4 Ways to Improve Your Marketing
Salesforce produces a very informative marketing report each year. It is a great learning tool to improve your marketing. While in 2014 increases in marketing spend were scattered across multiple disciplines, the top five areas for 2015 all relate to social and mobile marketing activities.
One of the features I really like about the report is that they actually break out some UK data! According to their 2015 State of Marketing report, the most pressing business challenges for UK marketers were:
- New business development
- Quality of leads
- Customer acquisition.
This resulted in 88% of marketers planning to either increase or maintain their spend in 2015 and 24% redirecting their spend from traditional to digital advertising.
These three challenges are common to nearly all the businesses I talk to.
Increased spending in 2015
The top five areas for increased spending in 2015 in the UK are:
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- Marketing Automation
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- Content Marketing
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- Social Media Advertising
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- Social Media Marketing
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- Data targeting and segmentation
The report surveyed over 5,000 marketers about their budgets, metrics and strategies for 2015. Having read the report, I am sharing the top four ways to improve your marketing from their research.
1. Create a Compelling Customer Journey
A “customer journey” is the experience individuals have with your brand, products or services over time from prospect to becoming a raving fan. A cohesive customer journey factors in each person’s personality, how they interact with your messages and how they perceive your company based on actions and preferences.
According to the research, “86% of senior-level marketers say that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey.” To improve your marketing, you need to work out where your audience spends most of their time. You should also mix up the types of messages you send so you can find out which are most relevant to them. Most importantly, always reply to individual customers’ messages on social media – no-one likes to be ignored!
2. Move Toward Mobile
The report clearly states that you should consider 2015 the “last call” to get started with mobile!
Google has announced that starting from April 21, “we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact on our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high-quality search results that are optimised for their devices.”
To get help with making a mobile-friendly site, check out Google’s guide to mobile-friendly sites.
Both B2B and B2C companies reported higher success rates with the implementation of mobile marketing. Start optimising your own content for mobile by updating landing pages, your website, apps, social media, and email. These are all adaptable to mobile-friendly layouts.
3. Engage socially with your audience
From 2014 to now, more than twice as many marketers listed social media as a key revenue source. Compared to 25% in 2014, now 64% of marketers believe social media marketing is a “critical enabler for products or services.”
If you’re still struggling to get to grips with social media, start small. Where is your audience most responsive? Focus on that area rather than spreading your efforts too thin.
There is a lot of data on how customers are behaving online. For instance, the weekend is the time when most consumers engage with social media. This is usually when most brands post the least. Study how your own business hours and customer engagement times align. If they don’t, make changes so that your social media marketing is more effective.
4. Rethink Your Email Campaigns
Email has been around for a long time, but it’s changing. With mobile usage on the rise, marketers need to think like a customer and figure out how to best tweak their email strategy to harmonise with this industry shift.
Optimise your email marketing by using a responsive design that works on tablets and phones. Don’t inundate inboxes with too many messages. A quick way to end up in the spam folder is to overwhelm customers.
You should think like a customer. You need to observe technology trends and reflect on how you like to be spoken. Also, think about the kind of information you’re interested in. If you do, you’ll be well on your way to staying in the Inbox and out of the Junk folder!
The key message in this report for me is that, if you do nothing else, sort out how you appear on mobile devices in 2015 will definitely help you improve your marketing.
