How can you make your marketing campaigns drive higher ROI, yet remain simple? I do see a trend with mid-size B2B companies where they reach a point of diminishing return using search words or general email target lists to drive their demand strategy. You have the tools in place with a comprehensive marketing CRM system BUT do you really have the monies/resources to make the leap to trying the endless list of predicative analytics companies and their strategies?
Is there an intermediate step you can take to improve your campaign ROI, now? Yes, large enterprise accounts have been using customer analytics to improve their targeting and I would suggest a simple roadmap to integrate Go to Market with sales and marketing to personalize and better target your efforts.
Remember what is the definition of insanity? Continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results, here are the steps you need to reset the results of your sales and marketing efforts.
Step One
Gather ALL your data and understand what information is needed to personalize your marketing
Collect all the information in your company and organize into an open database while at the same time understanding what information is needed.
o Get the sales data so we know the attributes of those that are actually buying from you.
o Include the customer success information so you can understand the patterns of solid long term customers, as opposed to those that churn.
o Then the various sources of marketing information, web, email responses, all of it.
This information needs to be collected into one central database where you can then determine what information is missing to be more targeted. For example, do you have the industry classification codes, regional information, company scope and size?
Step Two
Apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Progressive Profiling to Expand Customer Information
Do you know the actual identity of all your customers, and prospects? You might need to add some intelligence to understand which companies they are aligned if they are independent agents or sellers. This is where applying some AI or gain more information on your clients or with progressive profiling is possible. The caution here is customers get really annoyed to be asked questions that they think you should already know about them, consider AI as a better means for gaining insights.
Step Three
Enrich Your Customer Data with Additional Firmographics
In the initial step, you should have identified the information you are missing like the company firmographics or industry classifications. Here you should use third party resources so you are only asking your customers questions that truly add value. Doesn’t it drive you crazy when you register for an event which has a dozen questions and all of them could have been answered based on the domain of your email address?
Step Four
Analyze, Analyze and Re-Analyze your Customer Information
This is the critical step where you learn who are your most strategic, highest dollar value accounts and what are their attributes. While at the same time identify lower dollar value accounts that are still critical to maintaining a healthy revenue stream. This will allow you to determine how much you should be spending in acquiring the various type of customers. From this work, you can now evolve your integrated campaigns to be more targeted to industry, company profile, or decision maker. There is almost no end to the insights you can gather from such an analysis in comparing buying vs prospect databases or customer success patterns. Then you can determine what is the best means of acquiring or expanding accounts.
Step Five
Execute Your Campaigns with a Focus on Metrics that Matter
Now you are ready to build your campaigns and hone your messaging to your more refined and target customer lists. Be prepared to understand where you are getting the falloff in the conversion from awareness to consideration to bookings.
This is where I go back to what are the critical metrics, or what I call the Metrics that Matter. I suggest the most critical metrics are pipeline creation and then conversion to bookings. Frequently I see a digital team focused on building pipeline but far less concerned about driving the conversion rate to booking. If we are really going to get to full funnel integrated sales and marketing, we need to make revenue the end game.
There are no easy answers but building campaigns which are far more targeted and relevant is the key to your long-term success.
p.s. I really do like predictive when you know who you are trying to reach and how best to find them but do your homework first!