Email’s come a long way since the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. We marketers have learned to emphasize targeting, working with permission-based data sources and intelligently using email to build strong customer relationships. Despite these best efforts, a recent study from email intelligence service Return Path shows that 70 percent of all spam stems from…(Read Entire Post)
We’re excited and proud to announce that Marketfish has been named to Lead 411′s list of hottest companies in Seattle for the second year in a row! It’s extremely gratifying to find ourselves listed alongside such stalwarts as PayScale, Lockerz, and Apptio. We’d like to congratulate all the winners on making Seattle a center of innovation and a welcoming home for tech companies. You can read the full list of award winners as well as Lead 411′s press release here.
Happy Friday everyone! We’re back again with another roundup of the week’s best digital marketing tips, tricks, and trends. This week we’re emphasizing big data, because we believe it’s a trend that’s changing the very face of marketing. Keep reading to find out why.
Big data success includes personal, real-time analytics: Merkle exec – Big data and mobile marketing are two significant trends that have taken marketing by storm. As society continues to move towards a mobile-centric view of technology, marketers have had to adapt their strategies to accommodate this evolution. Big data plays into this paradigm, because it gives marketers a chance to analyze web behavior, purchases, and other data to determine the most effective way to engage new and current customers. Keep reading to learn more about the tools and strategy marketers need in place to truly take advantage of both mobile marketing and big data.
Vague Goals Seed Big Data Failures – We all know big data is this new shiny toy, but did you also know that 55% of big data projects don’t get completed. Furthermore, “inaccurate scope” is listed as the primary reason these projects fail. Big data is like any problem. It needs to be tackled in increments. To succeed, start with a problem you’re already trying to solve with data, and see if adding more data to the mix clarifies the solution. Measure the results, and iterate from there. For more on the pitfalls of improperly planning your big data initiative, click here.
Major Differences Between Marketers and Consumers #Infographic – As marketers, we sometimes get caught up in the cleverness of our own creations. A multichannel campaign delivering relative content at multiple touchpoints with the intention of steering the prospect along the buying cycle is enough to make our mouths salivate. But it’s important to note that marketers and consumers view and interact with brands in drastically different ways. Check out this infographic for a quick peek at many of the differences.
10 Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Works – Email may be a legacy channel, but we still firmly believe that it’s an effective tool for generating new leads and strengthening relationships with current customers. Check out this quick but comprehensive roundup of 10 reasons why email is still healthy and alive in 2013.
That’s it for this week everyone. Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments.
Experian QAS’ recent study “Data Quality and the Customer Experience” is a telling story for today’s data-driven marketers. To start off, here are a number of interesting insights culled from the study:
So, what kind of picture does that paint of today’s “data-driven” marketer? To me, it looks like organizations overwhelmingly acknowledge that data is critical to their success. A similarly overwhelming number of organizations understand that they, in fact, do have a data quality issue. Yet, for whatever reason, these organizations haven’t invested in the tools needed to rectify that issue.
My suspicion is that marketers haven’t decided to adopt an automated tool for addressing these data issues for a few key reasons:
So, what’s the answer? Marketers would benefit from first identifying the problems in their current processes, and then identify a tool that solves those problems.
If the issue is duplicate data, look for a tool that can de-duplicate databases and then merge that data into a new, unified database. If inaccurate records are plaguing the organization, it makes sense to look for a tool that includes hygiene and validation capabilities. Better yet, find a solution that can collect data right from your lead capture forms, validating and autocorrecting it as it is imported.
If you don’t understand enough about your current customers and inbound leads, look for a platform that provides appending services and enriches your contact database. Take the same approach if your database analytics are lacking. The key is identifying priorities and seeking out a tool that aligns with those priorities.
The trick, though, is not settling for a tool that bottoms out with capabilities that can only solve your current problems. You want a tool that’s going to allow you to continue to grow as a data-driven organization. Think about how you see your marketing evolving over the next one to two years, and move towards a tool that aligns with that vision. Once you can nail down these two areas of your data strategy, choosing the right tool should be much easier.
Great content is, well, great, but content marketing can’t thrive on content alone. You see, each piece of content needs to target a specific audience segment, and have well-defined goals and objectives. To be effective, it needs to resonate with the intended customer segment, and lead that segment towards a purchase. Buyer personas are well-established mechanisms for making this happen. And a data management platform (DMP) can make building those personas even easier.
What exactly are buyer personas?
Essentially, buyer personas are an archetypical representation of your customers. You can have multiple buyer personas, especially if your product serves a variety of different industries, or has tiered service structures – think MS Office Home vs. MS Office Professional. Your different user bases are not going to share all the same concerns, objectives, use cases, etc. So, you can’t expect one persona to encapsulate all of your customers.
How do you get started?
This is where a (DMP) can kick-start the process. Use the DMP to analyze your existing customers and leads. You should have the ability to track trends across criteria like company size, annual revenue, industry, etc. You can also analyze at the individual level for decision makers, influencers, or your point of contact within each company. Take into account information like age, gender, location, and any behavioral data you might have.
This is all pretty top-level stuff. It doesn’t adequately account for the psychological components of purchasing behavior. But, it does help you quickly break your database into broader segments that you can then further analyze and research.
Surveys, Interviews, and Questionnaires
This is where you really start to define your buyer personas in the necessary level of detail. Create a list of questions. Ask about your customers’ motivations for choosing your brand. What problem were they trying to solve? How does your product help them solve those problems? Questions like these will help you unlock the psychology behind your typical customer’s purchasing process. HubSpot has a few examples of questions you can ask when building buyer personas.
Now, identify your highest value customers, and ask them these questions in an interview. If they’re happy with your product, they should be more than willing to help you out with a brief interview. If they aren’t happy with your product, well, you have bigger problems to solve.
You could also work these questions into a survey or questionnaire that you send out to current customers. Depending on response rate, this approach can yield a large amount of viable research very quickly. Another approach is joining your sales team on calls to get a sense of the mindset of potential customers. Listen to the things they like about your product, the questions they ask, and their objections.
Once you feel that you have enough research, beginning building your buyer personas. These personas should essentially look like several segments grouped along criteria like goals (the challenges they want your product to solve), behaviors (their interactions with your marketing), and demographic data.
After your personas are constructed, go back into your DMP and apply a unique identifier for each of these personas. Now you can segment both your leads and customers along these identifiers. Once you send campaigns that target these personas, apply these identifiers to any leads that come in. With this process, you can easily nurture leads on a persona basis, rather than segmenting on potentially meaningless criteria.
Final Points
It’s a good idea to limit the number of personas you actually create. Somewhere between two and four personas is right for most organizations. You could have more if you’re selling a complex product, but you don’t want to complicate the issue needlessly.
It also pays to think of these personas as if they are real people, not characters you’ve created. Do whatever it takes to make that happen. Do some roleplaying skits, have an artistically talented team member draw pictures of each persona and hang the pictures on your office’s walls, or give them names and try to reference them by those names in your marketing meetings.
Like most aspects of lead generation, buyer personas work best when you first test, measure, and iterate with smaller campaigns. You need to determine if your personas are accurate, and if you’re using the right pieces of content to market to those personas. As always, once you hit on the right formula, roll out the campaign on a much larger scale.