4 Steps to Becoming an Elite Data-Driven Marketer
Marketing blogs often draw a line between elite marketers – those who produce campaigns that get results – and Average Joe marketers, the unfortunate majority who are struggling to put their data to work. If you’ve been disappointed with the results of your campaigns, you’re not alone. According to Hubspot, “Less than 25% of marketers are able to report how their campaigns impact revenue!” Luckily, joining the league of elite marketers is not as exhausting or sweat-inducing as becoming an elite runner. In fact, you can become an elite marketer in just a few steps. On your mark; get set; let’s go!
Step 1 – Give Your Data a Good Bath and a Makeover
Elite marketers do not dabble in dirty data. They are keenly aware that any decision based off of incomplete, invalidated and unstandardized data is a bad one. According to Zoom Statistics, “Up to 25% of B2B database contacts contain inaccuracies, causing 40% of business objectives to fail.” If nearly half of your marketing initiatives are failures, it’s time to take a hard look at your data and demand it clean up its act.
How do you get your data cleaned up and ready for a night on the town with your best customers? You plug in a customer data platform (CDP). These handy tools integrate with your marketing tech stack and enable you to resolve a host of critical data issues with speed and efficiency. Look for a CDP that automates the process of monitoring and improving (validating and enriching) the quality of your data. Elite marketers always work smarter by automating anything and everything they can, and you should, too.
Your CDP should also enable you to see your data quality in real-time and generate reports on-demand. That way, in the event you have some jerks in other departments who are siloing data (and who doesn’t), you can let the CDP do the talking for you. Reports that visualize data are great at showing hold-outs how much better results can be when everyone is using clean, complete, standardized and enriched data.
Step 2 — Put Personalization on Auto-Pilot
Next time you’re at a conference feeling bad about how much more successful the keynote speakers are at deploying revenue-generating ABM campaigns than you are, remember this: they had robots helping them. Forget whatever inspiring story they told about a personal “a-ha” moment that came about because they simply listened to a client and next thing you know they created a truly personalized campaign that resulted in a ka-jillion dollar deal. That’s nothing but good story-telling. The truth is if you take a peek behind the curtain of the wizards of ABM, they are all using content automation tools (CAT) to scale that beast — and you can, too.
A few things to look for in your CAT include integration with data sources throughout your martech stack, like Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) and Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs), and organizational data sources, like data warehouses. The more sources your CAT can pull content from, the better. In fact, a well-connected CAT can save you thousands on content costs by repurposing content throughout your organization for a variety of campaigns and channels.
In addition to automating the process of sending personalized content to customers, some CATs foster a stronger brand identity and uniformity across sales and marketing by hosting customizable templates. Ideally, your CAT should connect directly to leading sales tools, like SalesLoft, so that sales teams can access templates from their primary platform of use.
Step 3 – Add More Channels to Your Mix
Dun & Bradstreet’s (D&B) Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising Outlook Report for 2020 contained several fascinating findings, but one of the key takeaways was the importance of omni-channel customer experiences. Lauren Bakewell, the Chief Product Officer for D&B, and author of the report said, “Simply put, better, more personalized omni-channel experiences mean more sales, stronger loyalty, and greater long-term customer value.”
Elite marketers are not content to put all their eggs in the email basket. They understand that today’s B2B customer expects a B2C experience that includes the ability to use text messages (SMS/MMS), messaging apps, and chatbots to communicate with the companies they do business with. If you’ve been toying with the idea of adding one or more of these channels to your current campaigns, now is the time to do it.
We recommend starting with a channel like SMS, and then as you become comfortable sending and managing your text campaigns you can add more channels. One thing you will notice immediately upon adding more channels to the mix is the resurgence of once-dormant accounts and a spike in new customers. This typically occurs because channels like SMS meet the needs of busy modern customers by catering to their ever-growing mobile phone habits.
Step 4 – Know Your Total Addressable Market (TAM)
One of the primary reasons elite marketers are able to boast about their account conquests with such compelling numbers is because they have calculated their TAM and set campaign goals accordingly. If you have never calculated your TAM, it’s fairly easy to do. We wrote an easy-to-follow Guide to Calculating Your Total Addressable Market that takes you through the process step-by-step. In addition to providing direction for your campaigns and helping you segment prospects wisely, knowing your TAM can save your marketing ops team time by eliminating unprofitable customers and markets from your pursuits. If you have a CDP plugged into your stack, you should be able to use it to compare your current database to the universe of customer contact info housed by leading third party data providers, like ZoomInfo.
You Got This
We hope this blog has boosted your faith that you belong in the lofty realm of campaign-killing, goal-nailing elite marketers. We believe all you need to join them is sheer determination, a whole lot of automation, some good martech, and a little help from your friends at Sureshot.