3 Process Problems Killing Your Marketing Campaigns

3 Process Problems Killing Your Marketing Campaigns process.st/marketing-process-problems/

10/27/2016 The following is a guest post from Maja Kowalska. Maja is the head of content marketing at Benhauer. She supervises both company’s blogs (SALESmanago and APPmanago), ebooks, infographic, and the work of the whole team.

You know the meme with dog in a lab captioned: ”I have no idea what I’m doing”?

Sadly, it’s an image that most of the marketers can easily relate to.

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It happens so often: you put effort into what you feel is the most important course of action, but the results are almost invisible. According to studies, marketing is crucial for 60-80-90% of CEOs, but in the real-life, 100% of them will cut marketers off if they don’t present measurable results.

Bad news: vanity measurements such as Facebook likes don’t count. Moreover, can be treated as little better than mad scientists playing with ideas and generating ridiculous costs.

All this can be really discouraging for creative people who just want to make a living with the job they love.

While watching marketers work, and their position in the company, you can easily point out some patterns and processes that ruin the efforts of the whole team.

Problem #1 Lack of proper content personalization Some marketers work on the ‘spray & pray’ approach — spray recipients with emails and pray for it to work. Those poor souls still rely solely on the bulk campaigns because they know nothing better.

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A quick aside: There was this guy – Piero Manzoni (he was actually pretty famous). One of his most known creations is Merda d’artista. Manzoni bought exactly 90 cans, numbered them, and filled with… well, you know what. Surprise, surprise — people were delighted, and the cans were first to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold (and still sold out). We might say, that this Manzoni guy succeeded on some level. But how many experiments won’t?

Cure the Process The ‘X factor’ they lack is a decent email marketing engine. People are spoiled these days. Every piece of content that omits their context is thrown away and cursed with the ‘spam’ label. It’s not that hard. The personalization is not only Hi, $name$ at the beginning of the message. Emails can relate to the items watched on the website, lead’s level of education, even the social media activity if you want that.

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Email personalization in Intercom.io

In short, it’s all about digital body language. With proper software, they can track and analyze lead’s behavior and then use this data to create behavioral profiles, which can be used for better message personalization.

Problem #2 Digital marketers don’t take notice of KPIs Let’s sneak a peak at the mobile channel. Advertising performance in this channel is rated positively by less than a quarter of marketers (23%), and negatively by almost the same number of responders (20%). The most common answers were: neutral “OK” and simple “I don’t know”.

It tells us a lot about the state of marketing mathematics. Need more proof? More than 90% of marketers use Facebook, 68% of them want to increase their knowledge about the platform and 62% plan on increasing Facebook activities. Yet only 45% of marketers are sure that their Facebook efforts are efficient and up to 88% of marketers would like to learn how to measure their ROI for social media activities.

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This issue has hounded marketers for the last five years. Is this being done deliberately? No. It’s rather getting used to the lack of KPI-responsibility. No tangible results = no growth or improvement.

Cure the Process Marketers have to be taught,that KPIs aren’t evil taskmasters, but actually inform they way they do their jobs.

First of all, someone has to set a reasonable KPI system for marketers. There are many tools, that can help to achieve that: Google Analytics, Webinar platform’s analytic panels, marketing automation platforms, Social Media analytics, etc.

Then, step by step, get them used to measure and to report their efficacy in standup meetings. And, instead of frightening them with cutting the marketing dollars off, teach them that being able to show what they acquired is more lucrative than marking the actions with a bunch of buzzwords!

Use a growth hacking process like this to run tests and improve your KPIs:

Problem #3 Siloing information Obtaining a lead isn’t the only problem during the lead generation process.

Freshly acquired leads have to be nurtured and educated before they will be passed to the sales department. To prevent the process of premature sales, both marketing and sales must communicate.

Unfortunately, the sad reality of many workplaces is that the marketing department works in isolation from the rest of the company. They have no common ground to start the dialogue, so they ignore each other.

Cure the Process A CRM platform accessible by both departments is an elegant way to resolve this problem. By using tags and funnels, all of the people involved in a process gain an insight into lead’s education level. The cooperation within

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company’s CRM will positively affect inter-department cooperation as well. In the era of multi-screening and ROPO effect, one needs a 360 degrees customer’s behavioral profile combined with relation history record to address the proper actions and campaigns to those who are most likely to react.

The discreet charm of the common software to manage the leads is that the people find a common language (the corporate Esperanto) and finally start to communicate.

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