Have you learned about the most popular buzzword in the marketing lexicon outside of “AI”? It is “continuous improvement,” and it is almost as important as AI. Some experts consider it more important.
Continuous improvement is actually a concept that reaches beyond marketing, but so does AI. However, it is so applicable within the discipline that the term may as well be distinct and native to it. Let’s take a look at what it means within marketing and why it is so vital.
What is continuous improvement in marketing terms?
Continuous improvement is a quality management technique. It involves making small but important improvements to processes that need them. You are not overlooking major changes when you take on this philosophy. Rather, you are realizing that most changes do not take place in big steps.
Continuous improvement helps marketers to achieve increased accuracy in customer targeting, building up service and product quality, optimizing customer satisfaction and improving lead generation.
What does continuous improvement do for marketing?
When you take on the challenge of continuous improvement in your marketing campaign, you are putting your company on a path to better returns on your marketing investment.
Your main goal with continuous improvement in marketing is to reduce and eventaully eliminate waste in your processes. Doing this will help you get more from your marketing budget. For example, many companies cull their marketing databases by a continuous addition of new data from your sales force. This keeps your marketing from becoming stagnant and helps you generate better leads in the future campaigns you design. (It also helps you design more targeted campaigns more quickly.)
Product Development
The product dev team can use continuous improvement to optimize existing products to meet the ever changing needs of prospects. If you stay ahead of the curve in this, you can build market share much more quickly. You get to true innovations more quickly as well without spending the large amounts of money that are usually required for such breakthroughs.
Search
As you know if you are a marketer, your search engine ranking is essential to your visibility and online reputation. The higher your search engine ranking, the more quickly your prospects will find your products and services. You should be looking to continuously improve this aspect of your marketing, because your SEO will probably fall without it. New companies are making their way into the online space on a daily basis. All of them are competing for the same spots, so continuous improvement is actually a necessity here.
The Customer Experience
If your customers have a great experience with your company, then they are likely to spend more with you and bring new customers to you. If you apply continuous improvement to the entire customer experience, then you can catch weak areas in your sales funnels. You can also improve training programs, modify processes much more quickly and deploy customer services in a more timely manner.
These are only a few of the reasons that continuous improvement is a required function of your marketing department. The deeper that you dig, the more reasons you will find! Take the best practices above as a starting line, not a finish line, and never stop looking for ways to apply continuous improvement to your marketing campaigns and department.
