Setting Your Marketing Goals for 2018

With 2018 now in full force, it’s likely you have your strategic business goals prepared and ready for execution. Hopefully, the marketing aspect of your business received just as much love during strategic planning sessions for this year, but in the off chance it didn’t, or if you’re looking to optimize your marketing plan for the new year, read on!

When setting your marketing goals for 2018, I highly encourage you to consider these points. In doing so, you’ll have a robust plan that is easily understood, integrative, and ready for execution:

1. Identify what did and didn’t work in 2017

Like anything in life, it’s best to learn from your shortcomings; the same mentality should apply to your business and how you market it. Begin by reviewing any marketing or campaign-specific data you may have from the year prior. This data may stem from Google Analytics or any other web analytics tool your company may use, social media analytics, email marketing results and lead tracking (web or otherwise). Upon reviewing the data, ask yourself these questions:

1. Where did these leads come from? Did they result from a campaign or organic search?
2. Was the messaging tailored to a unique audience?
3. Was my website, landing page, or collateral optimized for conversions?
4. Did customers interact with my brand the way I intended them to? Did I follow-up with them as often as I should have?

You may notice that while you had great campaign ideas, the execution was off. Slight tweaks of the same campaign based on answers to the above questions could result in an entirely different outcome!

2. Consider your resources

As small businesses, we often don’t have the luxury of having a marketing department or team. Your marketing team may only consist of a coordinator or manager, or perhaps even just yourself! Bearing that in mind, make 2018 the year you introduce automation to your business. With automation, you’ll provide your marketing personnel with more time to focus on tasks that really matter, such as strategic planning and business development.

Or, if finances permit, expand your marketing team. Get specific with what you need. Do you require a generalist who can complete as many different tasks as possible, or is a specialist of some sort what you require? You may consider hiring a marketing agency that has all of the above and more, and can be more cost-effective than hiring an additional full-time staff member.

3. Be realistic

First things first, yes, all companies want to grow and make more money; however, it’s important to remain realistic with the amount of growth you achieve and how quickly you attain this growth. Remember, good marketing takes time. While you’ll want to see a direct impact on your ROI, the fact of the matter is, revenue growth from new leads and customers will not be noticed until the next quarter or even later on in the year; or, years to come. Of course, this all depends on the type of business you have and the industry you’re in, but the importance remains that you should be focused on building your funnel at this time.

What are you waiting for?

I too often hear from business owners how they require assistance with marketing their business, yet it somehow is always placed on the back burner. By setting your marketing goals now, you’ll have a clear and concise plan that you can refer to throughout the year. If you require assistance with developing a marketing plan or executing marketing tasks, give CreativeWorks Marketing a call today!

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What Does It Really Mean Series: Marketing Automation

There are so many buzzwords being tossed around these days in the marketing world that it’s hard to keep up. It’s important that you understand what these terms mean so that you can make an informed decision on what’s right or wrong for your company. That’s why I’ve created this new series: What Does It Really Mean? I’ll take each of these confusing buzzwords, one by one, and explain them to you in “real people speak”. The first in our series is Marketing Automation.

What is marketing automation?

Although the term marketing automation makes it sound as though the art and science of marketing has become entirely automated, nothing could be further from the truth. There is much more involved than the click of a button. Marketing automation is a category of software that can automate certain repetitive tasks such as social media, lead management and tracking and monitoring campaigns. Marketers use marketing automation to help us keep up with the many platforms we’re often engaging with on a daily basis. It allows us to be more operationally efficient and help you to grow revenue faster.

How can marketing automation help your business?

• Save time and money. Labour intensive process that traditionally have been done manually, such as scheduling social media, can now be automated, saving time and money and increasing productivity.
• Increase efficiency. Multiple campaigns can be scheduled well in advance and fewer touch points reduces errors.
• Simplify multiplatform management. Consumers can be found on any number of platforms and it seems that more are cropping up daily. It’s become increasingly difficult to keep up with the management of all of these platforms. Marketing automation can help monitor multiple platforms on a daily basis.
• Improve lead management: Marketing automation systems can integrate with your CRM system so that you’ll be able to nurture your leads, not lose track of them.
• Improve customer retention. Marketing automation collects data that provides relevant insight to your customers, allowing you to anticipate your customers’ needs.
• Personalize the experience to the user. Marketing automation tools allow you to personalize your relationship with every customer with strategies like lead qualification.
• Track and monitor. Marketing automation can help track your marketing expenditures and monitor the responses to your marketing campaigns.

What are the pitfalls of marketing automation?

The number one pitfall of marketing automation is not having the resources or training to make it work. This is why I strongly recommend that you engage with a reputable marketing agency. Left to your own devices, you may automate the wrong processes. In addition, many people are under the misconception that marketing automation does marketing and lead generation for you; but that’s not the case. You have to build a pipeline of targeted, pre-qualified leads before you engage marketing automation. Only then can it help you manage and nurture your leads.

How can you integrate marketing automation to complement your marketing activities?

I read an article recently that described marketing automation software as the “Swiss Army Knife” of the software world because it’s so versatile. Marketing automation software works with your marketing activities; it doesn’t replace them e.g. it can leverage your data to tell you which leads are your hottest prospects and give you greater visibility into which marketing campaigns are generating the best ROI. It can streamline manual processes, improving efficiencies, increasing productivity and saving time and money.

Marketing automation can provide many benefits for your company as long as you have a clear plan and a strategy to execute. In order to realize the benefits, you need a marketing automation expert on your team. CreativeWorks Marketing has the one-two punch – expertise in marketing and marketing automation. Take advantage of our 20+ years of marketing knowledge and contact us today.

How To Kick-Start Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

There is so much “talk” about marketing automation, and we all know it is here to stay, but there is very little talk about what this means for small businesses.

Online conversations surrounding marketing automation have predominantly been about choosing or reviewing the marketing automation tools with players like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua. However, many small businesses are not even at the “tool” step in their process – they still need to understand how this applies to them, and if it can dramatically increase efficiency and output as it claims to do for so many larger brands.

I’ve outlined below a few tips on how to get started with your marketing automation. I hope that it will help you determine if this is even something worth investing your time, and if so, whether to start on a small scale or outsource it to a marketing agency.

Assess Your Needs: Before you can determine if you need MA, first review your current level of online marketing tools including PPC, web, and social media. Look at what is working and what is not. Look at your lists – how large are they and what type of responses are you getting from them? Are you running individual online campaigns that require manual segmenting of email lists? How much time do all these tasks take and what revenues/leads are being generated by them?

Create a Strategy: For best results, you need a marketing automation strategy and it should be revisited regularly, adjusted, and optimized. You need to clearly spell out what type of MA you are willing to invest in, what lists you will use or acquire, and most importantly from where you will get your content.

Content Development: In the world of MA, content is still king, so you will need a content library. Do you have an in-house resource or will you work with an agency that can provide you with content? These need to be value-add pieces that resonate with your audience.

Just the Basics: Consider starting out small with a technology that offers very basic functionality, but once in place can yield significant results. Even if you don’t have time initially to take advantage of all of the capabilities of marketing automation, just building one or two early-stage lead-nurturing campaigns can increase your quarterly volume of qualified leads by 120%— a very small time investment for game-changing results.

We as small businesses are set to become some of the biggest beneficiaries in the age of automation, but whether it’s the right time for your business or if it’s even the right fit for your business is worth exploring.

Do you think you know enough to start assessing the value for MA in your business?   If not, what would you like to know more about to help you decide if it’s right for you?

3 Myths About Programmatic Advertising Every Business Should Know

Continuing along the theme of automated marketing, I wanted to discuss programmatic advertising as it has changed the face of online advertising. As a fairly new concept, I wanted to debunk a few myths that are already surfacing about it.

“Programmatic” ad buying is like using machines to buy ads. Software purchases digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves human negotiations and manual insertion orders.

Myth 1: Robots are replacing people
Yes and no. Technology is being used to replace some of the more menial tasks that humans have historically had to deal with, like sending insertion orders to publishers and dealing with ad tags, but they’re still required to optimize campaigns and to plan strategies. Programmatic technology will probably mean there are fewer ad buyers in the world, but it could also allow both marketers and sellers to spend more of their time planning sophisticated and customized campaigns instead of getting bogged down in bureaucracy.

Myth 2: Programmatic advertising takes humans out of the buying equation
While it is true that digital ads were bought and sold by ad buyers and salespeople and that programmatic advertising technology has replaced them in this role, the human element in programmatic advertising is in the strategy. Think of it like this – the machines are the brawn and humans are the brains.

Myth 3: Programmatic advertising is the same as real-time bidding
Real-time bidding (RTB) is a type of programmatic advertising but not all programmatic advertising uses RTB. Programmatic advertising refers to the purchase of ads through real-time auctions, but programmatic software also allows advertisers to buy guaranteed ad impressions in advance from specific publisher sites.

Programmatic ad buying is definitely on the rise and some agencies are eager to buy as much media as possible through programmatic channels. Some major brands have also dedicated programmatic ad buying to their in-house teams.

Although it is still mainly online ads that are traded programmatically, it is clear that on the horizon and coming to an agency near you is the opportunity to buy “traditional” media this way, including TV spots and out-of-home ads!

Do you think programmatic advertising is something only for large brands and agencies? Are you currently using programmatic advertising for your company? After reading this blog, will you be considering this for your business? I look forward to your comments.

Kick Start Your Automated Marketing – Not With Technology

Marketing automation (MA) can seem quite a complicated, misunderstood, multi-faceted beast to some organizations because it is more than a centralized platform to handle all online communication – with its many moving parts and strategic decisions, it’s hard for many to get started.

The media would have us believe that MA is all about choosing the right technology and voila, you have MA! Well, sorry to break it to you, but buying the technology is a small part of the story; it’s really all about creating a framework and a strategy.

Knowing your MA strategy will require you to do all of the thinking upfront BEFORE you invest in the software, I have outlined a few key aspects you should consider to kick-start your MA program:

• Conduct some research up front, including outlining what you want to get out of this program, and making sure to put your audience at the centre of your MA
• Build an MA team comprised of key stakeholders from customer service, marketing, sales, and product development. You may want to include an agency representative or MA consultant at this point.
• Conduct a situation analysis outlining where you are now, what systems are in place, what content, and what data do you have today and what is planned for the full rollout of the program
• Set business objectives to be clear as to why you are doing this, including ROI, reducing overhead, KPIs, communicating better with a target audience, or improving the customer experience
• Develop strategies for scoring, nurturing, website, and content marketing framework
• Set tactics with a 12-month view but look at a 3-month window with tactics and clear goals
• Set responsibilities to be clear who is going to do what when, and if a controller is needed (externally or internally) to help measure success, and create and measure the program to a project plan
• Review the various MA platforms available to decide which is the right one for your business e.g. Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Pardoc, Marketto are a few leaders
• Begin implementing by adding a tracking code on your website, landing pages, etc.
  • Assess your reach including how much traffic, social media engagement, email contacts
  • Document audience personas and then create segments to better understand who these personas are (company size, level of person in company, etc.)
    • Processing leads from initial engagement to opportunity enables you to build and nurture workflows in line with the objectives laid out in your tailored strategy.
  • Align segments with your CRM campaigns (e.g. SalesForce opportunities)
  • Building content framework is key to this type of program so keep building on it depending on your objectives. The content could be awareness content like whitepapers and webinars, or inbound-focused with downloads.
  • Leads will not be created by this software, but rather will be created by your ability to provide or repurpose amazing content which the software then serves up
    • You will target, segment and personalize on relevancy, which turns sales into customer service. Nurturing your customers from cold to warm enables you to give them what they are looking for.
  • Analytics will score each visitor interaction on the basis of profile and behaviour, resulting in a prioritized marketing database.

MA allows us to imagine a world where machines and not your staff perform the majority of your marketing activities including reviewing analytics, creating performance reports and data visualizations, writing and scheduling social media updates, determining blog post topics, copywriting, curating content, building strategy, and allocating resources. The result of implementing a solid MA program is that the marketer’s primary role will be to collect and enhance algorithm-based recommendations and content, rather than to devise them.

Are you armed with the knowledge to launch your automated marketing strategy or do you need some help? What help would you need to get started? I look forward to an active discussion!