With all of the buzzwords and Martech surrounding the marketing discipline these days, one can easily be led down a road of complexity that will quickly become frustrating and inefficient. Even if you have the greatest Martech stack known to man, it means nothing if you have to cycle through dozens of applications just to get to the one you want. By the same token, what good is knowing all the buzzwords in the dictionary if none of them actually apply to your key performance metrics?
When things get complex, it’s time to get back to basics. Here are some best practices to keep you from getting bogged down in the mire of technology and process overload.
The Customer Comes First
Before you add anything to your Martech stack or to your business processes, ask yourself one question: Does this help me create a closer connection to my customer base? If the answer is no, scrap it. Make that connection tangible by tying every tool or process to customer metrics like retention rate, customer lifetime value, Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction, conversion rate, or churn. If it does not move one of those, it is noise.
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
The philosopher Thoreau definitely had the right idea in mind when he gave us this simple three word plan for life. There is some certain level of complexity that you’re going to have to take on in order to keep up with a more sophisticated marketing landscape. You may have to learn some apps in order to stay in compliance with potential vendors, suppliers and prospects. Overall, however, technology is meant to simplify your life, not clutter it. Always take stock to ensure that you are getting more done during the day rather than less because of the new technology and processes that you take on. Run a quick stack audit, list your apps, kill duplicates, and trim one-off tools you barely use. Connect core systems like your CRM, marketing automation, and analytics through native integrations or an integration platform to reduce switching and errors.
Outsource
You do not have to do everything yourself, especially within the marketing discipline. There is absolutely no reason that you should try to incorporate an end to end marketing department in-house. Even the largest companies in the world don’t have this, and marketing companies themselves are actually becoming more known for partnering with each other to specialize and improve efficiencies. With this in mind, why are you trying to do it all? Outsource. It will improve your life.
Go Offline
Although online marketing is the most cost-effective and generally efficient way to market these days, there are still highly viable reasons to take your campaign off-line. First of all, you need original content in order to make your online marketing campaigns pop. Where you get the majority of this content? Creating your own off-line events. Instead of using stock photos and even stockier campaign lines, go out and meet your prospect face to face. Let them give you the ideas about how they want to be marketed to. Track those off-line efforts by using campaign-specific URLs with UTM parameters or QR codes that point to a dedicated landing page. You will know which event, flyer, or booth drove visits, sign-ups, and actual sales. You don’t have to guess anymore, and on top of that, you can get some authentic pictures for your social media profiles.
Automate
This tip may not seem like simplifying or getting back to basics only because automation is a fairly new concept within our discipline. However, it fits because it has the ability to greatly reduce the amount of wasted time in your day. Here’s the bottom line: If a computer can do the work better than a human being, then find a computer to do it. Start with welcome and nurture emails, lead scoring and routing, social scheduling, and simple A/B tests. Keep data clean and honor privacy laws such as GDPR, effective in 2018, and CCPA, effective in 2020, with consent and clear opt-outs. Ideally, you will find a person who knows how to automate several processes on several computers. This way you don’t have to worry about putting anyone out of a job while you try to simplify your marketing life and create the most efficient process for your company.
The best practices above should help you to gain peace of mind as well as business efficiency. Always keep simplicity in mind. This is what marketing is all about.
