If you’re like most marketers, you can rattle off a dozen ways off the top of your head. Ads, click-through rates, blog comments and Facebook likes, and industry research begin to scratch the surface. What about sales calls and customer success touch points? How about their deal size, billing cycle, or even their company holiday card?

To create a full picture of your customer, you have to gain customer insights from every angle. The easiest and most complete way to do this is by using a customer data platform.

What is a customer data platform?

According to the CDP Institute, a customer data platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.

This means:

• A customer data platform must be a single software, not a combination of products.
• A CDP must export a persistent, unified customer database, not a fragmented system.
• A CDP must be accessible to other systems, not a standalone export.

How is a CDP different from a CRM?

But wait, what about your CRM? CRMs, or customer relationship management systems, have become integral to revenue operations. They provide invaluable insight into your customers. Further, they integrate with marketing, customer service, and financial programs. You may even use a unified CRM, which puts many of these integrations into one central system.

Here’s how a customer data platform differs from a customer relationship management system.

CDPs are managed by marketers 

This is unlike a CRM, which is managed by a sales operations manager or a system administrator. A digital marketing manager or analyst can manage a customer data platform.

CDPs are not used to manage customers

A customer data platform is not used to send emails, make calls, or market to customers. Instead, it analyzes things that have already happened.

CDPs go above & beyond the CRM

A customer relationship management system is a great data resource. But, it is not the only data resource. A CPD can enhance CRM data with marketing, service and financial information as well.

Your customer has a story before and after they become a data point. A customer data platform helps your digital marketing team tell that story, without gaps.

What kind of data does a CDP collect?

The customer data platform should collect customer insights at every touch point to provide a 360 degree view. Here are some examples of the types of data a CDP might collect:

Web data

Tools like Google Analytics document your customers’ web behavior. A customer data platform can aggregate links clicked, time on page and bounce rate. Combining this with other customer data can show meaningful trends in user behavior.

Customer identifiers

Your CRM integration will enhance your customer information. With a robust CRM, you can use identifying information to segment customer profiles. Data like names, birthdays and addresses creates fuller pictures of your customers.

Customer histories

Has your customer been around for six years or six months? Are they paying six figures or on a six-week free trial? This sales information, also in your CRM, profiles customers by their purchasing behavior.

Email or social media engagement

Who are the customers who like everything you post on Facebook, but never upgrade? What about those who haven’t opened a marketing email in over a year? These digital marketing analytics are powerful when aggregated with your other customer metrics.

Customer service data

You can learn a lot about a customer when studying how they use your customer service. Combining data from live chats, phone calls, and emails shows customers’ behavior over time and likelihood to churn.

Financial information

At the end of the day, you want to know what customers are purchasing, and for how much. A customer data platform shows lifetime value and total investment into your customers, including acquisition.

Benefits of using a customer data platform

Marketing bridges the gap between your customer and your product. Marketers typically understand their product extremely well. Why shouldn’t you understand your customer at the same level?

Benefits of a customer data platform include:

Campaign optimization to suit your customer profile

A customer data platform shows you which campaigns resonate with your customers. With this information, you can segment your marketing programs to meet customer needs.

Improving your sales cycle

With integrated marketing and sales data, a CDP can identify blockers in your funnel. This information allows you to smoothly move customers from marketing to sales.

Identification of customer correlations

Say you have a hunch that organic customers are more likely to contact customer support. A CDP can prove you right—or wrong. These correlations let you find alignments in your marketing, sales, and support functions.

Reintegration of customer data into other software

Customer data platforms integrate both ways. So, your marketing and sales software can use CDP data to improve your day-to-day functions.

Driving revenue

Better customer understanding = better marketing = better revenue.

Using a customer data platform to improve your marketing

How, exactly, does better customer understanding lead to better marketing? Here’s how a CDP can impact the success of your marketing campaigns.

CDP shows which channels bring in the most revenue

A CDP will draw a direct line between your marketing channel and lifetime revenue. You can invest more in the channels that are high revenue-drivers, and retire those that aren’t. This will increase your marketing ROI and decrease your customer acquisition cost.

CDP helps to improve your product marketing

Product marketing helps your customer better understand your company and product. A CDP uses your data to show customer touchpoints, pain points, and decision cycles. You can incorporate this information into segmented product marketing materials.

Create better segments with complete visibility

We all know digital marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s meant to be humanized. Our campaigns and programs work best when we tailor them to fit our customers’ needs. With a customer data platform, you can create more specific customer segments. With fewer assumptions, these segments are more accurate, measurable, and effective.

Conclusion

A customer data platform is a great tool to better understand your target audience. The insight into the entire business can be transformative for marketing success. If you are a marketer looking to better understand your customer, consider adding a CDP to your tech stack.

Interested in learning about Insightly’s unified platform for customer data management? Request a demo and see how you can better manage your customer data, align teams, and build stronger customer relationships.

Request a demo

Sources:
4 Types of Customer Data to Enhance Your Marketing Campaigns. Rob FitzGerald. ConnextDigital. June 20, 2019
8 Benefits of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Jan Hendrik Fleury & Clemens Niekler. Crystalloids. October 7, 2019
Customer Data Platform Basics. Customer Data Platform Institute. 2021

The post What is a customer data platform? appeared first on Insightly.

Digital marketing tools and advancements have made this conundrum a thing of the past. For modern marketing teams, value and return are key indicators of success. Now, marketers are responsible for understanding their business impact. Today, marketers are able to track online customer behavior and have an extraordinary opportunity to learn about their market position and reputation.This gives us unprecedented ability to understand how marketing contributes to company profit.

Why should you track marketing performance?

It’s no secret that marketing impacts your company’s bottom line, but how? An efficient marketing process drives customers, lowers costs, and shortens the sales cycle. Marketers are responsible for tracking performance to improve the health of the business. This means returning the investment made into marketing programs at a growing rate.

What is marketing ROI?

Marketing ROI, or return on investment, is revenue generated from marketing programs, less the cost of these programs.

Many companies make strong investments into marketing. These include direct costs, like ad spend. They also include indirect costs, like marketing team salaries. Marketing ROI shows that these marketing expenditures contributed to revenue the company generated. Marketing ROI is presented as a percentage.

The marketing ROI formula is (total revenue – marketing expenses) / marketing expenses.

If you spent $20,000 on marketing, and your company generated $100,000 in revenue, your marketing ROI would be 400%. Put another way, for every dollar invested in marketing, the company made 400 dollars.

But, what if you make a marketing investment and you see the value of it later on, or over time? For most companies, calculating marketing ROI is not a simple equation. Instead, it is a process of strategic decision making and analysis.

How to calculate marketing ROI

Measure your marketing spend.

The first step of understanding return on investment is understanding your investment. Your investment includes ad spend, marketing software, team salaries and agency fees. Additionally, consider if you’re spending on marketing outside of your traditional team. Is your customer success team using social media to connect with customers? Is your CEO flying across the country to speak at events? These costs are nebulous and need estimation, but are still marketing investment.

Attribute revenue to marketing efforts.

For companies that broker one or two enterprise deals per year, this is easy. You ask your customer how they heard about the company. Then, you can attribute revenue to the marketing channel they mention.

For many companies, the volume of leads is too great to ask each customer about their journey. Further, online consumer behavior is fraught. Many customers would not even remember how they first learned about your brand.

With technology like Insightly, Google Analytics, and Looker, customer journeys can be tracked through the marketing funnel. You can learn which ad a customer clicked on, which blog posts they read, and how they purchased your product. Then, you can give a marketing effort proper ‘credit’ for the revenue it generated. The team at Marketing Evolution terms this ‘person-level marketing,’ or marketing attribution.

If a customer has many marketing touchpoints, how do you assign credit? Your team should choose an attribution model. An attribution model designates a consistent method of measuring marketing revenue. A common model is first-touch attribution, crediting the initial interaction a customer had with the company. Many companies also use last-touch attribution, ascribing value to the final interaction before purchase.

Whichever attribution method you choose, you measure your marketing ROI by knowing which efforts resulted in revenue. Your team can measure investment by program, and calculate the return that each program generates. Depending on your volume and model, you may be able to calculate ROI with more granularity.

How not to measure marketing ROI

Measuring marketing ROI with an attribution model is somewhat novel. Most firms are just beginning proper implementation, attribution and optimization that allows for calculating marketing ROI.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes made about marketing return on investment.

Don’t undercut long-term impact by focusing on short-term value.

Consider this situation. Your team makes an unprecedented investment into creating a professional report. You research, write and design a 20-page book explaining trends in your industry. You publish this report on your website March 1st. By March 31st, it’s received a paltry 25 views and hasn’t brought in any leads. When you’re calculating your marketing ROI for March, you chalk it up to a major loss.

In April, your team adds a few keywords to the report and distributes the piece to some industry analysts. Your sales team starts to use the report for lead engagement. It starts to gain traction. You double your web traffic, and you start to notice a few leads attributed to the piece. Even though you published the piece in March, it’s providing value in April. In each subsequent month, the value of this report grows. Ultimately, the revenue it brings in dwarfs the investment.

Marketing compounds. Online, digital marketing efforts live forever and gain traction over time. What looks like a loss in the short term has the potential to be a long-term gain.

Don’t fall for vanity metrics.

When you begin analyzing your marketing, it can be easy to get excited by the biggest numbers. For example, say you published a short blog post about the best restaurants near your new office. The piece generated high web traffic from tourists in the area looking for lunch spots. This high number might tempt you to divert marketing efforts away from product posts. Instead, you can increase your traffic by focusing on lifestyle topics. If you’re casting a wide net, you can cross your fingers that some users actually want to become customers.

But, like every teen movie has taught us, popularity isn’t worth it. Metrics like impressions, web traffic, and “likes” worsen your marketing ROI. The exception is if these metrics correlate to revenue, like if your site is ad-supported.

Daniel Hochuli of Content Marketing Institute sums it up, “It’s the act of counting vanity metrics as evidence for success that is a problem.” Vanity metrics muddle marketing ROI. They are investments untethered to returns.

Don’t get tricked by ‘sunk costs.’

In the example of the industry report, a rookie marketer might chalk it up as a loss. They will move on, and never create another industry report again.

A savvy marketer would likely see an underperforming marketing effort as an opportunity.

You can always optimize, improve and iterate on your marketing efforts. You can bring value into marketing programs, even if they seemed hopeless. By growing the return over time, you minimize the impact of the investment.

Measuring short & long-term marketing ROI

Marketing isn’t a simple input-output, and neither is marketing ROI. Marketing teams need to measure both short and long-term investments and returns. Here are two schemas for understanding marketing ROI over time:

Short term: marketing spend per customer.

If your marketing programs are new, you may not have the luxury of proving marketing ROI over time. You are looking to show the value of your programs quickly. The fastest way to show marketing value is total marketing spend per customer. This is also called total customer acquisition cost.

This metric takes into account all marketing spend across all customers. Because of this, you can be sure that all your marketing efforts are being accounted for. Over time, your total marketing spend per customer should decrease. Understanding total customer acquisition cost is crucial for short and long-term marketing planning.

Long-term: cohort analysis.

Mature organizations have historical data, and opportunity to plan for the long term. These teams want to optimize marketing efforts for efficient value. The best way to do this is with cohort analysis.

A cohort of your users are those who come into your website through the same channel, ad, or piece of content. For example, users attributed to your industry report, mentioned above, are a cohort.

A cohort analysis report tracks the behavior of a group, and the revenue they generate. For the ‘industry report’ cohort, you credit their revenue to March’s marketing investment. This cohort analysis also allows you to value recurring revenue by marketing investment

Cohort analysis requires an investment of both time and resources. Yet, it is crucial in reporting on long-term marketing gains. By laying this groundwork, you validate your efforts and investment. In her explanation of cohort analysis, Maria Calvello of G2 explains, “since the process of cohort analysis involves taking a deep-dive into groups of people and observing their behavior, it’s an ideal way to improve your customer retention.”

Conclusion

Marketing ROI is both a simple formula and a long-term analytic process. It is assessed in both the short-term and the long-term. It can impact an organization immediately, or over a period of time. This enigmatic nature can make calculating return on investment a daunting task. Yet, it’s a crucial step in understanding how  marketing contributes to the bottom line.

Sources:

Cohort Analysis: An Insider Look at Your Customer’s Behavior. Maria Cavello. G2. February 28, 2020.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Gerald Chait. B2B Marketing. March 18, 2015.

The Right and Wrong Ways to Use Vanity Metrics. Daniel Hochuli. Content Marketing Institute. February 10, 2020.

The post How to measure marketing ROI appeared first on Insightly.

That may sound like a straightforward question. But it’s not.

At any given time, marketers use several marketing channels and strategies to attract and convert the most customers. Since each customer goes through multiple touchpoints within the buyer’s journey, pinpointing which marketing channel or strategy is making the most impact in generating sales for your business can be challenging.

That’s where marketing attribution comes in.

In this article, you’ll learn what marketing attribution is and how to build an attribution model customized for your business.

What is a marketing attribution model?

Marketing attribution refers to the process businesses use to figure out which of their marketing campaigns or channels are directly responsible for converting website visitors into customers.

Marketing attribution models guide marketers on evaluating each touchpoint within the sales funnel following a set of guidelines.

By building and implementing a marketing attribution model, you and your team can make more informed decisions on which channels and campaigns you should focus on.

As a result you can boost our ROI while lowering your marketing spend. This is vital since more than 50% of businesses today still allocate less than 10% of their overall budget to their marketing campaigns and activities.

Marketing attribution models fall into two general categories: single-step and multi-step attribution models.

Single-touch attribution models

First-touch attribution

This single-touch marketing attribution model shows you which of your marketing channels caused a potential customer to visit your website for the very first time.

Businesses often use this when they’re planning to launch a marketing campaign focused on brand promotion.

Last-touch attribution

As the name suggests, the last-touch or last-click marketing attribution model assigns the entire conversion credit to the last customer touchpoint before the purchase or opportunity creation.

Multi-touch attribution models

The downside of using a single-step marketing attribution model is that both the first-touch and the last-touch attribution models only pinpoint to a single interaction on the buyer’s journey. They don’t show whether other marketing channels you’re using have also influenced a potential customer’s decision to buy.

Thus, many marketers use one or more of the following multi-touch marketing attribution models.

Lead-conversion touch attribution model

This is perhaps the most widely used attribution model because it shows which channels are the most influential in converting your website visitors into qualified leads.

The reason is simple: generating qualified leads is still the most significant challenge faced by businesses across all industries. By identifying the channels and campaigns that bring in leads that are ready to buy, it will be easier for you to convert them into customers.

Linear attribution model

This multi-step marketing attribution model divides the conversion credit equally across all channels used in the buyer’s journey from start to finish.

The drawback of this multi-step attribution model is that the points are evenly distributed among all the touchpoints, so you can’t identify the top-performing channels.

Time-decay attribution model

Similar to the linear attribution model, the time-decay attribution model shows how each marketing channel you’re using affects a visitor’s eventual conversion into a customer.

The difference between the two models is in the way they distribute points.

Instead of giving equal points to each marketing channel, in the time-decay attribution model the value of the points awarded are based on how close each touchpoint is to the actual conversion. That means that channels used in the bottom of the sales funnel are awarded higher points than those used at the top of the funnel, or at the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

U-shaped attribution model

This marketing attribution model gets its name from the way the points are distributed.

Here, both the first and last touchpoints of your sales funnel get 40 points each, from the total of 100 points or the total conversion value. The remaining 20 points are then distributed to the marketing channels used between the first and the last touch.

This model works if you assume that all your leads complete the same journey, starting at the top of the funnel. But, as this study shows, 74% of B2B customers would have completed half of the buyer’s journey before reaching out to you.

More importantly, not everyone that enters your marketing funnel goes through the entire buyer’s journey. In fact, 79% of your leads never make a purchase.

Custom attribution model

Custom attribution model or algorithmic attribution model is quickly gaining popularity among businesses.

As its name suggests, this model is tailored specifically for your business based on your buyer persona, buyer’s journey, and data from the marketing campaigns you’ve launched.

With this model you have more control over how you credit points to each touchpoint based on how much it influences your customers to convert.

How to choose & build an effective marketing attribution model

1. Audit all your marketing efforts

Conducting an audit of all your marketing channels and campaigns gives you a clearer picture of how many touchpoints spread across your sales funnels. It also helps you and your team decide whether building a custom attribution model will be the best option for your business.

Building a marketing attribution model from scratch, after all, requires a significant amount of resources. So, you want to make sure that it will be worth your investment.

Build a custom attribution model if you:

• Have a big marketing team/access to more resources
• Use multiple online and offline marketing channels
• Previously tried one or more standard marketing attribution models without success
• Need to provide stakeholders with a more comprehensive report on how each touchpoint influences your sales and their ROI

2. Set clear goals

Once you’ve determined that a custom marketing attribution model is the best option for your business, you need to choose the main goal for creating one.

Having a clear and specific goal will guide your marketing team to identify which datasets to analyze and use as references in building your attribution model.

Setting a clear goal will also help your team establish the metrics they’ll use as benchmarks to determine whether or not you’d need any adjustments so you can reach the goals.

3. Map your customer journey

Your customer journey serves as the roadmap of your entire attribution model because it helps you identify the specific marketing channels you’ll be monitoring.

Use your customer journey map to categorize each touchpoint based on its impact on your customer’s buying decisions, then distribute the points accordingly.

4. Incorporate lead scoring

Lead scoring is the process of identifying which of your leads will most likely convert into customers.

This is crucial because once you identify your “hot” leads, you can then identify common touchpoints that resulted in conversion and include these into your custom attribution model.

5. Invest in the right tools

Tracking and monitoring the data for each touchpoint manually can be extremely tedious and time-consuming. Not to mention that it’s going to be prone to errors.

Investing in a unified CRM like Insightly makes it easier to track and automate your custom attribution model. It also enables you to collect data across multiple marketing channels in your buyer’s journey and create dashboards and visual reports of all key performance metrics.

6. Customize your attribution report

If you’re going to build an attribution model for your business from scratch, you’ll also need to customize sales reports in your CRM.

Insightly’s advanced reporting features enable you to create a custom report based on the selected touchpoints and the specific values you’ve established.

It also allows you to schedule when these reports will be generated and automatically shared with your team. These regular reports will help you to monitor, evaluate, and make adjustments to your custom attribution model and keep you and your team on track with your goals.

Conclusion

Implementing a marketing attribution model—standard or customized—takes a lot of time and effort. But it’s going to be worth it in the long-term.

For starters, a marketing attribution model helps you and your team to identify top performing channels and focus on them, instead of worrying about ROI every time you launch a new campaign.

Ultimately, marketing attribution models allow you to maximize your marketing budget, improve your customer engagement, and generate more revenue and scale.

Of course, having a marketing attribution model isn’t foolproof, especially if you’re using one that you’ve built from the ground up. So, test regularly, use data to adjust your attribution model, and keep your goals in mind.

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Multivariate testing allows you to experiment with granular variations of the same email and zero in on which variation is more effective. It’s best used to identify the right tactic for a smaller segment of your audience, not your entire contact database.

The goal of multivariate testing is to improve audience engagement, conversion rates, and increase revenue generation through your digital marketing efforts. Let’s dig in, starting with the basics.

What is multivariate testing?

Multivariate email testing involves a complex and advanced approach to tactical email evaluation. You can test several combinations of the same email. With the ability to swap out email subject lines, email body copy, images, the sender “From” name or address, send time, and more, you have many options to play around with. This is where it diverges from a very similar approach, A/B testing.

How is multivariate testing different from A/B testing?

A/B testing experiments with two elements of an email. Multivariate testing experiments with up to four elements in an email, in multiple combinations, to determine the best performing combination.

For example, Insightly’s multivariate testing feature—among its new marketing automation features—lets you compare four variables in up to eight versions of the same email. You can test Subject Line 1 with Email Body 2, Sender Name 3, and Send Time 4. That’s just one combination and you have eight to play with, providing deeper insight to drive future email campaign success.

In some scenarios, A/B testing is all you need, while in others, multivariate testing is called for to generate deeper, actionable insight (more on that below).

How do you run a multivariate test?

Much in the same way A/B testing lets you select two options of the same email element; multivariate testing lets you choose multiple options. Ultimately, this is all done in your marketing automation solution and is quite easy to pull off.

Set up is fairly straightforward. We’ll use Insightly Marketing to explain. When you select the multivariate testing option for an email campaign, system workflows guide you through the process of selecting which elements you want to test and let you select what each respective combination of elements looks like.

Once this is set up, all combinations are sent out to a test group of your target audience. In the case of Insightly, the system automatically monitors the engagement levels of each email version sent to the test group. It then examines the resulting metrics, determines the “winning” combination, and routes that version to the rest of your target audience on the assumption that it will produce the best results.

Because the process is automated, you simply select the combinations you want to test then sit back and wait for the results to come in. Your unified CRM with marketing automation does all the heavy lifting while you focus on strategy.

What do you need to run your test?

First and foremost, you need the right technology. If you use a unified CRM that includes both sales and marketing automation capabilities, all your data is stored under one roof and the process is exponentially easier.

If not, you at least need a marketing automation solution that can run this kind of test. Without the right software, multivariate testing is virtually impossible.

Additionally, you need to know what insight you aim to gain from your test and which problem or challenge you’re trying to solve. Below are some tips and questions to ask yourself to gain the insight necessary to run an effective test.

Tips for effective multivariate testing

Multivariate testing is used to solve a problem or address poor performance in a given area. When planning and setting up your test, it’s important to:

• Identify the problem you’re trying to solve or question you want to answer
• Define your hypothesis
• Decide which combinations you want to test
• Calculate the correct sample size to give you statistically accurate results
• Run a test on fake leads first to ensure every automated, triggered action is set up correctly
• Monitor the test as it progresses with real leads to ensure no unexpected hiccups occur

Asking questions before you start

A good way to get the most out of your multivariate email campaign testing is to ask yourself some preliminary questions. Below are a few good questions to ask yourself during the planning stage—these will help put you in mental testing mode.

• Does my audience prefer creative or short, direct subject lines?
• Does asking a question in the subject line result in more opens?
• Are recipients more likely to click a call-to-action button (or image) than hyperlinked text?
• Are they more likely to open an email from [Company Name] than an individual?
• What is the best time to send emails to my target audience to get higher open and click-through rates?
• Are concise bullet points more effective at driving click-throughs than text in paragraph format?

I could go on and on, but you get the point. It’s important to approach multivariate testing with an inquisitive mind. Digital marketing must adapt to shifting customer expectations and testing new tactics is a great way to adapt.

When should you use multivariate testing vs. A/B testing?

A/B testing provides sweeping generalizations about the efficacy of one specific element of an email (or another marketing asset). This is high-level insight that tends to apply across the board and inform large shifts in your digital marketing strategy.

On the other hand, multivariate testing provides more granular insight into a tactic. Use it when you need to optimize smaller elements with precision as they relate to a segment of your audience.

In short, if you want insight into how effective a tactic is to your audience as a whole, A/B testing is the way to go. If you’re looking to discover which tactic best engages a specific, targeted segment of your audience and why, go with multivariate testing.

Ready to run your own test?

We strongly encourage you to do so. If you don’t constantly evolve your digital marketing practices and engage in experimental, disruptive marketing, you’re likely to be overtaken by the competition. Luckily, with marketing automation today, it’s easier than ever to engage in multivariate testing and A/B testing.

After all, with this technology at your fingertips, you no longer need to rely on guesswork to find the most effective digital marketing tactics. It’s increasingly easy to use data instead of intuition in business decision making. Get the right tools, the right mindset, and see what your experimentation uncovers.

Would you like to learn more about how multivariate testing could help you ramp up your digital marketing efforts? We’re happy to provide more details and answer your questions. Just request a free demo and we’ll provide the information you need.

Request a demo

The post What is multivariate testing? When & why you should use it 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.

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So, how do you actually run an integrated campaign?

Here are seven steps to help you get started.

1. Define your goals, strategy, budgets, & channels

Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

That’s certainly the case when it comes to launching an integrated campaign. Remember, your integrated campaign will rely on a variety of stakeholders, teams, creatives, and channels to accomplish your stated goal. Take time to properly prepare and set the groundwork for a successful campaign. At a minimum, consider these key areas:

Overall campaign goal(s)

Be specific. The more specific, the better. For the purposes of discussion, let’s assume that your primary objective involves capturing market share from a well-known competitor. How much market share? What does that look like in terms of net new accounts? Will any account do, or are you targeting a specific customer type, such as mid-market IT companies? What would motivate your buyers to switch?

Start an internal conversation and collect ideas from stakeholders across multiple teams and departments—especially from team members who will be supporting this campaign.

Strategy

Your campaign strategy provides a high-level overview of how you intend to achieve your campaign goals. It answers important questions about timelines, messaging, special offers, key milestones, software requirements, outreach cadence, and marketing channels. Many companies formulate their campaign strategies as simple slide decks. You can also use a project management tool to map and visualize campaign strategies.

Budgets & channels

Two of the most important elements for finalizing your campaign strategy include budgets and channels. They’re closely intertwined, which is why it’s prudent to think about them simultaneously. For example, if your company already runs pay-per-click ads, you may be able to use historical data to forecast a fairly accurate cost of acquisition. You can then work backwards to develop a budget that will generate enough leads for that channel.

2. Get customer data

Simply sending email blasts to your entire database will not deliver results. To win business from the competition and achieve your campaign goals, you need to target prospective customers who align with your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas. And, to target at scale, you need reliable data in your CRM. Here’s how to get it:

Segment your current lists

Some CRM and marketing platforms offer advanced audience segmentation rules, which allow you to create dynamic and static lists for targeted campaigns. For your competitive switching campaign, you may want to build a list of people who:

• Decided to go with your competitor instead of your company
• Switched from your company to the competitor
• Are known customers of your competitor but have never entered your sales pipeline

Identify a trustworthy data partner

B2B data providers and enrichment services can be worth a look, especially if your contact database is thin or has obvious gaps. Just be careful to partner with a data provider who guarantees reliability and takes privacy seriously.

3. Review, refresh, & create sales and marketing collateral

Relying on generic collateral is not a winning strategy. To maximize performance, you’ll need a library of web and design assets that align with the central theme of the campaign. For a switching campaign, your collateral must make a compelling case for why prospects should consider your company. What’s in it for them? Can you help them save money or deliver better service? If you were the customer, what would make you switch?

After carefully assessing your campaign objectives and messaging, you may need to develop one or more of the following:

• Landing pages
• Marketing drip emails
• Email templates for sales outreach
• Product and data sheets
• Graphics for social media
• Product demo videos
• Savings calculators or other interactive tools
• Case studies that feature customers who have already switched
• Downloadable assets, such as whitepapers or checklists

Note: To save time, repurpose existing collateral rather than starting from scratch. For example, a product overview could be tweaked to include campaign-specific copy. Just be sure that everything fits together and tells the same story.

4. Design your outreach journeys & lead follow-up rules

Integrated campaigns use intent signals to guide buyers through multi-touch journeys. Prospects who click several emails, visit your landing page, and download a case study should be further along in the journey than someone who only clicks one banner ad.

Creating journeys for thousands of prospective customers is challenging without the right tools. That’s why taking a unified approach to sales and marketing—one that makes it easy to build and manage buyer journeys—is key to running integrated campaigns at scale. Here’s how a unified CRM helps your campaign planning and execution.

Design visual journeys from start to finish

A unified sales and marketing platform with visual mapping capabilities, like Insightly, empowers your team to design workflows that engage buyers throughout the entire journey.

Easily collect & use buyer intent data

Anonymous user interaction data from your third-party analytics platform is not useful for integrated campaigns. You need live campaign data—at the user level—in your CRM to identify the prospects who are the most engaged and most likely to buy.

Use signals to engage sales at the right time

Collecting and organizing prospect interaction data in your CRM makes it possible to alert the sales team when a user reaches a predefined engagement level. For example, you might configure your CRM to automatically notify sales and assign a follow-up task once a prospect reaches an engagement score of 50 out of 100 points.

5. Develop search intent & remarketing campaigns

Online search can be an excellent source of new leads for your integrated campaign—especially if your competitor has significant brand recognition. Remarketing can be a cost-effective way to re-engage people who previously interacted with campaign assets. Consider the following questions as you develop your search intent and remarketing campaigns:

Which search terms exhibit actual intent?

Bidding on search terms requires a certain amount of intuition. Does it make sense to bid on every term that pertains to your competitor? Or, does a refined approach work better? Bidding on “you vs. competitor” and “competitor a vs. competitor b” terms are bound to deliver higher-quality clicks. That being said, is there enough volume?

Where should you retarget?

Search engines aren’t the only platforms that offer retargeting. Social media sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn, provide a variety of retargeting tools to help you re-engage buyers. Your ICP and personas should guide your retargeting placement decisions. Retargeting C-level executives may look considerably different than retargeting gatekeepers.

Does your CRM make it easy to collect ad-level engagement?

At a very basic level, your CRM should tell you where a prospect record came from (i.e., online search). Ideally, your CRM would also offer comprehensive visitor tracking that monitors buyer interaction with off-page campaigns, such as remarketing ads.

6. Run your campaigns

If you’ve taken Ben Franklin’s advice and adequately prepared, then running your integrated campaign should be relatively straightforward.

Enable your outreach journey

If you’re an Insightly customer, running a journey can be done in two clicks.

Turn on your search intent & remarketing ads

Most ad campaigns can be enabled with a few clicks. For example, here’s a helpful guide for starting and pausing your Google Ads campaigns.

Let your sales team shine

Your data-driven campaign empowers sales to use buyer interaction data to prioritize outreach and follow-up. If you’ve set up everything correctly, your reps will be automatically notified when leads are ready for engagement. User-level insights from your CRM provide context to help reps engage prospects with meaningful conversations. Meaningful conversations lead to pipeline, and pipeline produces revenue.

7. Develop a near real-time feedback loop

No integrated campaign would be complete without a continuous, near real-time feedback loop between sales, marketing, and other teams.

Marketing relies on lead conversion and disposition insights from sales to continuously refine channel mix, advertising creatives, and email copy. Likewise, sales leans on marketing to identify the interactions, channels, messages, and content that influence sales. Achieving this level of reporting is difficult when your organization lacks a single source of truth for managing buyer journeys. Life is much easier when you have data-driven transparency into each step of the buyer journey.

Time to integrate your campaigns

Aligning multiple teams around a shared campaign objective can be a healthy and productive decision for your company—especially in today’s business environment of remote teams.

It’s time to define your goals, build your strategy, develop a cohesive message, acquire the right mix of skills and technology, and build a successful integrated campaign. Your bottom line—and your people—will thank you.

Read more like this:

• What is an integrated campaign?
• What is account-based marketing (ABM)? A beginner’s guide
• Intuition vs. data-driven decision making in business today
• How to find the right decision-makers for B2B sales outreach

The post How to launch an integrated campaign appeared first on Insightly.

And one way to optimize conversion rates is to use lead scoring best practices.

As a refresher, lead scoring is a methodology where you assign value—often numerical—to different attributes such as visitor interaction with your brand. These points are then used to rank your leads in order to determine which prospects are ready for the next step in your sales process.

Here are seven lead scoring best practices that can help improve your conversion rate.

Lead scoring best practices

Define your buyer persona & journey

Use your existing customer database and research to better understand your market and create a more accurate buyer persona. You can start with customer details, such as age, location, language, occupation, company they work for, interests, and specific goals. Depending on your business, you may need to create more than one buyer persona.

Once you come up with your buyer personas, you’ll have a better grasp on their goals and the journey they take in order to achieve them. You need both buyer personas and customer journey to come up with a personalized marketing strategy tailored to attract your ideal customers.

Increasingly, consumers are only willing to engage with customized marketing messages specific to their interests. So develop personalized content to stand out from your competitors and generate better leads.

Include negative scores

Negative scoring attributes are just as important as positive scoring when deciding who are the qualified prospects in your list. This will not only make your scoring more accurate, but it will help you eliminate those who do not meet your criteria.

For example, you can factor in unrelated job titles (such as “intern” or “college student”) or behaviors such as “unsubscribing from emails” that will remove points from their overall lead score.

There could also be instances where a lead ranks high in your overall matrix, but is not your target customer. For example, a graduate student researching trends in your industry, who has attended all your webinars, signed up for all your lead magnets, etc., but has no intentions of paying for your products or services. This is where negative scores will come in handy.

Align your sales & marketing teams

Lead scoring is a sales and marketing methodology. Therefore, in order for the system to work, both sales and marketing must be in sync. The criteria of what makes up a qualified lead should be relevant to both teams.

Since your sales team are the ones interacting with the customers, they are able to offer unique insights which the marketing team can use to reevaluate and adjust your brand’s lead scoring matrix accordingly.

Without your sales team, your marketing team won’t be able to create a better lead scoring system. And without your marketing team, your sales team will be dealing with many unqualified leads. So be sure these teams operate in sync for most steps of the sales process.

Personalize your emails

Make use of your customer database in personalizing your emails. Information such as their name, location, and their recent transaction with your website might prove useful for your email content. If you are using a unified CRM for sales and marketing, then you have all customer data at your fingertips at all times, with full visibility into prior outreach and interactions.

Improve your response times

Customer response is so crucial, but a Drift study found that 58% of companies never followed up with lead and up to 90% of businesses don’t respond within the first five minutes. Failing to follow up or even respond quickly can immediately lead to lost sales.

In the digital age, where customers have easy access to so many options and can switch brands quickly, it’s crucial to stay in touch with your potential customers while they are researching options and thinking about your brand.

For example, once you’re able to set an appointment for a product demo, follow up with reminders and share relevant and helpful information. You can easily automate these tasks with tools like Insightly and save time for both sales and marketing reps.

Implement a follow-up strategy

As you study your lead scoring system, you will be able to pinpoint cold leads who need a little push or re-engagement with your business, a good follow-up strategy is crucial.

Leads are usually grouped in three categories, based on their attributes and behavior: cold, warm, and hot. A cold lead is someone who has shown any interest in your business, a warm lead has expressed some interest, and a hot lead is someone who matches your ideal profile, and is ready to do business with you.

Use the lead scoring system as a guide when developing a follow-up strategy. Since all leads have different relationships with your brand, you will need to find a different, most appropriate approach for each.

For instance, you can send cold leads basic information about your business, but share more detailed information about the products and services with people who have browsed your website and have specific questions.

Monitor & evaluate your results

If you are new to lead scoring, don’t fret when you are unable to pull it off the first time. Coming up with a lead scoring system is expected to be a series of trials and errors.

Make it a point to always monitor and evaluate your results so that you can continuously improve your lead scoring matrix. The more information you gather about your customers, the better you’ll be able to determine what kind of adjustments you need for a more accurate system.

With a properly implemented lead scoring matrix you’ll start noticing a significant increase in your business’ conversion rate and marketing ROI.

Ready to create a lead scoring matrix and align your sales and marketing all in one place? Request a free consultation and a product demo with an Insightly rep.

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The post 7 lead scoring best practices to improve your conversion rate appeared first on Insightly.

In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at customer data and explore best practices for customer data management.

4 primary types of customer data

Names and job titles. Email addresses. Support ticket records. Online reviews. Transactions. Cross-device usage patterns.

The list goes on and on…

Simply put, customer data comes in many shapes and sizes—and, from many sources, too. Making sense of customer data can seem overwhelming, especially without the right perspective. As a result, some companies fail to overcome roadblocks to effective data use, thereby diminishing the impact of their most valuable business asset.

To create some semblance of structure and clarity, customer data is often categorized into groups. Here are four primary customer data groups.

1. Basic data

Basic personal customer data forms your organization’s fundamental understanding of each relationship. Many—if not most—standard data fields in a CRM could be considered basic data. A contact’s name, email address, phone number, job title, and linked organizations are examples of basic customer data. Demographic data, such as gender and income, or firmographic data, such as annual revenue or industry, are also basic customer data.

When aggregated and analyzed across multiple contacts and/or organization records, basic data builds the basis for audience segmentation. Then, by using tags or reports in your CRM, you can begin to visualize how many customers share common attributes.

2. Interaction data

Sometimes referred to as “engagement” data, “interaction” data includes the many touchpoints that customers have with your brand. Interaction data is particularly useful for informing decisions that pertain to the buyer journey. Pageviews, ebook downloads, social shares, email inquiries, and demo requests are common examples.

Interaction data is often anonymized and aggregated for high-level reporting purposes (with the ability to “drill down” for further insights). For example, marketing consultants spend considerable time studying interaction data in web analytics platforms to understand campaign effectiveness and return on advertising spend (ROAS). In addition, some marketing platforms provide user-level reporting to track where each customer came from.

3. Behavioral data

“Behavioral” data offers insight into the customer’s experience with your actual product or service. (Note: The difference between interaction and behavioral data can seem fairly nuanced depending on your business and industry.)

Technology companies are frequently cited as premier users of behavioral data, such as free trial sign ups, user account logins, feature utilization, user license additions, deactivations, and downgrades.

That being said, almost every organization maintains some type of behavioral data (even if they do not realize it). If you’re a service-based company, you probably send detailed invoices that inform customers about why they’re being charged. Why not leverage this data to hone in on your most popular solutions? If you’re a manufacturer, you regularly receive purchase orders that are tracked in your ERP. In addition to helping you accurately fulfill your customer’s request, each purchase order represents an excellent opportunity to understand customer preference and identify future trends.

4. Attitudinal data

“Attitudinal” data helps you understand what customers think about your company and the solutions that you provide. Unlike the other three types of data, attitudinal data delivers a first-hand account of what customers actually think. Online reviews, support ticket comments, and satisfaction surveys are sources of attitudinal data.

Here’s the big problem with attitudinal data: Some customers are louder than others when it comes to expressing their opinions about your company. Does one scathing review from a dissatisfied person truly reflect the sentiment of your entire customer base? Probably not. That’s why consistent and proactive collection of attitudinal data from a statistically significant group of customers is key.

Collecting and managing customer data

Once your team has established a firm grasp of these four primary types of customer data, they can begin discussing how best to collect it. Here are a few questions to think through as you formulate your data collection and management plan.

What are our data goals?

On its own, data offers minimal value to your organization. Start with the big picture. Do you want to harness data to improve customer experience or develop new products or features? Is accelerating revenue growth or profit maximization the primary motivator? Discuss and agree on your “why” before getting bogged down in the minutiae of data talk.

How do other companies in our industry leverage customer data?

You’re probably not the first company in your industry to seek a more data-driven culture. Research how similar organizations have leveraged customer data in a secure and scalable way. What are their data goals? Supplement your planning efforts with your findings.

What data is essential?

Accessing and integrating customer data requires effort and, likely, an upfront opportunity cost. As a result, you may not be able to have all of the data that you want on day one. What data is critical to the current and future health of your business? How does it align with your stated data goals? Sequence the most essential data first and build a backlog of secondary data to revisit in the future.

What is the cost of accessing and managing data?

In addition to intangible opportunity costs, you may also encounter tangible expenses, such as software and consulting fees. Does your current CRM offer the right mix of integrations to properly ingest and report on your essential data? Does your CRM vendor charge a premium for AI-driven features that make predictive analytics a reality? If you do not already have a CRM, what is the cost to evaluate and implement a system from the ground up?

Do we have the right tech stack?

Sometimes less is more. Trying to integrate multiple systems is more work than just starting over with a unified platform that does everything you need.

Case in point, I have one client who is thinking about switching CRMs. For years they’ve relied on separate CRM and marketing systems, creating constant confusion in the customer data management process. Insightly Marketing, which consolidates CRM and marketing under one platform, could be a viable solution for simplifying and elevating their customer data.

What are the risks?

Data protection regulations (like GDPR) along with industry-specific data security requirements are becoming commonplace amidst our data-centric economy. Understanding security risks and implementing safeguards to protect customer information are key steps for any company that wishes to use data.

How will we maintain clean data?

No one wants bad data. Without the right systems and processes, however, bad data will become an all-too-familiar reality. To keep data clean, implement proactive data deduplication measures, keep your staff well-trained, and look for opportunities to eliminate manual data entry.

What is our expected (and actual) ROI?

Anything worth doing should be done the right way. The use of customer data is no exception. If your primary goal is to reduce churn, put a hard number on it. For example, “We expect to reduce churn by 10% by effectively using customer data.” Once agreed to, set a process to measure progress toward the achievement of this goal.

Maximizing data’s impact

It’s clear that customer data is more important than ever before.

With the right mix of tools, systems, and processes, your organization will put itself in a position to effectively use customer data and, ultimately, achieve more goals and grow business.

How are you managing your customer data? What are the systems and processes you use to help you make the most of your customer insights?

You can get a free needs assessment from Insightly and discuss best solutions for your immediate and long-term customer data management goals. Request a demo—it’s free and no commitment is required.

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Today, we’ll explore the first two steps for building and implementing a digital marketing plan that delivers results:

• Performing a digital marketing audit
• Sequencing your best opportunities

Let’s get strategic!

Performing a digital marketing audit

The term “audit” has gained a negative connotation in today’s business environment, perhaps rightfully so. Having your financials audited by federal or state authorities can be a painful, time-intensive process, even for those who play by the rules.

When it comes to digital marketing, however, an audit shouldn’t make you feel stressed. On the contrary, performing a digital marketing audit can be an enjoyable process that provides you with more clarity and accelerates the effectiveness of your marketing operations.

What is a digital marketing audit?

Similar to financial audits, marketing audits involve the careful collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. Unlike financial audits that look at receipts and tax return filings, marketing audits measure the impact of your existing digital footprint by examining a variety of data sets, such as:

• Website traffic analytics (users, pageviews, referring sources)
• On-page engagement (bounce rate, time spent, events, goal completions)
• Social media trends (follower growth, engagement)
• Email marketing statistics (opens, clicks, list growth, campaign performance)
• Inbound links (quality, quantity)
• Search engine rankings (keyword position, site visibility, domain and page authority, competitors)
• Paid advertising (cost per click, cost per conversion)
• CRM reports (customer lists, prospect lists, lead volume by source, conversion rate, and more)

If you’re totally new to digital marketing, you may not have much data to audit. That being said, most companies at least have a website and social media profiles. Start by making a list of your digital assets (such as your website) and develop a plan for collecting as much data as possible for each asset.

What tools do you need to perform a digital marketing audit?

Unlike offline forms of advertising, such as billboards or direct mail campaigns, digital marketing initiatives are intrinsically data-driven. Of course, this statement assumes that you have the correct tools in place to collect the data.

Notice it’s “tools” and not “tool.” In my experience, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” digital marketing audit tool. To perform an adequate audit of your website, for example, you should use data from several sources:

• Website analytics platforms, particularly the Google Analytics service
• Webmaster tools, such as the Bing Webmaster Tools service
• Site spidering tools, especially the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool and crawler
• Advanced SEO software, such as Moz SEO software

Auditing your social media or pay-per-click advertising will likely require additional tools. The good news is that digital marketing is a hot industry, so there’s no shortage of affordable online services. With a little research, you’re bound to find a plethora of solutions that meet your needs and budget. Keep in mind that spending some time and money on these tools will save you resources in the long run and help you reach your target customers.

What does the data say?

Data provides little value to your business unless it helps you to accelerate growth. To maximize the usefulness of your digital marketing data, use SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.

What is working? What’s not working? What are competitors doing that you could do better? What is the risk of maintaining the status quo? Use your SWOT analysis to identify data-driven answers to these important questions.

Sequencing your best opportunities

For the productivity-minded person, this step can feel tremendously monotonous. After all, your marketing audit uncovered dozens of great ideas that could deliver substantial impact. Why not just get to work and worry about the details later? Why waste time “sequencing” your next steps?

Here’s why sequencing is so important

The truth is that your organization, regardless of headcount, has a fixed capacity. Simultaneously tackling a website upgrade, tripling content production, and completely overhauling your social media presence could spread resources too thin. When resources are spread thin, nothing gets done the way it should — and your digital marketing suffers.

With a leaner approach, you acknowledge your organization’s finite resources and then sequence your top priorities accordingly. Leveraging a kanban board, such as the one available with Insightly’s kanban view, can help you do exactly that.

Structuring your kanban board for success

Let’s assume that the following actions are your most important digital marketing opportunities:

• Upgrade website template
• Increase search engine marketing
• Launch monthly newsletter
• Ramp up content marketing
• Begin using marketing automation
• Do more guest blogging
• Create whitepapers for lead generation

Let’s also assume that your marketing department does not have enough bandwidth to do everything at once, so you’ll be using Insightly to sequence your team’s work. In this situation, I would recommend creating a dedicated Insightly project pipeline that contains four stages:

• Backlog
• Up Next
• In Progress
• Done

Each digital marketing opportunity should have a matching project card in Insightly. Collaborate to identify the cards (aka projects) that offer the greatest impact with the least amount of effort. These projects should be sequenced and worked on first.

Anything that is not “in progress” should be moved to “up next” or placed in the backlog. Remember, if everything is in progress, very little is actually getting done. Focus on doing a few things well instead of trying to do it all at once.

Next up: when the work really begins!

So far we’ve looked at using data to identify and understand your digital marketing opportunities. Everything is neatly organized on your Insightly kanban board, which means it’s time for the work to really begin.

Stay tuned for our next article that provides detailed steps for building your digital marketing team, timelines, budgets, and implementation plan.

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