The birds are chirping, the grass is green, we’re venturing out without a jacket; springtime has arrived. Springtime is the time of year that you should evaluate where your company stands and whether or not you are in line to reach your annual goals.
Marketing is a complex engine; best practices seem to change daily. Are you using the same techniques that you were in 2014 or have your marketing practices evolved with the changing tide? Whether or not your techniques have changed, a third of the way through the year is a good time to take a look at what’s working and what’s not.
There are five trends in marketing and sales that seem to have a little helium injected into them in 2015. Adaptive databases, cross-channel personalization, diversified content, growth hacking and smarketing & accountability seem to be rising to the top of the marketing fold this year. Evolving with ever-changing techniques and technology is vital to success, but choosing the right techniques and technology to adapt is crucial. These trends are proving themselves to be worth your time and efforts in learning and adapting.
Adaptive Databases
Email marketing databases naturally decrease about 22.5% every year. If you have a database of four, within four years your database will be zero. This is especially true for B2B databases as people change jobs, change email addresses and opt-out of emails. Keeping your database current is more important than saving yourself countless bounce-backs. It is vital to ensure that you are marketing to the correct persona and marketing to each persona correctly.
Marketers should be using adaptive databases to adjust messaging based on the evolving interests and behaviors of leads. The result for leads and customers ideally is a more relevant experience. You can also use an adaptive database to personalize content beyond email, which leads to the next successful marketing trend of 2015; cross-channel personalization.
Cross-Channel Personalization
Cross-channel personalization is content that adapts to the person looking at it across channels (email, website, landing page, etc.). A great and prevalent example is Amazon. If you go there and search for something like fishing equipment, your future visits to Amazon will be tailored based on your interest in fishing.
A Monetate/econsultany study found that proper cross-channel personalization uplifts sales by 19%. With results like this it’s hard to rationalize not utilizing this on some level. To personalize, you need two things. The technology to power it and the strategy to make it useful rather than trivial. On the technology side, the ingredients are an adaptive database, a segmentation tool, and a personalization engine that can plug the database into your content tools.
Every time someone comes to your website they are bringing with them traces of information. Even people coming for the very first time. First-time visitors will come with information about their country, device and referral source. You can use this to make content more relevant even at the first meeting.
Technology has made cross-channel personalization easy to use, but without the proper strategy it will not be effective. You need to know your audience, its segments, and where the points of friction are on your website. Personalization needs to be useful, just adding someone’s name to an email or landing page isn’t useful, suggesting the right product or content for them to peruse is useful.
Diversified Content
As content becomes more prevalent as a marketing strategy, marketers are turning to a new range of voices and formats to stand-out. While blogging is still one of the most important tools for an inbound marketer, having podcasts, webinars, whitepapers and ebooks to promote too are vital.
A diversified content strategy is not only important to keep your audience engaged, but also for SEO purposes. As Google’s algorithms continue to update to ensure quality content ranks the highest, diversifying your content is crucial.
Different audiences also like different content. If all of your content is in the form of blogs you are excluding a large portion of your potential audience, simply because they don’t want to read a blog. If you present an array of options, the better your chances of garnering a larger and broader audience.
Growth Hacking
Growth hacking is a systematic approach to optimizing conversion paths for highest returns. Essentially growth hacking is a view of marketing that takes a systematic approach to optimizing conversions. Using the sales funnel as your platform, figure out the best way to convert a top of the funnel lead into a middle of the funnel lead, and so on through the funnel.
Growth hacking requires research, creativity and experimentation. A failure isn’t a failure when it comes to growth hacking, it’s an experiment that did not live up to the hypothesis, therefore you know not to utilize this tactic next time. A/B testing is vital to a good growth hacker.
Smarketing & Accountability
Smarketing might sound like a childish word, but it’s actually a highly complex and highly important technique to put into practice. Smarketing is a sales and marketing alignment on personas, goals and operations. A good relationship between sales and marketing is the key to a successful campaign. If goals and tactics are laid out for all to see and sales sees that marketing is doing their part and marketing sees that sales is following up with quality leads then the accountability portion will fall into place.
Marketing trends seem to waiver often, but these proven tactics, while still evolving, are without question vital to a modern marketer’s success. It’s possible that in six months we’ll be discussing a whole new set of trends. One thing that is certain, though, the above five trends have only become more prevalent as 2015 as worn on.
Join us at 1PM MT on May 6, 2015 for a webinar on this very subject. Please click below to register.
