I love quotes – like most of us. Don’t you just love reading inspiring quotes about life, success, change and much more?
I do. And this one is my favorite.
Now this quote reflects the shake-up happening at Coca Cola. Coca Cola had restructured their management (implemented from 1st May 2017) few months back. Beside the other common upheavals, Coca-Cola’s global chief marketing officer Marcos de Quinto has retired from the company after a near 35-year career at the company. “What’s the big deal?’ You say, “‘Corporate restructuring is nothing new. What’s in it for us?”
I agree. But there is a catch in this so-called typical corporate restructuring. ‘What it is?’ you ask again!
The Catch Is – Role Of CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Is Eliminated In Restructuring. Instead, Coca Cola Has Created A New Role Of CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER.
“We are moving quickly to structure our organization for faster growth and to ensure we can respond to the fast-changing needs of our consumers,” said James Quincey, CEO, Coca Cola in a statement.
Source: http://fortune.com/ The way I see it:
This is the beginning of the end of the typical marketing roles.
Yes. The role of marketing is evolving in businesses fast. It’s getting easier to question the true contribution of generic marketing roles. Marketing is now being held accountable for driving real, quantifiable leads. It’s no more good enough being a typical ‘Digital Marketer’ but you must be a ‘Revenue Marketer’. If I summarize in simpler words:
Digital marketing is going to be more revenue-centric.
Are you game for the challenge?
If not, get ready to change or get ready to go home.
A recent forecast made by Forrester – Forrester forecast that at least 30% of CMOs would be canned this year because they do not have the skills required to digitally transform the business.
At lower marketing levels, the tenure ratio is much lower. The report also pointed to the need for CMOs to focus on start executing data-driven customer insights based marketing.
How to do that?
Get ready to wear multiple hats – Creative, Technical, and Analytical. This is critical because your digitally enabled customers are leaving large data footprints for you to make a sense out of it. Time is gone when marketers would guess about buyer persona in terms of age, demographics, work profile etc.
At least, the basic customer insights can be gathered easily. For example, Google Analytics is a kind of big data marketing. Google Analytics provides detailed insights into the actions of your website’s visitors, including:
· How many people visited your website?
· From where they came?
· Which page they visited?
· How long they stayed on the site?
· Are they new visitor or retiring visitor?
· From which page they dropped off?
And much more. But is this enough? Certainly not! Big data can help you.
Why Big Data?
The key reason is – both big data and marketers want to dig deeper to know about their targets. This large data or the right term ‘Big Data’ – both structured and unstructured – inundates a marketer on a day-to-day basis.
A marketer can leverage this large amount of data to know about its customers, their online behavior, where they hang out, which social media profile they use more often, what they click on, how they buy, why they buy and why they don’t. That’s where ‘Big Data’ can be a powerful tool for your digital marketing campaigns.
Big data can help you discover more about your customers than you’ve ever known before. In an Avis Budget case study, Tim Doolittle, vice president of CRM and marketing science, said adding Big Data to understand their customer profile “…increased the effectiveness of our contact strategy, in many cases above 30% over control.”
Let’s have a look at some key new trends that can get you evolve your marketing faster and also deliver better results.
Lead Scoring for Content Marketing Optimization
Content is the oxygen for any marketing campaign. This is more significant in 2017 where content marketing has blossomed like never before. But then content marketing is done by several brands. Only a few of them succeed. Besides the content quality and its promotional aspects for the success or failure of your content marketing, one big reason is – your ability / inability to measure against a scoring method. Writing lots of content is one thing.
Segregating the same content based on its performance is different. Big data can identify the right content that helps your customers make the right decisions. With big data, it has become easy to understand which blog posts, web page or social media post is creating desired impact.More importantly, by scoring your content or customer engagement touch points, you can use build MQL or Marketing Qualified Lead for your sales team.
Source: https://kapost.com/content-scoring-infographic/
Content Scoring table consists of different digital assets which a customer may engaged with. Each asset can have equal score to get a MQL. Based on the customer touch points, you can find out which digital asset is performing best and which one performing worst. Accordingly, you can tweak your content strategy and promote the best performing digital assets. So, get ready to score your content like a product manager – backed by right data and insights. This will do wonder for your content marketing as well as lead generation marketing.
Deliver Real-time Personalization
Days of mass marketing are gone.
It’s high time you realize the power of 1:1 marketing.
Start engaging each customer / visitor ‘in the moment’ to deliver highly contextual and personalized experience. Real-time personalization is revolutionizing the retail marketplace. Although, 77% of marketers value real-time marketing as integral to their daily operations, most of them had trouble:
- Personalizing content through messages
- Improving marketing effectiveness/response rates
- Improving customer retention
- Harnessing Big Data
- Driving ROI through sales
Source: Marketingprofs
Real-time personalization will empower markets to turn visitors into leads and promote the most relevant content /offers to its customers.
Real-time personalization enables you to optimize live customer engagement by delivering customer insights through CX. These insights may include browsing behavior, past shopping history, demographics information, click heat maps, company name or industry background. Real-time personalization helps you get the most relevant content and messages in front of your target audience the moment they hit your site. Go with A/B testing to deliver different personalized experiences like changing the home page banner based on past browsing history or showing relevant offers via pop ups based on past purchasing history. With A/B testing, you can see which one performs best for different set of audience.
The real-time personalized experience scan be deliver in different forms:
– In-line content
– InfoBar
– On-page Pop-ups
– In-page edits
– Call-outs
– Sidebars
– Exit Pop-ups
But, implementing real-time personalization successfully is not an easy task.
Few of the key challenges with achieving real-time personalization are:
- Disconnected databases
- Complex legacy systems
- Under-resourced and overburdened IT teams
- Too many vendors across channels
- 3rd party Integration issues
- Poor visibility into customer behaviour
- Lack of in-house expertise
In most of the cases, real-time personalization revolves around product, pricing and promotion. You need right technology to swiftly process vast amounts of customer data and accordingly deliver right personalization rules for the online visitors.
With right technology partner, you can monetize customers’ data by unlocking untapped value from customer information in the CRM. This will not only build customer loyalty in the long run but also help you create more profitable online marketing campaigns in real time without much hassle.
Deliver a Steady Stream of Prioritized Prospects with Predictive Analytics
Lead generation is the most important marketing objectives for all marketers – and most difficult one too. Most of marketers generate leads from different channels and then pass them on to their sales team. In a sense, for them, all leads are equal. The concept of leads prioritization is totally missing form almost 70% companies globally. To prioritize sales leads, modern marketers use predictive analytics (lead scoring). As the screenshot below indicates, almost 78% of companies using predictive lead scoring are from high tech industry.
Source: VentureBeat
What Is Predictive Lead Scoring?
Predictive lead scoring is a tool that uses an algorithm to predict who in your database is qualified or not qualified. It helps you set a number of parameters which will help you determine whether a lead is qualified for sale steam or not. Each attribute will have its own score. For example, if a prospect fills the enquiry from with personal email ID (yahoo.com or gmail.com) instead of official email ID, then this lead gets minus two points. If same email ID belongs to an unrelated industry then this lead gets minus five points. Thus, you will be able to score each potential lead and send it to sale steam with right merit. What you need to do now is – assign a list of positive and negative attributes to your sales leads and score them objectively.
A whopping 79% of B2B marketers have not established even traditional lead scoring, despite the fact that companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. – Source – HubSpot
Source: VentureBeat
As you can see the key benefits of using lead scoring above, you must create a standardized process for evaluating lead database and prioritize your leads and get better conversion rate. Smart Insights ran a survey among their blog readers asking their opinion on the most important trends. The question was:
Here are the results:
Summing Up
Today, being a digital marketer is not an easy job. I say this from personal experience.
Before we go to a war, we should not be just aware of our weapons but also understand fully how to use them when time demands. And mind it – marketing in today’s world is not less than a war. From strategy to execution, it’s a total war out there.
And big data can be your biggest weapon in winning this digital war. If big data is not an integral part of your digital marketing strategy then you really should make it NOW. At the same time, you should know how to unlock the value of this big data – from clicks to webinars, heat maps to social networks and more. Big data can empower you with new tools and technical know-how to understand what your customers want and then tweak your digital presence and execution strategy to engage your customers for better brand experience. Focus on the metrics, get data-driven customer engagements at personal level and help them experience the brand in their own ways.
The key will be for brands to push their brands to be more human, helpful and handy as they look for relevancy in a post-digital marketplace.It demands lots of data drilling and constant experimentation, and last but not the least, massive patience from your side. Using big data may not give you the results overnight but gradually, it will help you make informed decisions which will be backed by data and insights, not just your gut feelings.
And that will be a great beginning for your next-level marketing. I hope you have learned some of the good tips from this article to evolve into a revenue marketer. And that, will be a new era not only for your marketing career but also for your organization too as now you’re not just a mere spectator in revenue generation. You will be on your way to be a big wheel, rather than just a nut bolt of a wheel.Share your thoughts in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.
