Before you draft a marketing plan, do a competitive marketing analysis—a research initiative that will give you insight into how similar products are being marketed and help you to identify the best opportunities for your launch.

You may also want to complete a competitive analysis in marketing if you’re starting a new business, presenting to an investor, or need to refresh your marketing strategy.

Here’s how to write a competitive market analysis, and how you can use these competitive analysis methods to inform and improve your marketing.

Identify your competitors

Most marketers and salespeople talk about competitors often. When figuring out who else is in your space, you might compare similar companies based on product offerings, size, revenue, or number of customers. These types of product competitors are extremely useful when developing marketing programs, because you want to know how to position your product against your closest similar offering.

However, similar products are not your only competitor. In fact, they may not even be your main competitor. Sometimes, your biggest competitor is simply ‘doing nothing.’

Further, your company may be playing in someone else’s yard when it comes to marketing. Let’s say your project management tool is great for salespeople. Now, you’re not just competing for share of voice with other project management tools—you’re competing with every other sales tool as well.

When you identify your competitors, start by making a list of similar products. Then, expand. Who is each competitor competing with? And who else is playing in that space? What is every feasible alternative to someone buying your product? That’s your true place to start with a competitive analysis framework.

Understand competitors’ marketing strengths and weaknesses

Once you know who your competitors are, it’s time to give them a little credit. They wouldn’t be your competitors if they weren’t any good, right?

Analyzing your competitors’ strongest marketing programs

We tend to think of our competition as, well, competition. Instead, start to think of them as learning opportunities. What are they doing that’s working? You can find this out by:

• Analyzing their social media presence
• Noting how they talk and write about their product
• Analyze their paid media on Google Adwords
• Use SEO tools to see how they are ranking on different keywords
• Talk with their current or former customers about their experiences

Once you complete, see if you can carry out some of these programs at your company. If your competitors had a celebrity cameo at their multi-million dollar conference, you may not be able to capture that same marketing juice. However, if they’re competing on low-cost keywords and doubling down on a content or social strategy, your team can integrate these learnings into your own strategy.

Determine the competition’s weaknesses and your opportunities

You can learn just as much from what your competitors are not doing. Are there channels that they’ve ignored, or abandoned completely? This could mean that your target audience isn’t in these channels; or it could mean they are an untapped resource.

Often, B2B companies are the last to pursue trendy channels and tend to stick to what they’re used to. Because of this, the first-actors in these networks get to reap many benefits. They are able to quickly build more dedicated following and figure out if there’s potential to turn social media channels into lead sources. They also get to learn the ins and outs more quickly. Not every channel is a winner, but those who pursue them are able to determine this more quickly.

Your competition’s weaknesses are your chances either to capitalize on, or learn from. When you’re completing your competitor analysis framework, you can analyze the possibilities for your team to pursue these opportunities.

Examine your competitors’ approach to digital marketing

With digital marketing, we’re all playing in the same sandbox. There’s only one Google, one Twitter and one LinkedIn, so we have quite a bit of visibility into each others’ strategies.

By poking around, you can start to map your competitors’ digital marketing approach.

Here are some questions to get started, and some tips and tools for finding this information:

What networks are they using?

You can run their name through Namechk to get a list of which social media accounts they’ve created under their brand name.

Do they have an SEO strategy?

Use the ‘Site Explorer’ tool in Ahrefs to check their domain authority, which of their pages are ranking, and if they’ve had changes over time.

Do they use Google Adwords?

Tools like iSpionage allow you to take a look at what ads your competitors are running and how much they’re spending. This is a huge indicator of whether you’ll be able to financially compete with their marketing spend.

Digital is the easiest place to replicate, test, and measure. Using your competitors’ strategies, you can experiment to see if these items also improve your marketing metrics as well.

Analyze pricing and packaging

Marketing is a catch-all term for so many different programs. Yet, pricing and packaging is one of the most crucial marketing elements that does not typically fall under our umbrella. The price of your product, and what comes with it, are usually the most critical decision factor for attracting customers to your product.

When working on your competitor market analysis, you can assess which products cost the most and the least. When assessing price, it’s also important to consider what features are included in that price point. Special discounts? Lifetime customer support? Unlimited user seats?

These items are all part of your value proposition, which you can use to communicate your product to your target market.

Packaging and pricing is not a perfect science. When analyzing the value of each offer, work closely with your product and sales teams to determine what is actually being offered, and for how much. You’ll be able to get additional insight from these teams about how your product fits into this mix and if you’re competitive. Adjusting your pricing and packaging offerings can inform your market strategy.

Evaluate your competitors’ lead flow and customer acquisition

Marketing doesn’t stop after visitors land on your site. The alignment between marketing and sales is crucial to making sure your leads become customers. Examining your competitors’ lead flow can give you some insight into how the marketing and sales teams work together.

When creating your competitive market analysis, see if your competitors are:

• Collecting leads through web forms
• Employing a sales team (you can learn this from LinkedIn)
• Offering demos, free trials, or limited access to the product

By investigating these items, you’ll start to understand how your competitors are not only getting leads, but also acquiring customers. You can use this information to approximate their customer journey, which you can integrate into your greater strategy.

How to do a competitor analysis [TEMPLATE]

Conclusion

One of the many reasons to do a new competitive marketing analysis is to inform your own marketing strategy. Often, these analyses are significant to investors and senior leaders, and can remind them that you’re on the right path. The research phase of these analyses can take time. But, they pay off many times over when you can learn from your competitors’ successes and failures.

The post How to do a competitive market analysis 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.

As marketers, we are the go-to people. If a sales team needs a new deck to present to an important client? Ask marketing. If an engineer needs to test new product copy? Ask marketing. If recruiting wants to improve the employer brand? You get the idea.

These tasks are on top of the marketing team’s actual responsibilities. Which are, of course, driving brand awareness, generating leads, graphic design, running campaigns, go-to-market initiatives, creating content, enabling sales, maintaining social media, internal communications, media relations, market research, working with vendors, and analyzing company performance.

Despite these many competing priorities, marketing teams rarely have dedicated project management and have to manage their own priorities.

As a marketer, how can you better manage your own projects? And, as a member of a marketing team, how can you help your colleagues be successful with project management and deliver great work and results every time?

Implement agile methodology for marketing project management

Modern development teams have been using the agile methodology for years. This project management system adheres to twelve principles that streamline software development. Some of these principles also apply to marketing.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer

Marketers are often trying to satisfy everyone, including internal stakeholders. It’s crucial to keep in mind that the ultimate goal is customer happiness.

Welcome changing requirements

‘We’ve always done it this way,’ is a death knell. The best marketers are flexible.

Deliver frequently, and maintain a constant pace indefinitely

Marketing projects can be on long or short timetables. Yet, showing consistent markers of success helps teams stay engaged and move projects along.

Manage capacity for solo-tasking

When I was starting out in marketing, I always made sure to mention in interviews that I was a ‘good multitasker.’ It was a sign that I was accommodating, would say yes to anything, and was happy to work with anyone.

It took me a few years to learn that these are not the traits of a good marketer. It took me even longer to learn that if your marketing team is multitasking, you have a prioritization problem.

Each member of your marketing team can only work on one thing at a time. If their effort is split among projects, the chances of success don’t double.

Marketing teams must realize and understand their true capacity. Consider the number of team members, their expertise, and their hours available. This will determine exactly how many projects your team can take on. The goal is not to do less work, it’s to stay focused on tasks and initiatives that matter the most and do them well.

Integrate and communicate

With competing priorities and interests, marketing teams can become siloed. A marketing analyst might never interact with a field events marketer, for example. Yet, their goals and objectives may align closely. The opportunities to align your team will ease the collaborative project management process.

Work with your colleagues to identify gaps in your marketing project process. With ongoing remote work, there may be some gaps that you aren’t able to see at first glance. Once these are identified, the team can find opportunities to align. This could mean weekly standups, or it could mean a centralized repository for marketing assets. If your team is struggling being apart, it might mean a weekly Zoom that has nothing to do with work at all.

Practice ruthless prioritization

Without multitasking, we force marketers to prioritize. We all know this means that something must come first, but it also means something must come last.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when deciding what not to work on:

If I don’t do this task, will it create a bottleneck?

Is someone relying on you to complete this task so they can begin their work? If so, prioritize it. If not, postpone it.

Will this task take a long time?

Can you accomplish two or more other tasks in the time it would take you to do this task? If so, prioritize the shorter tasks, and postpone the time-consuming task.

If I postpone this task now, will it snowball into something bigger?

Will postponing this task create more work for you in the future? If so, prioritize the task. If not, postpone the task.

Ruthless prioritization is often just that: ruthless. Marketing project managers may upset stakeholders when they deprioritize a project. Though it may be unpleasant, it’s a crucial part in being able to achieve marketing goals.

Learn to love the backlog

Many marketers are ‘type-A.’ We love a checklist. We love feeling a sense of accomplishment. We love the feeling of stepping back and saying ‘job well done.’

This is rarely the reality on a marketing team. Even if you’re celebrating a big launch or a historic sale, there’s never a true sense of completion. Marketing is continuous.

As the backlog grows, it can start to overwhelm. It feels like you’re staring into your refrigerator and every food item is going bad at once.

Accept that the backlog isn’t a refrigerator—it’s a deep freezer. It’s where ideas, tasks, and initiatives can live for months or years. You can store something in there while you’re working on something else. Or, you can let something fall to the bottom and dig it out to defrost when you absolutely need it.

Conclusion

Marketers must adopt a project management mindset. Once they understand how to operate with an agile mindset, within their capacity, and address priorities, the never-ending task list becomes more manageable.

The post How to become a better marketing project manager appeared first on Insightly.

One of these will forever remain…email.

In fact, just as marketers thought this was a dying art, email marketing is doing better than ever. It’s projected by the year 2024, the number of email users will reach 4.48 billion.

And one way to reach them is to start an email drip campaign.

What is a drip campaign?

A drip campaign is a form of digital marketing where relevant information is “dripped” to sales leads over a period of time. These messages typically take the form of email marketing and are based on either a user action or predefined time interval.

For any given action, a marketer can choose the number of emails, type, and rate at which to send them. These emails can also be personalized with data, such as a prospect’s name or specific references to actions they took.

A drip campaign is automation mixed with prewritten messages. Important engagement points are mapped in the marketing automation system and information is generally sent on a preset schedule in response to a specific action or strategic plan.

Drip actions

Some examples of important actions a consumer might take to trigger a drip campaign include:

• Purchasing a product or placing an order
• Shopping cart abandonment
• Not placing an order for a period of time
• Engaging with customer service
• Attending a store event
• Registering for a webinar
• Downloading a report or white paper

Anything you can think of where automation easily gets the message across should be suitable for another drip message.

How are drip campaigns used?

Drip campaigns help you better connect with the right person at the right moment. They are designed for hyper-targeted messaging without the manual labor. They accompany every prospect through the sales pipeline and assist them when any snags or challenges occur.

Important dates

Date-based automations help a brand communicate with an audience on days that matter to them. This goes beyond just a birthday. You can also initiate a drip campaign for things like:

• Subscription renewal
• Reordering prompts
• Anniversary of first purchase
• Major holidays

Anything that can further brand value for the consumer can be added to a timely drip campaign.

User behavior

Drip campaigns can also be triggered by a user’s behavior. This includes actions they do or do not take. Here are some examples:

Welcome email

When a new person joins the audience, use a welcome drip to share your brand highlights or product information and tips for first-time users. Keep new people posted on upcoming events, sales, and other relevant activities.

First order

After someone makes an initial purchase, thank them for their business. Reinforce they made a good decision and suggest complementary products for future purchases.

Recommendations

This is a great automated email to boost sales. Recommendation messages can be sent with an order confirmation or shipping details.

Customer service

Emails that follow up after a customer service or sales inquiry are a productive way to keep your audience engaged. This creates an opportunity to further educate and onboard prospects.

Lead nurture

Drip campaigns are particularly well suited for nurturing active interest in prospects. If someone registers for a webinar or downloads a white paper, this is a cue to send a lead nurture drip email that keeps the conversation flowing.

Abandoned shopping cart

Anytime a prospect fills a shopping cart and then moves away from the page, you want to send them a reminder message. You can encourage people to reassess the purchase or send them offers on similar items.

Types of drip campaigns

When it comes to the method and style of drip campaigns, there are several archetypes to choose from. Some of these include:

Top-of-mind

This type of message keeps leads engaged throughout the sales process.

Educational

This includes any relevant data for prospects to help them make a more informed purchasing decision.

Re-engagement

These are designed to win back the interest of cold leads.

Training

Messages for new clients (or internally) to move readers through a training program.

Competitive

Target a competitor’s customers with a better offer or the benefits of switching to your product.

Promotional

Entice prospects with time-sensitive promotions and special pricing offers.

Setting up a drip campaign

Drip campaigns are an automated workhorse that helps a business maintain the marketing, nurturing, and selling that’s essential to success. Setting up drip marketing is not as difficult as one might think. Follow these simple steps:

1. Choose what will trigger the campaign. Is it a specific date or action?
2. Identify your audience. Information must be targeted. Where in the pipeline are they?
3. Tailor your messages. Drip emails don’t need to be long, but they should always be on-brand.
4. Measure your success and adjust based on performance. Choose metrics based on the email you type, audience, and other factors. You may track open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
5. Save all copy. These messages can be repurposed down the road.

Why are drip campaigns important?

A study of 2,000 people on the Transformational Consumer, found that more than half of us are engaged in a never-ending search for content, services, and products to support changing behavior. A drip campaign is just the type of marketing to encourage this quest.

Drip campaigns are important because they support a variety of business pursuits. Benefits from this style of digital marketing include:

• Nurture leads
• Boost sales
• Provide relevant and timely information
• Targeted and custom messaging
• Increase engagement
• Bolster brand trust
• Automate manual actions

Drip campaigns are also one of the easiest forms of digital marketing to track and analyze. All sorts of metrics and user behavior data can be collected to give a brand deeper insight into exactly what people want to see and read.

Best practices for your drip campaign

When creating a drip campaign, there are a few things to remember.

Specific design

Make it easy for prospects to express their preferences regarding things like the frequency of messages, the type of content, and how they would like to receive it. Never push messages on anyone. That negates the point.

Targeted campaigns

Always tailor your message to a specific audience in mind. The more targeted your marketing, the more relevant the email will seem to the very person reading it.

Test everything

Always monitor and analyze every drip campaign you send. This is how you will test the effectiveness and which aspects of the campaign are working, or what needs to be changed. Review key performance indicators (KPIs), campaign goals, and important metrics like open and bounce rates.

Use your tools

Marketing automation tools typically integrate with other platforms that will make your life easier. Consider items that facilitate drip marketing, like social media management, CRMs, and analytics.

What have we learned?

Drip campaigns are a vital part of digital marketing. The most popular medium is email. This type of personalized messaging provides timely and relevant information to people, just when they need it. Not only does it leverage sales, it stimulates brand trust, and brings your customers closer to you.

Looking for a marketing automation tool? Check out Insightly Marketing.

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To scale in a way that is supportive of the customer journey, businesses are turning to automated systems that help them strike a better balance between growth and personalization. And marketing automation tools, such as Insightly Marketing, can be especially useful when implemented thoughtfully and strategically.

Let’s take a closer look at some best practices for automating your customer journeys.

Why marketing automation & customer journeys go together

As we discussed in a previous article, your customer journey map is a visual representation of the process that your buyer goes through from awareness to satisfied customer. A well-crafted customer journey map should help team members understand your buyer personas, their internal motivations, and their interactions with your organization.

Journey mapping is also helpful for improving the customer experience and overcoming internal inefficiencies. For example, you may find it easier to identify:

• Content gaps: Articles, eBooks, technical guides, and other resources that might help the customer achieve his or her goal faster.
• Unnecessary friction: Points in the journey that make life difficult for customers, such as confusing calls to action or redundant steps.
• Time-consuming, manual processes: Steps that, if automated, would benefit both the customer and your team, such as appointment confirmations.

Fixing these challenges is not easy when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of contact records. That’s where marketing automation comes in especially handy. Unlike batch-and-blast email tools that offer minimal configuration options, marketing automation tools are built to enable highly customized, rule-based journeys that align with customer and internal objectives.

Marketing automation enables your company to systematize your processes and scale them to keep pace with growth. The net result? Better informed customers, less friction in the buying process, and improved efficiency.

4 marketing automation tips for a better customer journey

So, what’s the best way to align marketing automation with your customer journey? Consider these four tips.

1. Collect raw ideas & develop your automation strategy

Resist the temptation to start “doing.” Instead, invest time into the process and develop a game plan. Go back to your customer journey map and note any content gaps, broken processes, and improvement opportunities, such as:

• Implementing auto-responder emails for form submissions
• Automating the distribution of blog content to subscribers
• Regularly following up with leads who have requested pricing but failed to buy
• Accelerating the onboarding experience for new customers
• Asking customers to post reviews on social media and review sites

Ask key stakeholders in sales, support, marketing, and other departments for feedback. Aim to understand how much time and effort is involved in supporting existing processes and workflows. Quantify the potential business impact that could be realized through automation.

2. Sequence your work

Take all of your automation ideas and organize them into a central location. You can use kanban boards, which are visually intuitive and make it easy to organize projects into a sequential order for implementation. Start with the project that represents the largest value and least effort. Or, if you’re completely new to automation, perhaps it would be best to start with a very small project with minimal impact. This way, you can familiarize yourself with the marketing automation platform and reduce the risk of unexpected delays.

One additional note about sequencing: If everything is in-process, nothing is in-process. Therefore, it’s best to implement one automation project at a time. Focus on using automation to add value to the customer journey—rather than maximizing the amount of work.

3. Gain a clear understanding of your marketing automation technology

There are a variety of marketing automation systems on the market today. Some offer visually intuitive user interfaces, while others are somewhat antiquated and tedious to use. Some are natively integrated with your CRM, while others require a third-party integration. Regardless of the technology that you intend to use, it’s vital to read support documentation and familiarize yourself with the platform, UI, and terminology. (If you haven’t selected a marketing automation system, check out Insightly’s marketing automation checklist.)

Insightly Users: Insightly Marketing users should read What are Journeys? and brush up on important definitions, such as prospects, lists, steps, actions, triggers, and checks.

4. Use data to measure impact, avoid issues, & inform future decisions

As you automate various aspects of the customer journey, be sure to refer back often to your marketing automation system for data and insights. In addition to top-level campaign metrics, drill down into specific steps in the journey. Your system should make it easy to understand:

• Total number of deliveries, opens, and clicks for each email
• Top-performing and under-performing steps in the journey
• Opportunities to continuously improve the journey

One final note: Your business is continuously evolving—and so is the customer journey. Therefore, you must regularly update your automation rules as things change. Set a goal to review all active automations on a regular basis. Monthly or quarterly is probably a good cadence, depending on the amount of automation. Check for any automated workflows that overlap or detract from the customer experience. Look for ways to consolidate and simplify.

Automate your customer journeys, one step at a time

Automation can be tremendously beneficial to the customer journey. It can also be a little overwhelming, especially if your company has been slow to adopt new technologies. As you begin to formulate your automation strategy, don’t try to do too many things at once. Remember, any incremental improvement will be a net gain for your customers and team.

Keep it simple, focus on value, and keep iterating.

If you’d like to learn more about Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing automation, request a demo and get a free needs assessment.

Request a demo

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Yet, there is a time when idealism can work for us. When developing a marketing program, consider building an ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile is an exercise and tool in understanding your target audience and optimizing your marketing efforts.

What is an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a comprehensive account of your company’s perfect customer. Ideal customer profiles are crucial for account-based marketing (ABM) and targeting enterprise customers.

Ideal customer profiles are often used in B2B marketing. They allow marketers and stakeholders to understand the institutional needs of their target market. With an ICP, marketers can tailor programs to better meet these needs.

Why use an ideal customer profile?

If you ask any B2B marketer in the world, they could probably tell you it’s a company within a certain size range, located in a certain area in the world, who has a need for their product.

The problem? Some of these companies that fit this profile are ideal customers, and some are less-than-ideal. When you are budgeting your digital marketing efforts, you want to focus on the best match.

B2B marketers can use an ICP to understand the full customer journey and find a stronger product-customer fit.

What is an ideal customer?

Let’s say you have one extremely high-revenue customer. They are loyal and they pay you the equivalent of 50 smaller customers. Great, right?

But, they take up 80 percent of your server bandwidth. They have a half-dozen dedicated account managers. They need round-the-clock customer support.

Is this your ideal customer? Would you want to replicate this customer 100 times over? Or, is your ideal customer a bit more manageable, that would allow your company to scale and grow?

It can be easy to have dollar signs in your eyes when thinking about your ideal customer. In this case, it’s important not to equate the biggest invoice with the best value.

An ideal customer is one that is profitable, scalable, and a long-term fit for your business growth.

How do you create an ICP?

There are six steps to create an ideal customer profile.

Collect customer data

Start with what you already know. Consult data collected through your CRM, customer data platform and other analytics tools. This will begin to illustrate the quantitative trends in your target market.

You may want to use a spreadsheet or business intelligence (BI) solution to layer your customer data. This will allow you to identify trends and note your ‘best’ customers.

Identify ‘ideals’ in your customer data

When combing through your data, note some of the traits of your best customers.  Those may be tied to revenue, customer acquisition cost, and/or sales cycle length.

Once you identify the categories, get specific. Is your highest-revenue customer $10,000/year or $100,000/year? Were they expensive to acquire? Did they have the longest or shortest sales cycle?

Answering these questions about customer engagement decisively will paint a picture not of a customer, but of the ideal customer.

Document customer traits & demographics

Identify the things that you can see about your ideal customer. These might be their:

• industry
• location
• biggest decision-makers
• number of employees
• corporate structure
• annual revenue/share price (if applicable)
• board structure

Research the ‘unknowns’ about your ideal customer

You know how your customer interacts with your company. Yet, that’s one small piece of who they are.

Here are a few questions you can ask of your best customers when building an ideal customer profile:

• What was the pain point that led you to seek out our product?
• What are your company’s other pain points or immediate needs?
• Who at your company benefits most from using our product?
• What other B2B solutions does your company use?
• What is the outlook for your company and industry over the next few years?

Detail how your company helps your ideal customer.

So far, you have created a great ideal target account profile. How do you turn it into an ideal customer profile?

Document how your product serves your ideal customer. Your new understanding of their business should make this exercise clear. How does your product solve their pain points, and how will that continue into the future?

Document your findings in a customer profile.

Once you’ve completed your research, combine your findings into your final customer profile. It should paint a picture of the exact company you’d like to have using your product with great detail. This will guide your digital marketing and sales teams on whom to target.

Ideal customer profile vs. buyer persona

Modern marketing programs rely on buyer personas, or fictionalized versions of potential customers. If you are selling a manufacturing product, your buyer personas may be ‘Project Manager Pam,’ or ‘Budget Owner Bob.’

Buyer personas are useful when using buyer enablement marketing on a personal level. XYZ Manufacturing is not going to click on your LinkedIn ad or read your blog post, but Project Manager Pam might.

Ideal customer profiles zoom out from buyer personas. They are a holistic look at the entire firm, rather than the pain points of the individual decision maker. Ideal customer profiles and buyer personas are best used in concert with one another.

How can you use an ICP?

The modern B2B marketing and sales process relies on a true understanding of the target market. An ideal customer profile can influence these revenue programs in several ways:

Improving your account-based marketing

An ideal customer profile serves as a template for an account-based marketing (ABM) target account list, Your account-based marketers can use an ICP as a template for finding potential customers.

Improve MQLs & SQLs

Use your ideal customer profile to qualify leads. If a lead is less than 50 percent similar to your ideal customer, you can take them out of your funnel. You can also use a rubric to compare leads against your ICP. By doing this, you focus on moving along leads that have the potential to be your best customers.

Improve your product-market fit

Your ICP may have revealed that your ideal customer has needs that you are not meeting. This profile can identify gaps in your product-market fit. These gaps are opportunities to innovate your product. This can lead to better, longer-term customer relationships.

Conclusion

Creating an ideal customer profile can refresh your digital marketing and sales focus. By completing this exercise, you can renew your focus on bringing in the best customers for your company’s growth.

If you’re looking for systems and tools to manage customer data, align your sales and marketing teams around the customer journey, and build lasting customer relationships, then check out Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing.

Request a demo

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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.

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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.

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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.

The post How to build an attribution model for your business appeared first on Insightly.

Demand generation therefore encompasses all activities that help attract, engage, and convert likely customers. Depending on your industry, ideal customer profile (ICP), and personas, this may include a combination of:

• Outbound sales
• Content marketing and SEO
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media marketing
• Trade shows and virtual events
• Email marketing
• Direct mail
• Affiliate and referral programs
• Upselling or cross-selling to existing customers

Note that I bolded the phrase ‘likely customers’ in the previous paragraph. Why? Unlike traditional lead generation programs, which tend to focus on net-new emails or contacts, demand generation is focused on delivering net-new customers. Marketers, myself included, should pay special attention to this reality. Filling your CRM with 1,000 new email addresses that never convert is a waste of time and money. It pains me to say that, but it’s true.

So, what’s the best approach for implementing a scalable demand gen program that delivers results? Let’s take a closer look.

How to improve demand gen in 2021 & beyond

If demand generation is a multi-faceted endeavor that involves numerous disciplines, departments, and stakeholders, what can you do to maximize its impact for your company? Here are four steps to take in 2021.

1. Start with an objective view of your existing demand generation efforts

Whether you realize it or not, you already have programs in place that generate demand. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in business!) To measure the impact of your existing demand gen efforts, jump into your CRM and pull a report of closed opportunities over the past year. Customize the report to include the originating source, such as outbound sales, existing customer upgrades, paid ads, social media, etc. Now analyze the data to understand where revenue is coming from. Visualizing your data as a pie chart can be a simple, yet effective way to understand what’s working—and what’s not. Here’s an example.

In the example above, it’s clear that outbound sales is the largest demand generator. That being said, this chart tells us nothing about how effective sales is at generating demand. If the company’s sales team consists of 25 account executives and 10 sales development representatives (SDRs), then the fully loaded cost of closing one sales deal may be exponentially greater than a self-service deal from organic search. Spend time analyzing historical deal data from a variety of vantage points.

2. Develop a plan for collecting better data

As you analyze historical data, you’ll likely identify gaps that make it difficult to answer all of your demand gen questions. After all, customer data is not limited to basic contact information, such as job title, revenue size, and related opportunities. To truly understand demand gen’s impact on the customer journey, you may need to go deeper and begin collecting the following data.

Interaction data

Trade shows are great for generating lots of business cards but not for closing deals. One lead from a trade show may require dozens of sales and marketing interactions before he or she has the desire and ability to buy. Collecting web and email interaction data in your CRM provides in-depth insight for understanding which demand gen channels, campaigns, messages, and content influence a customer’s buying decision.

Behavioral data

Behavioral data is particularly useful for understanding the impact of your cross-sell and up-sell demand gen activities. For example, if you’re a software company, you might collect clickstream data from your app to measure interest in gated features. Simple adjustments to your product interface could have a major impact on awareness for and, as a result, demand for premium plans.

Attitudinal data

Customers can be an excellent source of new ideas, and demand generation is no exception. Why not ask your customers for demand-generating ideas? Survey your customers and ask them to share feedback on:

• Which industry websites, journals, and publications do you read?
• What type of content would you like to receive from us?
• What would make you more likely to tell a friend about our company’s solution?
• If you were the marketing manager for our company, where would you advertise?
• What trade shows or virtual events do you regularly attend?

3. Align your sales & marketing teams

Sales and marketing teams tend to be the largest generators of demand for companies. Unfortunately, they’re rarely in alignment with one another. Inconsistent terminology, competing objectives, and siloed systems are just a few of the reasons why organizations consistently struggle to align these two groups.

If you’ve struggled to align your sales and marketing teams in the past, fear not. A well-structured demand generation initiative can be the perfect opportunity to foster cross-departmental alignment and simultaneously drive enhanced top-line performance. Alignment usually starts at the top, so your first step should involve gaining buy-in from sales and marketing leaders on a shared set of objectives, methods, and metrics.

Once aligned on the big picture, leadership must continuously work together to operationalize the vision. Check out Insightly’s sales and marketing alignment series for tips on accomplishing that goal.

4. Unify your demand gen systems into one platform

As you’ve probably noticed, there’s a blurred line between sales, marketing, and other demand generating functions. Allowing sales to work in one siloed system and marketing to work in another is not a viable solution in today’s competitive landscape. In short, you need the right technology to help you collect the right data, align your people, and understand what’s working.

Revenue generating teams want fewer, better systems. Ideally, they want one system that empowers them to visualize the buyer journey, create segmented lists of likely customers, and automatically engage buyers in a personalized way.

Unifying your demand generating efforts into one platform, such as Insightly, is a smart first step toward enabling this reality. Your revenue teams will spend less time on time-consuming data integrations and imports and more time on what matters most: developing highly targeted campaigns, programs, and initiatives that increase demand for your products or services.

They’ll also have access to better data—and more of it—presented in a visually appealing way that simplifies decision-making and team alignment.

Maximize the impact of your future demand gen efforts

Customer behavior continues to change at a rapid pace. To compete, companies must view demand generation as a strategic initiative that requires buy-in from leadership, a commitment to cross-departmental alignment, and technology that supports data-driven demand generation.

Ready to see how a unified CRM for sales and marketing can help you take demand generation to the next level? Request a free demo with an Insightly representative. No commitment required.

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