketer in the world, but if you don’t know anything about the product that you are marketing, you’re in big trouble. It’s even worse if you don’t know the industry or how your product fits into the market. Marketers need to invest time into learning about industries, products, and customers.

Before pursuing a job at a certain company, reach out to some people that already work there. They can be part of marketing management, but you can learn a lot by talking to sales, engineering, or product teams as well. These conversations are easier than ever with the wide adoption of Zoom. Your interviewee can give you insight into how the company operates. They can also give insider information before you enter a formal interview process.

11. Consider leaving your current position

Whenever I was unhappy with a position, my parents used to tell me “it’s easier to find a job when you have a job.”

This isn’t always true.

In my experience, finding a new full-time marketing job can be a full-time job of its own. Having networking conversations, doing research, scheduling interviews and doing sample projects are challenging and exhausting. Doing all this while you’re supposed to be committed to another job is doing everyone a disservice.

The benefits of leaving your current job to focus on finding a new job include:

• Avoiding burnout
• Getting recommendations and referrals from your most recent position
• Spending some time focusing on your mental health and career goals

An extra benefit is that your schedule may open you up to contract, freelance, or volunteer work that can enhance your resume for your next position.

It’s a financially privileged position to be able to leave a job to focus full-time on your job search and career planning, but I recommend it to those who can make it work. For me, there have been times when it was feasible and times when it was not. Review your financial situation carefully before making a decision to quit. You don’t want to feel the financial stress while looking for a new job.

12. Try something outside of the traditional career path

I am envious of the marketers who went from a coordinator to manager to director, and ultimately to a VP or CMO role. The linear career path always seemed like the best way to advance through an organization and career. You learn a little more each year, keep getting promoted, and grow confidence in your work.

Yet, that wasn’t the path for me. My career took twists and turns. This led me to learn more about myself, my interests, and what I wanted my journey to look like. As I met more and more marketers, I learned that the straight-and-narrow progression wasn’t for everyone.

Some of the strongest marketers I’ve met had spent time outside of marketing. They’ve taken hiatuses to work in sales, product, customer success, or even outside of corporate business altogether. By incorporating these experiences into their work, they were able to develop more nuanced perspectives on marketing. As sales and marketing continue to align, we are certain to see more overlap between the sales and marketing career paths.

If you’re feeling like your career has stagnated, it may be worth taking a leap into a different kind of role. It doesn’t mean the end of your career as a marketer. Instead, it might make you a better marketer and provide you with more diverse experiences and opportunities to meet people and discover new interests.

13. Make the move when it feels right

There’s no need to keep to a certain schedule of promotions, advancements, and raises. For one person, a single position could be dynamic and challenging enough to keep them interested for many years. For others, a few months in a position may be enough to know it is not the right fit.

I’ve felt a lot of competition from my peers in marketing for the ‘best’ title or the most money. In the face of this pressure, it is crucial to remember each of us is on our own journey. All companies are different and all jobs are different. The best way to be sure that I’m growing is by returning and reflecting on my own career goals.

Conclusion

Pursuing a marketing career is a rewarding and challenging journey. As you chart your marketing adventure, consider both following the established trails and finding a way to forge your own path.

Sources

What to Expect from an Average Promotion Raise. Indeed.com. February 22, 2021.

Salaries for Marketing Jobs. Salary.com

The 25 Best Marketing Job Titles [Ranked by Search Volume]. Rob Kelly. Ongig.com. January 24, 2020.

The post 13 Ways to Improve your Marketing Career appeared first on Insightly.

It’s not complicated: You choose a beer that you know that you like. Why? Because you know the brand, i.e. you have brand awareness.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is familiarity with a brand by its name, how it distinguishes itself from its competition, and any unique values it may hold. The average person in 2021 is estimated to see 6,000-10,000 ads per day, according to Sam Carr of PPC Protect. Without even clocking it, customers consume advertising at every turn, but there are only a limited number of brands of which they have full brand awareness.

According to research from Penn State University, customers can be aware of a brand in one of three ways: aided, spontaneous, or top-of-mind.

• Aided brand awareness: a customer can pick your brand out of a list
• Spontaneous awareness: they can list your brand as one of several in your category
• Top-of-mind awareness: a customer thinks of your brand first, unprompted

Brand recognition vs brand awareness vs brand reputation

Brand recognition, like aided awareness, means a customer recognizes your name and logo. Brand awareness strategy goes further and aims at achieving customers’ understanding of your product, market fit, and brand voice. However, awareness stops short of brand reputation, which includes personal feelings about the brand.

Why is brand awareness important?

Brand awareness is a critical step in the customer journey. A prospect cannot become a customer until they are somewhat aware of your brand. They cannot become a great customer until they have full brand awareness. By building awareness, your company establishes trust, a competitive advantage, and long-term value.

Brand awareness builds trust

Your customers trust those that they know: their closest friends, family, and colleagues. Think of each interaction with your audience like building a friendship. Then, when a customer is at a purchase point for your product, they’ll think of you as a trusted confidant.

Customers are loyal to well-known brands

Brand awareness marketing compounds. Once you build this strong relationship with your customer, your brand becomes less penetrable to competition. As your customer becomes more aware of your brand, they are less likely to want to forge an unknown relationship with a competitor.

Brand awareness is a long-term strategy

A few years ago, I bought a blue Honda Civic—a style that I hadn’t ever noticed on the road. As soon as I signed the car title, it was like a thousand blue Hondas appeared overnight. I saw one anytime I left the house.

This is the frequency (Baader-Meinhof) illusion. Once someone sees something for the first time, they are aware of it every time they see it. In branding, this means it only takes one touch for your customer to become brand-aware. Once they’re hooked, they’ll see your brand everywhere.

What is a brand voice?

Developing a brand voice is crucial for brand awareness marketing. Wendy’s has achieved a level of notoriety for being a unique example of a brand voice throughout social media and company branding.

“The company’s Twitter persona is a natural extension of the Wendy’s brand Dave Thomas founded in 1969. […] Wendy’s playful approach allows it to make its points in a likeable way, like trolling McDonald’s on National Frozen Food Day with tweets poking fun at the use of frozen beef.” – ‘Behind Wendy’s Epic Social Strategy,’ Fast Company (2)

When honing your brand voice, think about how you would personify the brand. Are you a rugged executive or a sweet grandmother? What about a cutting-edge expert or an empathetic teacher? Once your customers know who they’re talking to, they’ll develop meaningful associations and a greater familiarity with your brand.

How does your brand voice build strong brand awareness?

Consistency

Your brand voice should feel similar in each instance where a customer interacts with you. By achieving this consistency, you will meet the expectations customers have of you. This will build your brand’s trust and reliability.

Clarity

Muddled messaging means that your customers will have to put in more effort to get to know your brand. By being clear in each instance, you build quick trust with your audience.

Reflection of audience

Use a voice that your customers can relate to and trust. In the example of Wendy’s, they adjusted their brand voice to match that of their young target market. When customers can see themselves in your brand, they fill in the gaps to become brand-aware.

Earning brand awareness in the digital age

Brands have weaponized online reputation engines to build awareness. Online recognition is the ‘digitization’ of word-of-mouth marketing and can take many forms. It might be a recommendation via LinkedIn, or an Instagram influencer sharing a product. Online endorsements are a critical way to your build awareness strategy in relevant audience groups.

For better or worse, online reputation can be easy to game. Companies spend millions of advertising dollars to appear popular and established among the right groups. Especially in emerging spaces, companies woo customers with flashy advertising and competitive prices. With the simplicity of online purchasing, switching brands may be easy and cost-effective.

However, brand awareness is an advantage when competitors outspend your advertising or undercut pricing. Even with cost savings, customers will not be able to estimate the cost of having so many unknowns when switching to a new brand. This gives the edge to the company with a stronger brand awareness strategy.

If your company doesn’t have a six- or seven-figure ad budget, brand awareness allows you to compete. Smaller companies have the opportunity to gain audience awareness by using digital marketing strategies that capitalize on the organic methods that customers use to learn about products before they purchase.

Using digital marketing to build your brand awareness strategy

Upwards of 87% of product research takes place online, according to Dan Alaimo of RetailDive.(6) To compete, balance your digital marketing presence across channels to control your brand’s messaging.

Content

Content is storytelling about your brand. Content refers to blogs, templates, product information, videos, customer stories, and more. With content, you create a narrative that reflects your company, product, and values. Companies with strong brand awareness share their voice with their audience through content.

SEO, or ranking in top positions on Google Search

When conducting online research, your audience trusts Google (or other search engine) to show them the most valuable content. Increase your chances to be at the top of search results by optimizing your website with SEO (search engine optimization) best practices for digital marketing. High rank has a double benefit:

1. Customers searching for relevant information see your brand.
2. You build trust by showing that Google considers your content highly relevant and valuable.

Social media

Is your audience on Twitter? LinkedIn? TikTok? Regardless of the platform, these apps exist to enhance connections between people. A presence on relevant social media shows interest in connecting with your audience. Social networks also provide opportunities for friends and colleagues to recommend your brand. By capitalizing on these forms of digital marketing, you can build brand awareness among the most trusted circles.

Influencer marketing

Build brand awareness by getting the recommendations of thought leaders in your industry. By utilizing networks that tastemakers have built, you reach new audiences and customers. Often, this is pay-to-play, but in many industries, thought leaders give earnest recommendations.

Email marketing

Email is popular and used daily across the world. This makes it, still, the marketing program with the highest reach. Email analytics also provide unprecedented insight into customer behavior. Because of this, email can be used as a learning and listening tool to better understand your brand awareness.

Paid ads & media placements

Awareness is not built on organic authority alone. Google, Facebook, and paid media ensure that brands’ ads will be seen by their audience. With advertising, your brand can have greater reach and potential for brand awareness. Find the best opportunities for your industry and budget your ad spend competitively. By aligning your content, SEO and paid strategies, you reinforce your message and build consistency across brand assets and channels.

Brand awareness is a journey

Improving brand awareness is an implicit or explicit goal of many marketing teams. We now know that brand awareness isn’t necessarily an objective, but a process. Brand awareness is expansive and includes customer interactions at all stages of the funnel. Yet, as you and your marketing team grow your understanding of what brand awareness is (and what it’s not), you can work to improve your mix of strategies and tools to reach your brand awareness and, ultimately, business goals.

Sources:

1. 10 Branding Statistics You Need to Know in 2021 [infographic], Oberlo, 2020.
2. Behind Wendy’s Epic Social Strategy, Fast Company, 2019.
3. Brand and Advertising Awareness: A Replication and Extension of a Known Empirical Generalisation, Penn State University, 2004.
4. How Many Ads Do We See A Day In 2021?, PPC Protect, 2020.
5. What the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon Is and Why You May See It Again… and Again, Healthline, 2019.
6. 87% of shoppers now begin product searches online, Retail Dive, 2018.

The post What is brand awareness? appeared first on Insightly.

As marketers, we’re charting new territory and are forced to constantly experiment with new, innovative tactics to remain competitive.

Luckily for us, the marketing automation (MA) systems we use provide tools that facilitate this experimentation. An effective way to evaluate new marketing tactics is through A/B testing.

A/B testing lets us deploy two variations of the same marketing tactic, side-by-side, and compare results. In this way, we discover which of the two is more effective. This removes part of the guessing element from our disruptive marketing experimentation and allows us to determine which new tactics to focus on based on data rather than intuition.

Below we dig into A/B testing, discuss when you should use it, and delve into a few best practices for mastering A/B testing in your marketing organization.

What exactly is A/B testing?

With A/B testing, we leverage marketing automation to execute two approaches to the same marketing tactic simultaneously. The best marketing automation solutions let you get pretty granular with A/B testing.

How does it work from a technical perspective?

We can use email marketing as an example to explain the process. When testing two versions of the same email, your MA system will send a sample of each version to two subsets of your overall targeted audience.

Your system will then wait a specified amount of time to measure how each of the two performed. Which had the highest open rate? Which saw the most click-throughs? Which resulted in the most unsubscribes?

Once it has enough data to determine which version is more effective, your system will push that version out to the rest of your target audience.

Why should you use A/B testing?

It’s important to know which marketing tactics best engage your audience, attract new leads, and drive the most lead conversions. If you’re testing an email campaign, A/B testing will tell you which email versions generate the highest open rates, click-through rates, and which generate the most marketing qualified leads.

Experimenting with an email campaign

When applying A/B testing to an email campaign, you can experiment with the subject lines of your emails, the copy of the emails, or the images you use. You can experiment at a more granular level by testing two different font types, font colors, email template designs, headers, sub-headers, names in the email “from” line, and so on.

Testing elements of a marketing campaign

You can also use A/B testing in various parts of a digital marketing campaign. Compare the results of two different landing pages, lead generation forms, or calls-to-action. Moreover, you can test two different marketing campaign sequences to determine the optimal cadence for campaign touchpoints.

Don’t forget statistical significance

When you’re A/B testing new tactics, be sure to apply your test to sample sizes large enough to produce statistically significant results.

If your target audience is 3,000 leads and you only send your initial test versions to subsets of 10 people, your results won’t be reliable enough to represent your entire audience. Sample size (n) is key to effective A/B testing.

Need a quick refresher on statistical significance? Brush up on the subject.

How do you plan & execute an A/B test?

The point of A/B testing is to generate data that leads to actionable insights and empowers you to confidently apply the tactics that are most effective with your target audience. What works for one industry may not work for another.

When planning an A/B test, it’s helpful to follow a set process and stick to it. This produces consistency in your results and strategies. Here is an example of an effective step-by-step process to follow:

1. Define your hypothesis

Determine the question you’re trying to answer. For example, should I send this marketing email from “The [Company Name] Team?” Or, does it make more sense to send it from individual sales executives? You’ll have an assumption of which will be more effective, but that’s just a hunch. Your A/B test will (or won’t) validate your assumption.

2. Determine which & how many tactics to test

Are you going to keep it simple and test two email subject lines? Or are you going to also test send dates to see which day of the week generates the most email opens? If you’re new to A/B testing, we recommend starting by testing one variable, such as an email subject line. It’s best to ease your way into the process and learn as you go.

3. Calculate a statistically significant sample size

Do the math and determine the appropriate sample size for each subset of your test so your results can reliably tell you which tactic to deploy. If you don’t, you’ll be wasting your time because your results won’t accurately predict the results you can expect when you push your tactic out to your entire target audience.

4. Test your test

Quality assurance (QA) is vital to effective A/B testing. Run a test drive of your experiment with some test leads in your CRM database. Be sure you are in that group of test leads so you can walk through the process yourself and ensure everything is set up correctly.

Click every link, complete every form, open every email, and so on. Then check the results to verify that the actions you took are properly represented. If there’s a broken piece of the process, you want to identify it before you execute your test on actual leads or customers.

5. Set your timeframe

How long will you wait, while the test group data is being compiled, before you determine the effective tactic and push it out to your entire audience? The answer is that there is no definitive answer.

The amount of time you should wait depends on how long it will take to accumulate enough data for your results to be statistically significant. That depends on your audience size and how quick they are to act. It’s important not to push out either tactic to the entire group prematurely.

6. Deploy, measure, & analyze

Once you push out the winning tactic, wait an appropriate amount of time, then measure the results. You may find that although Tactic 1 was more effective during your trial test, the results it generated when deployed to the entire audience varied significantly.

If that happens, you might want to run another test, comparing that same tactic with another one, to confirm that it is an effective approach to engaging your audience. There’s no harm in re-testing a tactic because you must understand why a particular tactic was successful.

When should you use A/B testing?

Don’t A/B test any random tactic out of curiosity. You need to set a goal when A/B testing because it is most helpful when you’re trying to solve a problem or improve upon something that’s not working as you need it to.

For example, if conversion rates have been dropping, it’s time to start A/B testing new tactics. If customer retention rates start to fall, pull out your A/B testing playbook. If you simply can’t generate new leads, it’s probably time to experiment with new tactics.

What do you need to conduct A/B tests?

First of all, you need the ability to measure specific metrics—the majority of which can’t be measured without technology. You can’t measure email campaign click-through or open rates without software that automates those processes.

In short, you need a CRM that stores customer and lead data as well as a marketing automation solution with the ability to conduct A/B testing. Some CRMs, like Insightly, include built-in MA capabilities to form a unified CRM system. These are the best kind of solutions to conduct effective A/B testing.

Final thoughts on A/B testing

Now that you understand the basics of A/B testing, as well as why, when, and how to conduct A/B tests, it’s time to get to work. Start thinking about when you might want to run your maiden A/B testing voyage.

If you don’t have the right technology in place to run A/B tests, now’s the time to start thinking about implementing new software—such as a unified CRM—in your organization. Such software does a lot more than allow you to test new tactics. It automates loads of manual processes, ensures data integrity, and allows you to deliver a better customer experience, along with many additional benefits.

If you need to learn more about CRM and MA software, feel free to schedule a free demo with Insightly. We’ll walk you through the benefits you receive from using a unified CRM with built-in marketing automation.

Request a demo

The post A/B testing: How to identify the most effective marketing tactics appeared first on Insightly.

As a result of the coronavirus, businesses of all sizes and industries are facing unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainty. At the center of this crisis is a deeply human concern: our own health and well-being, and that of our loved ones.

There’s no real playbook to follow, and at times, navigating this new reality feels like an experiment. When this is all behind us, we’ll all have stories to tell. How will this experience change us? What can we learn from it? It’s probably too early to reflect and make conclusions, but sharing our observations and insights can help us to make sense of what’s going on, stay connected and prepare for what’s next.

With that in mind, I want to share my notes on how my company transitioned more than 100 employees to fully remote work, as well as offer a few suggestions on how we all can continue to adjust to a new way of doing business.

Facing the reality early

Economic changes, market downturns, disruptive technologies, competition — these are familiar forces that have shaped how we run and future-proof our businesses. They all cause stress, but the anxiety surrounding the coronavirus is exacerbated by the fact that it is first and foremost a human crisis that blurs the lines between business and personal.

At my company, our first response was to protect the health and safety of our employees, and that meant deciding to transition to fully remote work even before local authorities advised doing so. As knowledge workers in a technology company with remote team management experience, we were in a better position than most businesses to take immediate action to protect our employees and communities.

The key takeaway here is that as a leader, you shouldn’t be afraid to face the reality of a crisis early. Responding right away can make a big difference, even if you don’t know what to expect.

Transitioning to 100% remote work

From a technology and infrastructure perspective, using a number of collaboration and planning tools, such as Slack, Google Suite and Zoom, made the entire transition smooth and helped avoid interruptions. Many of our employees had been working remotely one or two days a week already, so they had proper setups at home, including high-speed internet access, virtual private networks and security precautions.

But the technology side is only one side. There’s the human side, which is a lot bigger than just using some tools and new gadgets. Whether it’s worrying about getting sick, figuring out how to homeschool children, or taking care of family and friends, an extreme amount of stress has become part of people’s daily lives and can impact work and productivity.

If your company has recently transitioned to 100% remote work, ensure you’re staying aware of all these factors, leading with empathy and giving your people space to figure out what works for them. Make sure they know we are all in this together.

Managing and motivating remote teams

As I mentioned earlier, we couldn’t predict how this transition would turn out. Two months later, our teams are even more productive than before and have kept up performance. Some of our staff thrive with less time spent on face-to-face interactions and commutes, thus producing great work with more focused time.

To help manage and motivate your own remote employees, encourage your human resources and people operations teams to create opportunities for people to connect with one another in meaningful ways. Virtual luncheons and check-ins, dog walks, yoga sessions, cooking lessons, talent competitions, story time for your employees with children, and company newsletters with helpful resources are just some ways you can try to engage and support your people as they adjust to a new work reality.

I’ve also learned that company culture and a sense of humor play important roles in motivating and engaging teams. Fun Zoom backgrounds, silly hats and pets can bring some levity to a tough situation and help maintain a fun company culture.

Adjusting to economic uncertainty

While we’ve been able to quickly adapt, I am fully aware of the different realities our customers are facing in different industries across the world. It’s important that you consider supporting clients who use your company’s services. At the same time (and depending on your industry), you might need to consider reducing sales targets, as many companies are postponing purchasing decisions until they have more surety around their revenues.

The situation is changing fast, and we have only a few weeks of data. We also don’t know how much new government policies and legislation will affect businesses in the U.S. Finance, analytics, sales and marketing teams in organizations around the world are struggling to make sense of the situation and plan ahead. What is the drop going to be? How much will massive unemployment affect us? Can we stick to our current plans and guidance from the market and/or board of directors?

One of the best ways I’ve found to deal with this uncertainty is to constantly assess and monitor events as quotes and figures come in so you can continuously recalibrate on all fronts and continue to innovate and service your customers wherever they are.

Learning as you go

It’s hard to think too far down the road right now, so remember to learn as you go. At my company, for example, we’re looking into creating more flexible remote work policies. Our old preconceptions about working from home have been proven wrong: Our employees have been extremely productive and, in some ways, even more efficient while working remotely.

Beyond that, I believe these uncertain and difficult times have reminded everyone of our ability to come together, support and uplift one another, and persevere in the face of great adversity. They have also given leaders an opportunity to develop resilience, reevaluate company policies and see their team spirit at its best.

Read more from Insightly CEO Anthony Smith:

• Tips on introducing artificial intelligence in your business
• How to manage customer input in product development
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020

The post Navigating uncertain times with the new ‘business as usual’ appeared first on Insightly.

As a result, chief marketing officers (CMOs) are forced to have an entirely new set of skills in their toolkit—namely, the ability to wear many hats at once.

It’s about acting as a chief financial officer (CFO) to be strategic about when and where to invest marketing dollars for optimum ROI, acting as a product developer to ensure the solution matches the customers’ evolving technical needs, and integrating sales expertise to ensure marketing is driving leads through the funnel.

So let’s break down this evolution…

CMOs of companies of all sizes are now, more than ever, directly responsible not only for revenue but also for their contribution to profitability.

At the beginning of any planning period, every dollar requested by the CMO for marketing’s budget needs to be justified to the CFO/CEO, and every dollar spent needs to be accounted for. But once the budget is approved, the CMO and marketing’s performance will ultimately be assessed on a hard ROI metric by the end of the stated time period, usually 3, 6, or 12 months.

Until recently, that assessment was based on a series of volume metrics, such as number of event attendees or number of website visitors, and a choice of cost metrics, such as cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA). But with increasing adoption of deep analytics and data visualization technologies, the most progressive businesses assess marketing’s performance on the revenue-based metric of customer lifetime value (LTV) divided by the customer acquisition costs (CAC), or LTV:CAC.

To calculate the total cost of acquiring a customer (CAC), all expenses need to be considered, including digital marketing, content marketing and SEO, content creation, event management, media relations, influencer marketing, creative services, website development and maintenance, personnel, and other vendor costs.

Anything in excess of 2-3X for the LTV:CAC calculation is fairly healthy; and, if that rate is sustainable, the CMO can breathe easily. The hard part now for CMOs is truly understanding where to invest precious marketing dollars for the best ROI.

The good news is, as with every profession and school of thought, there are guiding principles with which to navigate…

1. Know your customer

The best CMOs first ask the simple, but fundamental questions: Who are our customers? How do they buy? Why do they want to buy from us? The answers to those questions will help define the foundations of the most effective CMOs—a deep understanding of the ideal customer journey, by type of customer.

With such knowledge, the CMO and the marketing team can make more informed decisions on whom to target, with what content, in what form, how often, and in what sequence.

A customer journey can range from the very simple and linear to the highly sophisticated and multilayered. When versioned by customer segment and type, the entire exercise can get complicated.

2. Choose the right tech

There are literally thousands of technology providers servicing every aspect of the marketing function. They include paid search and advertising, media relations, and content management systems; marketing automation platforms; customer journey analytics… the list goes on.

Choosing the right combination of technologies is critical to the CMO’s success and the task of delivering ROI results to the rest of the C-suite. Having a deep understanding of many of these technologies, and the often only slight differences in their functionality, is a must. One wrong decision can be costly: Many technology vendors require minimum-term or multiyear contracts, and unwanted costs will very quickly eat into positive ROI.

3. Assemble a team of athletes

Marketing as a functional area is the decathlon of business; no other area in a company has such diversity in skillsets, running the gamut from the highly analytical (left brain) to the ultra-creative (right brain). CMOs must have a deep working knowledge of an ever expanding range of disciplines or be schooled enough to intelligently and effectively direct and help those responsible on the marketing team.

The key is to hire the right people for every role. People are a CMO’s most valuable asset. Hiring the wrong person can, again, cripple the effectiveness of the marketing organization, and it can be a very costly mistake. Hire only when you are 100% sure that the person has the level of expertise that is required for a role.

The level of expertise required can vary depending on the go-to-market (GTM) strategy. For example, if PR is a critical part of the overall strategy, hiring a highly skilled and seasoned media relations expert is key. If a business is highly reliant on its website as a source of demand, then having a deep technical and creative team is preferred.

Whatever the goal, be sure to align your people resource with the marketing strategy, and hire only the best talent you can attract.

4. Craft your GTM playbook

Defining how to go to market involves making critical decisions about target market segments, ideal customer profiles and personas, partnerships, branding, campaigns, advertising (online and out-of-home), messaging, and timing and sequencing of activities.

Those decisions are not just the purview of the CMO. All those responsible for the commercial success of the business—CEO, sales and support leaders, product development and engineering leaders, and the heads of business development and partnering—have a role to play in determining the GTM plan for the business.

It is imperative that everyone be aligned around common GTM goals and objectives for a business to reach its revenue goals and beat the competition. Those need to be documented and revisited periodically during a formal operations review process to make sure the business is on track, and to change course if needed.

5. Integrate with other departments

In addition to generating revenue and positive ROI on investment dollars, CMOs also act as a service provider for many internal business functions:

• Sales for campaign development, product training and enablement, and event management
• Customer Success for customer marketing
• Support for online help center creation
• Human Resources for recruiting and talent branding

Marketing is the hub for the customer journey, and it is imperative that the CMO integrate and have transparency into other vital functions to ensure a successful end-to-end relationship.

Today, CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite, so those who want to survive and thrive must attack the position in a new, evolved way to ensure a successful customer journey, business growth, and career longevity.

Interested in learning more about Insightly Marketing? Schedule a call with one of our reps and get a free assessment of your marketing tech needs.

Request a demo

This article was originally published on MarketingProfs.

The post The evolving role of the CMO appeared first on Insightly.

The story of Insightly Marketing begins with Insightly’s original vision of empowering businesses of all sizes and industries to manage sales, marketing, delivery, and service on a single unified platform. The strongest driving force behind that vision has always been data integrity — a prerequisite for business success in today’s economy and the new digital age. By unifying sales, marketing, and delivery on a single data platform, we are eliminating the need and cost of constantly cleaning and syncing data between systems and teams. We are also erasing outdated boundaries between sales and marketing, allowing businesses to run coordinated campaigns, create consistent brand experiences at every customer touchpoint, and accurately measure and report on results. Learn more about the advantages of a unified platform.

Of course, in order to realize any vision, you need a set of beliefs that help you to stay focused, overcome obstacles, and remind you of why you started the journey in the first place. Here are a few principles that guided our journey of building Insightly Marketing app:

1. Level the playing field for businesses of all sizes and stages of development by opening access to enterprise-grade CRM technology that allows them to compete in the subscription economy where a company’s ability to collect, analyze, and act on customer data in a timely manner is crucial to business success.
2. Simplify complex systems and processes to support and empower high-impact work and sound decision-making. Too many teams are distracted and held back, too many opportunities are missed as a result of using outdated, cumbersome, and/or deficient CRM technology.
3. Design and build technology that humanizes data and allows businesses to focus on the relationship aspect of acquiring and retaining customers. Data is a foundational building block of customer relationships, but it can be overwhelming and useless without a proper structure and ability to take action. We help businesses to easily connect numerous data points to create a high definition picture of every customer and craft personalized messages and brand moments that strengthen their customer relationships and build trust.

Creation journey

The journey of building Insightly Marketing has been a journey of collaboration between product, engineering, and marketing teams, with our customers as a source of continuous inspiration and real-time feedback. From the ideation throughout the build and user testing, our product and marketing teams worked closely on every feature, sharing insights and challenging us to build the simplest and easiest to use solutions for marketers of all skill and experience levels.

As our own first customer, we got to test firsthand the transition from Marketo to Insightly Marketing and put it through its paces across four key marketing automation functions: prospect segmentation, email campaign creation, customer journey mapping, and analytics. We are excited to share a few details and lessons learned from our journey. We hope you’ll find the information and insights useful as you revisit your current marketing automation technology and/or consider implementing Insightly Marketing.

1. Challenging the status quo

Marketing automation is an aspect of customer relationship management (CRM) that’s concerned with prospect definitions, segmentation, and marketing campaign execution and tracking throughout the entire customer journey. With marketing automation, teams are able to perform key marketing functions in a more efficient and accurate manner at scale and measure performance. There are a number of ways to evaluate and compare different marketing automation technologies, but at the end it comes down to your marketing goals, priorities, and available resources.

Being strategic about your marketing tech investments will not only help you reap higher ROI, but will also help you to pursue new opportunities as your business scales.

With that in mind, we reviewed our Marketo instance and evaluated the platform in light of our business and marketing goals. We narrowed down our expectations from a marketing automation platform to this list:

• Generate more leads with the same budget
• Help sales build more and better pipeline
• Empower marketers to easily build campaigns, without outside help
• Gain visibility into the entire customer journey
• Manage the lead funnel more effectively
• Integrate sales and marketing to share a single source of truth on customer data
• Calculate ROI and prove the value of marketing efforts and spend

Marketo is a complex and sophisticated platform, but despite our best efforts, which included hiring a dedicated Marketo specialist and setting up regular data syncs with Insightly CRM, we constantly grappled with lead and customer data integration between sales and marketing. It took hours every week to complete data admin work, which included manual export and import, duplicate suppression, data cleanup, syncing fields, etc. We even hired an external agency whose sole job was to manage our email campaigns in Marketo. We sent them content, design assets, and campaign details and hoped it would all turn out as planned. The lack of full visibility and control over our campaigns hindered our ability to quickly set up and run multiple campaigns, test ideas, and make any last-minute necessary changes in real time. And, yet, working with an agency that specializes in Marketo was still easier than grappling with the system’s cumbersome setup on our own.

We found that Marketo’s interface made it hard to get employees to fully adopt the system and make the most out of it. For example, it took numerous clicks to view key information, such as creative assets and content, nurture configuration, and program performance reports.

With Marketo, we experienced firsthand the shortcomings of a marketing automation system that came with a lot of bells and whistles, yet failed to meet our most basic needs on a daily basis. In the meantime, the costs of using the platform kept rising without providing more value.

When Insightly engineers began to build Insightly Marketing, we were more than ready for the change and took key learning from that experience into designing a simpler, more intuitive, and scalable marketing automation solution for ourselves and other businesses. (You can say it was easier to build a whole new marketing automation app than to continue using Marketo.)

2. Creating our vision of marketing automation

As we thought about our marketing and business needs, we wanted to make sure that our marketing automation system would:

• Easily sync with the CRM in real-time, removing the need for manual data integration. Instead of spending hours to set up a single campaign, we’d have an automatic flow of information into that CRM that just worked.
• Serve as a single source of truth on customer data, including activities that led to sales conversion, and allow marketing and sales teams to create triggered, always-on campaigns to nurture our prospects into leads and nurture our customers into repeat customers and brand advocates.
• Help us track all our efforts by individual campaigns, so we’d able to optimize each one and increase conversion rates at different stages of customer journeys.
• Allow us to easily build dynamic lists that would automatically segment prospects and customers, so that we could reach them with timely and relevant messaging.
• Allow us to easily create drag-and-drop email campaigns with beautiful templates.
• Have a simple clean look and feel, allowing users to easily access necessary information, collaborate on projects, and reinforce best practices for marketing campaign management.

3. Turning our vision into reality

As we set out to turn our grand vision of an ideal marketing automation system into reality, we had to prioritize. We started exactly where we always do — customers and customer data, a foundational building block for any business. We wanted our marketing automation app to first and foremost accomplish two things:

1. Integrate with a CRM to create a high definition picture of every customer with full visibility throughout the entire customer journey, and

2. Allow businesses to use the data to create customer segments and quickly and easily carry out targeted marketing campaigns. Knowledge meets action, at scale.

From a technical perspective, we already had the foundational data architecture in place. We just had to build the marketing automation app on top of the platform that hosts our CRM, connecting sales and marketing at last. With a unified platform we’d be ensuring continuity at every level — from data structures to system integrations to user interface. We’d be able to link different types of customer data (profile and actions) in a clear and meaningful way to better understand our prospects and customers and reach them with targeted sales and marketing campaigns. We’d also be able to augment existing customer data with additional data from around the business and link relevant records in just a few clicks to gain visibility into every customer touchpoint.

With our framework and concept defined, we mapped the first set of functions for the initial release:

• Prospect segmentation and list creation
• A very easy to use email designer with great templates
• A visual customer journey builder
• Amazing analytics dashboards
• Advanced custom reporting

We also reviewed the top email campaign use cases:

• Batch and blast (announcements, newsletters, one-off communications, etc.)
• Simple nurture (follow-up after content download, blog subscription, event registration, or other top of funnel conversions)
• Conditional nurture (reengagement campaigns, custom follow-up triggered by certain actions/conditions)

4. Becoming our own first customer

As magical as it was to watch random (to an unaware eye) sketches from dry erase boards turn into clickable prototypes and, ultimately, into product features, we stayed critical throughout the entire process, testing and tweaking in real time. Here are a few key steps we took as we were building and later implementing Insightly Marketing.

Definitions

We debated naming conventions and meanings. What is a prospect? What is a lead? From our previous experiences we knew that these seemingly obvious definitions are often misunderstood or mean different things to sales vs marketing teams, and as a consequence create confusion and misalignment. So, we approached these definitions with great care and consideration, to make sure all data got accurately mapped between a CRM and Insightly Marketing and all records got properly organized and linked. Learn more here.

Data clean-up & migration

Before migrating to Insightly Marketing, we reviewed all our data in Marketo. We reviewed campaigns, programs, and performance reports, created catalogues of all landing pages and forms, and cleaned lists before exporting. As computer scientists and data analysts like to remind us — “garbage in, garbage out.” We got rid of garbage. Find more information on connecting Insightly CRM and Marketing data here.

Campaigns

As our own first customer, we got a chance to use the app to build and run real-life campaigns, including a monthly newsletter, a couple of webinar campaigns, and a conditional nurture campaign to revive inactive leads.

We then determined the types of email templates we’d need to create different campaigns. Here are a few template examples:

• Monthly newsletter
• Announcement
• Nurture email
• Event/webinar

After we sent out our very first email from our beta of Insightly Marketing, we learned that the “unsubscribe” function didn’t perform exactly as intended. Our engineers had to quickly fix the issue, so we could run our next email campaign. We then added a quick guide and tips on creating an “unsubscribe” link in an email template.

Anyone who has ever managed email campaigns knows how many things can go wrong. We’re acutely aware of this at Insightly, and as our engineers continue to innovate and simplify the complex world of marketing automation, we use real-time feedback and testing to keep up the quality of our solutions and give our customers peace of mind as they manage their own marketing campaigns and outreach.

To learn more on building email campaigns, check out this section in our Help Center.

User management

One of our favorite moments while implementing Insightly Marketing was when for the first time ever everyone on our marketing team could easily access and use a marketing system. Our designers could now create and test email templates right in the app, instead of having to build mockups or submit specs to a third party, and our writers could easily add and edit the content on their own. This eliminated a lot of back-and-forth (online and offline) and duplicate efforts, and also provided individual team members with visibility into marketing campaigns from start to finish.

While a rapid team-wide adoption was exciting, it also reminded us of the need to properly set up and manage users and user permissions. To that end, we identified “administrators” with advanced permissions and regular users with limited/simple permissions and designed simple processes and folder structures.

Folder management

Considering how many content assets we create, store, and use, Insightly Marketing’s Folders feature became an invaluable tool for keeping our content organized and easily searchable and accessible. We developed a simple and consistent naming convention for all our files and folders and organized them in a way that made sense to the team.

Measuring performance

In order to ensure that Insightly Marketing wasn’t just easy to use, but also helped us to significantly improve campaign performance, we established key performance indicators (KPIs) — open rates, click through rates, bounce rates, registration rates — and benchmarks for each KPI. This required massive reporting data exports from Marketo and analysis of recent historical KPIs by email category.

First, the data had to be formatted, cleaned, and categorized by top level category, such as Webinar, Announcement, etc. We then categorized it by sub-category: Invite 1, Follow-Up, Confirmation. Next, we collated the data and established averages for each specific sub-category. Based on that analysis we determined our baseline goals for email open rates, click through rates, sign-ups, and so on, which we’d use to evaluate every email campaign performance.

Once we configured some campaigns in Insightly Marketing and reached and exceeded our baseline goals, we started to trust our tool to send more emails.

We’re now regularly reviewing KPIs for each email or customer journey send, comparing the results to the original benchmarks. This measurement became valuable product feedback for the development team and continues to inform the build-out of the future reporting and dashboards.

Our journey of building Insightly Marketing doesn’t end here. Our engineering team delivers new product features and improvements every two weeks. Stay tuned for more updates on Insightly Marketing.

***

At the end of the day, marketing automation should solve for three key needs: planning, execution, and reporting of marketing campaigns. In today’s economy — with an abundance of information and options and multi-path consumer behavior — it takes strategic thinking, an ability to analyze a lot of data, and creativity to acquire and engage today’s customers.

With this in mind, a unified CRM for sales and marketing is the most effective way to ensure customer data integrity, foster team alignment, and achieve high ROI on marketing spend. We believe that investing in a unified CRM platform for sales, marketing, and delivery is the single fastest and most effective way to cut overhead costs and make the most out of every marketing dollar spent. We also believe that it takes a shared vision among stakeholders, true collaboration, and a solid strategy to effectively implement marketing automation.

We invite you to browse documentation, guides, and best practices on how to properly set up and start using Insightly Marketing. For more information, please check the Help Center, where we regularly add new content on all our products and best practices.

Are you ready to start your own journey with Insightly Marketing? Learn more in Marketing Automation Made Simple, and when you’re ready, let’s talk!

Request a demo

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Survey overview

In August 2019, more than 440 Insightly CRM customers — the majority of whom own or work at US-based companies with up to 500 employees — participated in an online survey on trends and challenges in marketing. Survey respondents included C-suite executives, mid-level managers, and CRM administrators from different industries, such as manufacturing, retail, consulting, education, healthcare, advertising and media, technology, and IT.

Key findings

How important is marketing to business growth?

More than half of the respondents find marketing “very important” to their business growth and nearly one in five report they couldn’t run their business without it.

So how does this recognition of the role of marketing translate into decision-making and operational management? Keep reading.

The scope of marketing activities

Even though the majority of survey respondents work in small teams (fewer than five people) with less than 10% of annual revenue allocated to marketing, the scope of marketing activities remains quite broad, covering digital marketing, advertising, PR, and events.

As expected, website management and email marketing are the most common marketing functions, followed by social media.

Investments: people, budget, & technology

People

In the survey, 48% of those who consider marketing “very important” and those who say they “couldn’t run business without it” (combined) report having only one or two dedicated marketers on their teams. Note that this number doesn’t include outside agencies — 37% of all survey respondents say they use contractors and external agencies.

Budget

More than half of all survey respondents report setting aside less than 10% of their annual business revenue for marketing, which is typical.

Interestingly, 44% of those who say marketing is “very important” or critical to their business growth, also report allocating less than 10% of their annual business revenue to marketing.

While most businesses in our survey are conservative with their marketing budgets, almost half of all respondents say they are spending more on marketing in 2019 compared with 2018, with the majority reporting up to 25% increase in year-over-year spend.

Technology

Considering the heavy focus on digital marketing and small team sizes, we were surprised to see a rather limited use of marketing technologies among survey respondents. Almost 17% of all respondents say they don’t use any technology at all and 56% use Excel to manage marketing.

Sales & marketing alignment

Keeping in mind that in today’s economy people expect consistent and customized experiences throughout all their vendor interactions, we asked our customers how well their marketing and sales efforts are aligned. Of all survey respondents, 46% say they are fully integrated and 11% say they are not integrated at all.

Of those who report not fully integrating their sales and marketing efforts, 42% say that it’s because it’s not a priority for them and 24% say they don’t have time to align.

Important to point out that 47% of respondents who state that marketing is “very important” to their business growth report full integration between their marketing and sales efforts.

This makes sense. According to Gartner, “The ‘single’ or ‘360-degree’ view of the customer requires combining all the operational master data pertaining to the customer — and often also to the product and service — from all data silos where it currently resides. Only by doing so can data and analytics leaders enable improved customer engagement across all customer-facing channels, including marketing, sales, customer service and digital commerce.”*

Measuring performance

As more companies focus on tracking their return on investment on every marketing dollar spent, we wanted to know how our customers measure marketing performance.

Surprisingly, more than one third of all respondents say they don’t measure marketing performance on a consistent basis.

Of those who say marketing is “very important” or crucial to their business growth, 46% report measuring marketing’s contribution to business revenue (deals closed, revenue per lead, etc.).

Survey takeaways

While our brief survey confirmed that the majority of businesses recognize the importance of marketing to their business growth, it also revealed inconsistencies in the ways businesses manage and invest in marketing and marketing technologies.

We also learned that one of the most common reasons why businesses don’t fully align their sales and marketing efforts is because they don’t consider it a priority.

There is an opportunity for companies to better invest in marketing technologies that would allow them to do more with less and focus on aligning their sales and marketing efforts. With a strong combination of a strategic sales and marketing alignment and scalable, integrated marketing technologies, businesses can not only create consistent brand experiences for their customers at every touchpoint, but also accurately measure the performance of all marketing activities and their impact on business growth.

Explore more content on the Insightly blog.

*Gartner, MDM Is Critical to Maximizing CRM and Customer Experience, Bill O’Kane, Michael Moran, December 2018

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