“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
When it comes to marketing, this oft-used adage refers to the consumer. While marketing tactics are malleable by design, forever shifting to match the evolution of technology and communication, certain strategic pillars remain. The most steadfast of these pillars may well be the need to deeply understand the consumer.
Consumer knowledge is an evolving science. Marketing teams might seek a deeper understanding through surveys and focus groups, social media listening and online reviews, interactive ads or person-to-person interviews. When consumers are truly understood by a company, marketing campaigns are more targeted and loyalty grows. Take a study by Bain, for example, which found that consumers who engage with a company over social media spend up to 40 percent more on that product in the long term, and also possess deeper emotional commitment and loyalty to the product. Much of this comes from the high levels of engagement, interaction and information exchange that social media allows.
Regardless of medium, the message is clear: obtaining deep levels of consumer knowledge can lead directly to high levels of loyalty and engagement.
We sat down with 13 tech companies who believe that obtaining three-dimensional consumer knowledge is paramount to their success. Though they make markedly different products, they explained that by achieving a deep understanding of their consumers, their companies can zero in on the best way and the right time to engage, achieving maximum long-term impact.
Keys to effective marketing
- Endless curiosity
- Understanding your consumers
- Understanding your own goals and objectives
- Regular testing
- Cross-team collaboration
- Keep up the creativity
Calm
Katie Shill
SENIOR DIRECTOR OF MARKETING
Katie Shill, a senior director of marketing at Calm, knows that the success of her company’s product is tied directly to consumer knowledge. The marketing team at Calm, a global wellness brand with a popular app for sleep, relaxation and meditation, focuses on learning about consumers to unlock how to best serve them. This strategy has led to incredible growth and exposure at the most opportune and important times, she said.
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
Effective marketing, at its simplest, is ROI. Are the investments you’re putting into your marketing activities (time, money) driving maximum impact for your business? At Calm, this means getting clear on our marketing objectives and understanding how they ladder up to our company-wide objectives. Effective marketing doesn’t live in a silo — so it’s important to ensure that the whole team is aware of how marketing KPIs drive broader business impact.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
The key to effective marketing is ruthless, never-ending curiosity and the drive to deeply understand your consumers. No channel strategy or piece of content is the silver bullet. If you spend time understanding your consumers — who they are, what they care about, what their pain points are, what they’re seeking — then you’ll be able to effectively be in conversation with them and better understand how to position your product to fit their needs. Too many marketers focus on the tactics and then wonder why those tactics don’t drive impact. The key is to start with understanding your consumers, which can then unlock how your brand can uniquely play a role in their lives.
The key to effective marketing is to start with understanding your consumers, which can then unlock how your brand can uniquely play a role in their lives.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
Back in November, Calm sponsored CNN’s coverage of the 2020 president election, running both TV commercials throughout the week and specifically sponsoring CNN’s famous “Key Race Alerts” that alert viewers when new numbers come in — a particularly stressful moment for every American, regardless of who you voted for. It was extremely successful — we saw brand awareness grow significantly amongst CNN viewers, it drove social virality, and we saw a big spike in organic growth that week. There are a few lessons to be learned from that activation. Firstly, we knew that the election night was going to be anxiety-inducing for all, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. Our goal was to provide viewers a moment of calm, and a reminder to take a deep breath during a stressful night. It’s a simple lesson in meeting people with the right message at the right moment. At the end of the day, we’re a brand that supports people in easing their anxiety and giving them the tools to manage it. What better place than to meet people where they’re the most stressed — watching the news — and reminding them that we’re here, and we exist to support them during these moments?
Point
Shoji Ueki
HEAD OF MARKETING AND ANALYTICS
For Shoji Ueki, head of marketing and analytics at Point, consumer knowledge is integral for understanding growth engines and customer touch points. As Point is a home finance product aligned with the homeowner, deeply knowing the consumer can assist with which growth channels to focus on and which touch points on the customer journey can be used to make a lasting connection.
First, what does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
At the end of the day, marketing exists to help the company achieve an objective, so the starting point is clear alignment on goals and constraints. In our case, we’re trying to maximize the funding we provide to homeowners and do it within a specific return on ad spend constraint.
In order to make this happen, we need to build growth engines that can lead to scalable long-term growth. It’s really important that we focus on channels that are the right fit for our particular product and business model. To give an example, certain financial partnerships work well for us because these partners have an understanding of the customers’ financial situation that helps us determine whether our product may be a good fit. On the other hand, peer-to-peer referrals is a tougher channel due to the sensitive nature of discussing your financial situation with others.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
One key is building our marketing strategy around the target audience. We’re dealing with real people who are potentially making a big financial decision. To be most effective, we need to develop an in-depth understanding of who they are as well as their motivations, anxieties and pain points. We also have to understand all touch points in the customer journey, because each is a unique opportunity to reach them.
Additionally, driving growth doesn’t stop at the marketing team. We have to optimize the full customer experience, which for us includes the product/website and a sales process. It’s critical that all parts of the customer experience are aligned and working in concert with each other.
To be most effective, we need to develop an in-depth understanding of who the consumers are as well as their motivations, anxieties and pain points.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
Direct mail has developed into a critical channel for us. Our target customer is someone who both meets our eligibility requirements (e.g., has a specific credit profile) and has a need we can solve (e.g., pulling equity out of their home to fund home improvement). We leverage credit bureau data to hone in on the right target audience and then utilize direct mail to reach them. Our Home Equity Investment product is a very complex product in a new category, and direct mail enables us to explain its value in a more detailed and personalized way than, say, a billboard or display ad.
Orchard
Ran Tan
HEAD OF GROWTH MARKETING
For Orchard, the key to effective marketing lies in continued testing and iteration. Head of Growth Marketing Ran Tan said that they regularly run tests across all of their marketing platforms and then iterate as needed. Additionally, Tan said that they regularly work with the CX team to gather customer feedback and adapt their messaging when necessary.
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
The goal of the growth marketing team is to introduce customers to our services and grow Orchard as a business, in a cost-effective manner. There are a few challenges that come with marketing services like Orchard’s. First, buying and selling a home is a big financial decision for consumers and one they only make a few times in their lifetime. Second, it’s typically a complicated process with a lot of different steps and nuances. And third, for a lot of people, it’s probably the first time they’re making this type of transaction, so we need to give them context on the original process as well as how we’re making it a better, smoother process.
For us, effective marketing helps explain the problem homeowners face, demonstrates why Orchard is a better solution and establishes trust with the consumer — all while keeping things simple and setting accurate expectations with the customer. Customers may start by seeing the ads, but then they’ll learn more through the website and through conversations with our team. The more they learn about us, more they engage with us. Our goal is to present the right information — and the right amount of it — at the right time, so that customers are excited about Orchard and know what to expect.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
For Orchard, the key has been continued testing and iterating. We run regular tests across all of the aspects of our marketing funnel from media channels to targeting, creative and messaging, landing pages and the website, and to the flow that customers complete once they hit the website.
To support this, we set shared goals and support that with cross-functional collaboration. We’ll work closely with other teams at Orchard. For example, our creative team helps us make great ads and we work alongside the product team to prioritize and implement tests on the website and customer flow.
For us, effective marketing helps explain the problem homeowners face and establishes trust with the consumer.’’
We also lean on other teams to hear more about what’s working and what isn’t. For example, we solicit regular feedback from our CX team about what they hear from customers. It’s a great way to get anecdotal feedback when we’re testing a new marketing channel or to understand if our marketing message is clear. Recently, we heard from our CX team that many customers are interested in buying newly-built homes. As a result, we’re now testing Facebook ads that specifically focus on this, and have also added some content to the site about how we help customers buy “new builds.”
What’s a successful marketing initiative you’ve recently worked on?
One recent success story is our Houston launch, which is a new market we entered in January. Orchard was live in five markets before we launched Houston. We had launched markets before but wanted to test something different this time to see if we could get even better momentum right from launch.
Historically, when we’ve launched other markets, we’ve run ads in our regular marketing channels but haven’t really focused on the fact that we’re new — the main message has been Orchard’s value props and what problem we solve. This time, we decided to test running launch-specific ads on Facebook. We set aside a separate Facebook budget for this, and the ads emphasized Orchard as a new solution in Houston, without going into as much detail about Orchard’s services or how it works.
The response we saw to this was overwhelmingly positive, and we saw great traffic to the site as well as great conversion further down the funnel. As a result, we’ve adopted these tactics for future new market launches, and are also testing ads in all our markets with simpler and higher-level messaging.
Onna
Peter Schroeder
HEAD OF GROWTH
At Onna, effective marketing involves two key components: people and process. Head of Growth Peter Schroeder said that employees work cross-departmentally to ensure everyone is on the same page. Their sprint methodology has proven to be effective for keeping track of projects, improving time management and meeting deadlines.
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
Like most B2B marketing teams, effective marketing means market sourcing more qualified leads that ultimately lead to revenue. That said, we have a much broader mandate than that. We market a very technical product to a very sophisticated buyer, so our job is to educate. When people get to know us by attending an event or enjoying a piece of content, when Onna “clicks” for them, that’s when we know we’ve been effective.
Effective marketing means aligning all of your marketing to your brand and demand generation efforts.”
We’re also obsessive about the quality of our output. Whether it’s a blog post, webinar or sales collateral, it must demonstrate that we know our audience, tell a great story and prove that we know what we’re talking about. Anything less than that doesn’t cut it — we will always choose to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term sustainability.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
Effective marketing means aligning all of your marketing to your brand and demand generation efforts. This is easier said than done so, for us, there are two critical elements: people and process. The people at Onna are hugely collaborative, which helps marketing stay in lockstep with product, sales, partnerships, customer success, etc., to make sure we always have the latest information so we can best support the entire organization.
Regarding process, our marketing team operates in two-week sprints (part of Scrum methodology). We’ve found sprints to be really effective for keeping track of projects, improving time management and holding ourselves accountable to meet our goals. As for technology, after we find a scalable and repeatable process, we implement technology to help us scale faster than we ever could on our own.
What’s a successful marketing initiative you’ve recently worked on?
Events are a huge part of our marketing strategy and, obviously, because of the pandemic, it’s been difficult (if not impossible) to bring people together. The biggest conference of the year for us typically happens in February in New York. Unfortunately, all the wonderful people we would typically show around our beautiful city weren’t descending on NYC this year, so we decided to bring a taste of NYC to them.
We held a virtual roundtable that kicked off with a presentation from the COO of New York-based institution Ess-a-Bagel, including a behind-the-scenes demonstration of how New York bagels are made. Guests received a special brunch box bagel delivery to enjoy during the session. The event was a hit — we got a lot of great feedback from attendees, as well as valuable industry insights that we can use in future marketing efforts! This worked so much better than your out-of-the-box wine or beer tasting event because it managed to bring some real-life magic to the virtual realm and make for a fun, memorable, hol(e)istic experience.
Contentsquare
Niki Hall
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
At ContentSquare, effective marketing means always putting the customer first. Chief Marketing Officer Niki Hall said that understanding your customers and prospects’ needs and how they want to use your brand will result in a win-win situation for both parties.
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
Effective marketing is when marketing is a growth engine for a company — always taking a customer-first mindset.
My vision of effective marketing for my team is to always have a customer-first mentality with the focus of truly understanding the needs of our customers and prospects and how we can help them be successful. By having a customer-first approach and consistently exceeding their expectations on how we solve their needs, it will always be a win-win situation. In addition, doing what is best for the clients and prospects will result in our success as a company.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
It all starts with a keen understanding of the business: company goals, growth targets, NPS, total addressable market and competitive landscape. Using this approach truly enables teams to focus on a North Star of where to move the business.
Next, devise your marketing strategy for a customer-first mindset, strongly grounded in the business fundamentals. Ensure you really know your customers’ and prospects’ needs and how they are engaging with the brand.
And lastly, roll-out the program, measure, continuously refine and execute.
Devise your marketing strategy for a customer-first mindset, strongly grounded in the business fundamentals.’’
What’s a successful marketing initiative you’ve recently worked on?
We recently hosted a Roaring 20s webinar with a leading industry analyst Zeus Kerravala. Using a theme that is timely and an analyst who has credibility in customer experience enabled us to attract a large audience and have a thought leadership conversation about the impact of digital transformation on customer experience. This is just the start of many thought leadership webinars we will be hosting as part of a series leading into a big brand campaign reveal.
Camelot Illinois
Lauren Averill
SENIOR MARKETING MANAGER
What they do: Camelot Illinois is the technological arm behind the Illinois Lottery. The company’s work provides funding for schools, local businesses and special causes.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
Being on the marketing team for a brand like the Illinois Lottery means things are changing every day. With jackpot amounts updating with each roll and new games or instant tickets launching every month, our team produces a lot of content. Aligning on the strategy and plans across all channels is always important, but providing consistent and relevant messaging is something we strive for. This helps us streamline internally but it also ensures consumers are getting clear, consistent messages across the consumer journey.
Before we launch any initiative or campaign, we align on a key look and feel with messaging to support it. Our executions stem from that key visual while allowing for enough flexibility for the communication to change based on where the consumer is in their journey. This allows the right message to reach the consumer based on relevancy while still retaining consistency across the campaign.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
We always start with a solid foundation where all parties are aligned behind the strategy and objectives that are laid out. This can often be challenging when we’re tasked with overcoming several barriers to achieve our business goals and we need to prioritize and align on communication objectives. Marrying our communication priorities with the right media channels to deliver those messages ensures that our marketing efforts are as effective as possible.
Before we launch any initiative or campaign, we align on a key look and feel with messaging to support it.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
Our 2020 holiday campaign was our most recent and successful campaign. We typically get a boost in sales around the holidays as people buy instant tickets as gifts for family and friends. But knowing that there would be hesitancy to shop in stores and that people’s gift budgets may be smaller due to hardships caused by the pandemic, we took a different approach, shifted our strategy and aimed to be a beacon of joy during the holiday season. This came to life in our TV spot, which featured the mischievous yet adorable hamster, Claude. With a new boyfriend moving into Claude’s owner’s apartment, our hamster couldn’t help himself from scratching up his new roommate’s belongings. In the end, the boyfriend repairs their relationship by providing a holiday instant ticket from the Illinois Lottery. We extended this idea across retail, paid and owned channels with the message, “Joy to the scratchers.”
The campaign contributed to a notable increase in holiday instant ticket sales from last year, as we saw our highest sales since the 2017 fiscal year. Our TV spot also performed stronger than in previous years, especially in tracked categories such as “attention-grabbing,” “humorous,” and “unique.”
iManage
Anne Kokke
VICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING
What they do: iManage’s AI platform enables organizations to understand and activate the information that exists in their business content and communications.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
I have always been passionate about developing a highly collaborative cross-functional team while engendering confidence and enthusiasm in others. So for me, the key to effective marketing starts with a great team, or what I like to call “team-manship.” As a group, marketing offers arguably the most diverse set of talent of any other function, from highly creative designers and relationship-builders in PR to deep analytics of marketing technology. Each individual plays a critical role, and with everyone working together in unison, the team can optimize its impact in the market and within its own business.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
“Outside-in” is our watchword. To be effective, you must listen and understand your customers’ requirements and have the commitment to deliver real business value that drives customer success and measurable business outcomes.
With everyone working together in unison, the team can optimize its impact in the market and within its own business.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
We recently finished rebranding the entire business. It just hit the market this month, so it’s too early to see actual results, but the journey itself has been a roaring success. What made it a success? First, I owe it to market research. When you are steering the ship, you must invest in the data to prove the direction and we did just that. Second, leadership involvement played a large role. Getting senior leaders across the business involved in the journey was critical to our success, so it was this idea of “our brand, our vision” instead of a marketing initiative. Lastly, capturing the hearts and minds of the entire business was tantamount to our success. From the culture survey that shaped our brand archetype to the all-hands readout on the market research, each employee has been part of the journey and can share in its success.
SteelSeries
Kathryn Martinez
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
What they do: SteelSeries develops hardware and software for the gaming industry, offering products like headsets, controllers and keyboards.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
For marketing to be effective, it has to do several things. First, it should build affinity for the brand, meaning that it reinforces the brand’s essence and core values. Second, it should engage and resonate with the intended target audience in meaningful ways. Third, it should have a basis in universal insights that transcend language and borders to give it a global reach. Fourth, it should be 360 degrees so that all of its components collectively surround the consumer to increase impact and scale.
When possible, effective marketing should be based on longstanding, repeatable campaigns, which enable them to build equity with consumers while keeping the new executions fresh and relevant.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
The key to making our marketing effective starts by checking what we as marketers know and like against what the target audience says is important; in other words, what the consumer says they like and what’s meaningful to them.
Listening to what consumers say as well as what they don’t say — what they tell us through their consumption habits and practices — can inform insights, messaging and tactics for effective marketing efforts.
But it also has to do with using data to validate what’s working, whether that’s CTRs and view rates in digital advertising, subs and followers on our owned social media platforms, or promotional coverage in-store at key retail and e-tail accounts.
Our marketing is also effective because we’re constantly testing new ideas including new social media platforms, ad types such as short-form ads on TikTok or Snapchat and creative executions like filters on Instagram.
And finally, it’s effective because there is a shared vision throughout the organization of its purpose, the insights that led to it, and an appreciation of how to bring it to life across channels and in countries around the world.
Marketing should build affinity for the brand, meaning that it reinforces the brand’s essence and core values.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of SteelSeries and, to celebrate, we developed a campaign called “Glory Story“ to tell the history of SteelSeries, including the reason our brand exists, our innovation stories and our strong esports heritage.
The campaign consists of six spots versioned out in ad formats ranging from .06 seconds to 60 seconds depending on where they will be viewed. It was created through the use of our game world characters and translated into over 15 languages, including English, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, Czech and more.
The story was based on insights that are universal to gamers around the world. It engages with and delights consumers while also educating them about who we are as a company and a brand.
And to make it a 360-degree campaign, we overlaid influencer activation, esports tournaments, retail activation, PR components and significant social media builds to make it comprehensive.
We’ve now done YouTube brand lift studies in nine countries, and the campaign has crushed benchmarks set among consumer electronics brands on all measured attributes, including ad recall, brand awareness and brand consideration, which tells us that it’s effective.
Ibotta
Kevin Zentmeyer
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING
What they do: Ibotta wants to help shoppers get the most out of their everyday purchases. The company partners with brands like Kellogg and Walmart to give users cash back on groceries and more.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
Product marketing is a bit unique in that it’s more of a support function for a combination of marketing, product management and sales, so it can be hard to pick out our impacts on the final product. That said, I know we’re doing a great job when there’s an absence of confusion about new products and features that are launching within the relevant teams.
The most important element that my team consistently contributes is messaging — and good messaging is always simple. Simple messaging is understandable and memorable. When I see that the messaging is still simple when it’s distributed through all of our marketing channels, I know that we not only did the job of boiling the feature down to its value in a concise manner but also communicated it clearly to our stakeholders and collaborators.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
The key to making our marketing efforts more effective is the successful integration of the product management and marketing teams’ efforts. In an app-centric or consumer technology company, the departments are highly interdependent for success. Users don’t care or understand that your marketing touchpoints are run by a different team than app onboarding screens. To them, it’s one Ibotta experience that’s either compelling and intuitive or unrewarding and disjointed. Beyond the multichannel UX, the integration is crucial because the user acquisition and adoption funnel flow from marketing to product. The onboarding experience has to be contextually relevant, and the product itself needs to deliver on the promise of our marketing campaigns. Otherwise, our efforts to grow the user base are all for naught.
The most important element that my team consistently contributes is messaging — and good messaging is always simple.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
Ibotta’s launch of cash back on online grocery purchases was hugely successful. Due to the pandemic, digital sales of groceries quintupled, as a share of the overall grocery market jumped from 2 percent to 10 percent. We were fortunate to have most of the technical components already in place to serve users for this suddenly sharp consumer need. In less than a month, we launched. After discovering that our MVP (minimally viable product) was not performing well enough for our users, we relaunched the product to our user base. For most of our users, this new product required them to interact with the app in a completely different way, which made a crossover and educational marketing tactics incredibly important.
I think this was largely successful due to the tight partnership between our product marketing and lifecycle marketing teams, which enabled them to launch such a large initiative quickly and iterate upon it as we changed the product and learned along the way. As we scaled the initiative from an early adopter audience, we collaborated closely with our in-house market research team to keep our messaging as relevant as possible to our users who navigated the pandemic and continuously adjusted their grocery shopping behavior.
Location3
Josh Allen
VICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING
What they do: Location3 is dedicated to helping global franchises develop multichannel digital marketing strategies. The agency offers a broad range of services, from paid search and SEO to web analytics and franchise development.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
Effective marketing for Location3 involves a cross-channel, B2B strategy designed to engage our target audiences at each stage of the decision-making process as they seek out new partners for their organizations to assist in growing bottom-line revenue.
A broad example of this may include targeted media buying and public relations campaigns to help drive increased awareness among our prospective customer base, supported by focused content marketing tactics that reinforce Location3’s value proposition as a leading digital marketing partner. We also do a fair amount of event-based marketing throughout the calendar year, which can include tradeshows, digital marketing conferences or private, invite-only events that we host in conjunction with partners like Google and Facebook. When it comes to determining whether or not a campaign or initiative was effective, we use a number of tools to evaluate our data sets and KPIs for overall performance, qualified lead volume, business development opportunities, revenue and more.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
Aside from having really smart people on your team that are experienced in cross-channel strategy, I think it’s important to have good data that you can rely on to evaluate past performance and optimize your current campaigns and programs. In addition to quality, quantitative data, our event-based programs have also produced a wealth of qualitative information that has informed our strategic thinking and has been valuable to us in terms of how we position Location3 in the marketplace.
I think it’s important to have good data that you can rely on to evaluate past performance and optimize your current campaigns and programs.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
Early in 2020, as tradeshows and conferences were shifting to an all-virtual format due to the pandemic, we realized that a portion of our target market was completely underserved in terms of opportunities for them to gather together either virtually or otherwise and learn about digital marketing strategy, tactics and best practices. So, we decided to put together a virtual conference with an agenda created specifically to address their needs. The end result was the inaugural Franchise Activation Conference, a unique two-day virtual event attended by more than 400 franchisees and local business owners across the United States. The event was such a success that we’ve since seen subsequent increases in marketing budget and local advertising spend among our own client partners and are planning the 2021 version for later this year.
Healthgrades
Taylor Soldner
SENIOR CONSUMER STRATEGIST
What they do: Healthgrades aims to forge more meaningful connections between patients and healthcare providers. Consumers can use the company’s platform to find and schedule appointments with their provider of choice, therefore improving patient access while building customer loyalty.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
Marketing is all about sending a clear message to your consumer. Sending a clear message requires understanding your audience and choosing the right marketing channels to reach them, whether that be search engine ads, social media ads, emails or even physical mail. For us, the audience really depends on our health system client and the goal of the campaign, but we excel at finding the consumers and patients who are at the highest risk and need immediate care. When higher-risk patients get the care they need, the health system client sees a return on their marketing investment and the patient population is healthier overall.
Currently, lots of health systems are making sure patients feel safe coming into their clinics for routine care, such as cancer screenings and cardiology checkups. When those patients come into the hospital for preventive appointments, it means our marketing campaigns have been successful, which is a win-win for all.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
A truly successful marketing campaign means staying focused on the client’s end goal. Their goal might be connecting heart patients with a cardiology specialist or soon-to-be-moms with an OB/GYN. A lot of marketing seems to focus solely on KPIs such as click-through rate, leads or website visits. These metrics are important to gauge the effectiveness of the chosen channels and message and help us make ongoing optimizations to the campaign. However, the real end goal is to help patients feel comfortable coming into a hospital to get care when they need it. When we can attribute new and existing patients coming in for care to our campaign, we see true effectiveness and success.
A truly successful marketing campaign means staying focused on the client’s end goal.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
Let’s take that example of OB/GYN appointments. Marketing messages to generate new OB/GYN appointments are focused on the most sought-after audience across the marketing industry: women aged 25 to 45 who are likely the household decision-maker for healthcare and major purchases. We built a campaign with an end goal of having more women choose to deliver their babies at our client’s hospitals.
By looking at consumer trends and listening to our health system clients, we identified women who are most likely to become pregnant in the next 12 months and located the marketing channels where these women are most active. We then customized calls to action depending on the marketing channel. For example, paid search ads promoted booking an appointment, whereas social media ads focused on meeting the OB/GYNs through video interviews and learning about the birth center with a virtual tour. By meeting women where they were in their journeys, we informed their decisions as they chose an obstetrician, and we accomplished our goal of more moms delivering their babies at those hospitals.
Skupos
Christine Shriver
VICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING
What they do: Skupos connects independent stores, brands, and distributors all on a single platform, enabling them to unlock revenue, run promotions and more.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
Effective marketing means driving the pipeline and having fun doing it. Marketing is an interesting field because it has shifted over time to become a function that equally values creativity and data and analytics. This creates a diverse and awesome team dynamic. You have creative thinkers with big picture ideas that transform innovative, outside-the-box ideas into campaigns, combined with analytical experts that measure and optimize every click, touch and conversion. When those things work well together, you see the results in the numbers.
Launching a campaign is exciting, but real success happens later. Watching it drive the pipeline and rally the team to optimize it is where the magic kicks in. Revenue is the ultimate, tangible validation of an effective team. Fun is the side effect.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
This comes down to the two key themes I mentioned above: creativity and data.
Find a killer message and run a marathon with it. Take your time finding your value proposition and make sure you vet it outside your team. It’s easy to get lost in your products and forget that your end users lack context. Marketers are also guilty of pivoting across themes and content too quickly. We are one out of thousands of messages an end user receives in a day. Hit them with the same thing longer than you think makes sense and they’ll start to remember you.
Never stop looking at the numbers. Launch a broad set of channels at a smaller scale to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Tweak, refine and measure again. Cut the waste and reinvest in what works. Go big on the platforms that earn it. We have the most insane data at our fingertips, and it is our responsibility to use that data and make every dollar spent count.
Find a killer message and run a marathon with it.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
When I started at Skupos, we were building a marketing engine from the ground up. However, I didn’t want to wait to build the enterprise pipeline until we had a new website, collateral suite, systems in place and teams built. We sat down as a team and prioritized what parts of the core marketing engine needed to exist, lined those up and, in tandem, launched our first enterprise campaign within months of my start date. While the campaign ran, we built the rest of the core.
By end of year one, we were contributing seven figures to the pipeline, which was 25 percent of the company total and had closed a Fortune 500 logo. It was extremely scrappy, and the success is owed to incredible creativity, project management and data-minded individuals on my team.
EDB
Carole Bailey
SENIOR DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL DEMAND
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
The Merriam-Webster definition of effective is “producing a decided, decisive or desired effect.” The most important part of this definition for our team at EDB is the quantitative and qualitative desired effect, which we all can rally around. We create strategic plans annually and readjust quarterly to align with sales goals and marketing trends. If we are successful to have met these prescribed metrics, whether it’s creating leads or impacting brand awareness, we feel we accomplished them as a team.
We review our programs weekly to assess how we are tracking to our objectives and key results.”
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
We review our programs weekly to assess how we are tracking our objectives and key results. Monthly, we review with our key constituents from sales leadership to review our mutual goals based upon open communication.
What’s a successful marketing initiative you’ve recently worked on?
We embarked on many different projects to improve our emails and our account engagement. One key initiative was revamping our email practices with special attention to nurture email programs. The team reviewed all of the year-to-date metrics of the various nurture streams and created new nurture email structures for two website areas: the training and migration portals. In the past, these were two areas where there was little consideration for the respondent’s behavior once they had visited these portals. With just a few weeks in operation, we’ve seen a 100 percent improvement in engagement from those respondents visiting these sections of our websites.
