There are many topics that I could have written on this week. The Indiana primary election, Game of Thrones, the NFL draft, my upcoming mini marathon, May the Fourth, the Indiana Pacers playoff collapse, etc. However, I have decided to focus my blog this week on a desk decoration that I have mere inches from my computer monitor and how this jar of wooden spheres describes the perfect data driven marketing strategy.
This glass jar is a cylinder standing roughly 12 inches tall and contains various sizes of wooden orbs. Now, I am sure that many of you have heard the tale of how motivational speakers will use similar setups in their speaking engagements. The speaker will fill the cylinder with large balls, ask the audience if the container is full (audience says, “yes”), and then the speaker will prove the audience wrong by adding smaller balls that fill the cracks between the larger balls. The speaker continues through this same exercise while adding smaller balls, sand, and finally water.
This presentation is used to challenge audiences about where they spend their time and how best to organize it. What are your “big balls” or priorities concerning your data driven marketing efforts? Below I am going to list out each category of priorities as they pertain to the exercise described above.
Big Balls
- CRM Integration – Unless your sales and marketing teams are one and the same, you must have your CRM system integrated with your marketing automation technology. If a sales team member generates 30 new leads at a trade show and enters them in the CRM, these leads should be pulled down into your marketing automation platform for lead scoring, additional nurturing, and data appending.
- List Building – This is a full blog post in and of itself, but I am going to sum it up in one, brief bullet point. You should be building your lists organically through inbound marketing and sales team connections. Purchasing lists of contacts for batch and blast campaigns is one of the fastest ways for your company to find itself on blacklists and receiving spam complaints.
Medium Balls
- Social Media and Website – One of the largest hurdles for the modern marketing team is the problem of having siloed data. Most companies know that they should be executing email, social media, PPC, SEO, etc. campaigns, but the problem lies in tying all of these together for a single view of the customer. If your social media team is clueless about your email marketing strategy…
- Targeted Segments – I mentioned the “batch and blast” marketing strategy on an earlier bullet point, but I would like to go a bit deeper into the idea of targeted groups. Think about an easy example like Nike. If Nike is having a women’s shoe sale, Nike should send an email message with this deal to primarily women. In a B2B environment, companies may break their contact database down even further to target key decision makers by company size and sales territory. Whenever possible, segment your main database to ensure maximum relevancy for your readers!
Sand and Water
- Metrics – You and your team must be able to track the effectiveness of your campaigns and overall strategies. Whether it is a tactical metric like email open rates, or if it is a high level report such as overall stage movement, marketers must be able to prove their value on a daily basis.
- CLM Stages – Whether or not your company is utilizing a software like Right On Interactive’s, I would encourage you to take a long hard look at your customer journey as more than a campaign. Customer Lifecycle Marketing allows marketers to track unknown prospects as they progress through their relationship with your brand all the way to brand-loyal advocate.
I am not a motivational speaker, but I hope you found a nugget or two from the above examples as you begin to prioritize your marketing strategy. For more on marketing automation and CLM, check out out newest Ebook, CLM 101.
