| MARKETING |
evolution in the months ahead. Here are the top trends to
track:
Data-driven engagement via automation
The trend that we have seen since 2016 and only continues
to strengthen, as the industry continues to demand higher
levels of efficiency and effectiveness in an increasingly
scrutinized, misunderstood, and competitive environment.
According to Acend2, 71 percent of companies currently
use marketing automation, and another 23 percent plan to
get started with it in the months ahead.
Marketers will have no choice but to increase their
investments in marketing tools that are capable of more
sophisticated segmenting for targeted engagement with
existing and prospective customers.
The tyranny of the bottom line
Marketing has always required a combination of creativity
and science - usually more of the former. This has made the
impact of marketing trickier to measure accurately, and the
value even harder to measure. The tides have turned, as
marketing has become increasingly data-focused.
The effectiveness of the data revolution in marketing is
twofold. On the one hand, marketers have far deeper
insights into what works and what doesn’t. On the other
hand, it means marketers are expected to make more
effective use of available data analytics tools to show
higher returns.
Tighter collaborations across teams
With greater transparency into all aspects of the customer
life cycle, marketing is finally being recognized as a critical
contributor to business success, and tighter integrations
with the sales team is crucial. Marketing is no longer a
fringe group practicing the dark arts that somehow benefit
the business.
With activated becoming more directly measurable, the
pressure is on for better alignment in terms of evaluation
performance. End-to-end business process metrics are
merging with one another, and lead qualification criteria are
evolving as a result.
You can finally ignore those vanity metrics that don’t
make substantive contributions to the bottom line. Insights
derived from marketing analytics must be actionable by
your sales team, who must, in turn, give feedback to your
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marketing team about leads that do or don’t convert and
which leads are more likely to convert, as an example.
This process transforms marketing into a discipline that
draws on relevant metrics to deliver practically useful
insights and prospects to sales teams to use to realize
higher sales and revenue.
Analytics latency is history
Today’s advanced business intelligence tools (think cloud
storage solutions and caching algorithms) make it easier
to collect data from multiple sources in different formats,
analyze the data, and extract actionable insights.
The benefits include dramatic cost savings and near-
real-time analysis of information accurately merged from
distributed sources.
Simply breaking down traditional data silos is a big step
toward better efficiency. Analysis with minimal latency
means more immediate decisions that often have profound
results for rapidly growing businesses based on key goal-
based metrics such as:
• Cost of content production and paid customer
acquisition,
• Content being distributed effectively,
• True engagement with relevant audience members.
TAKING IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Those who pay attention to the trends heading into 2020
are better positioned to take advantage of new tools to
collate, analyze, and act on their data. Ultimately, those are
the people who will be able to most effectively determine
whether their marketing strategies are working and how
best to optimize them.
We’re continuing to see increasing demand for data that
is more detailed and precise than ever. Those who are
capable of drawing insights from data using analytics will
leap ahead of lazy marketers who insist on relying on that
“gut feeling.”
We can already see the signs of this imminent, fundamental
change. They all point to one certain conclusion: Using your
gut over data analysis-driven strategy for 2020 is a recipe
for failure.