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Author: Franz Malten Buemann
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Zoon Webinars and Active Campaign automation
Hey, I’m trying to build an automation with Zapier, so I can segment Zoom webinar attendees automatically, as well as sending them the zoom recording after the webinar. Using Zapier is quite limited, so I’m looking into Plusthis, so I can segment attendes vs non attendes automatically. Has anyone got some experience with Plusthis? Thanks
submitted by /u/1984ya [link] [comments] -
Turning an Idea Into a Purposeful Mission
This article is part of a larger series that focuses on diversity and equity in marketing through the amplification of Black and racially diverse authors. As a company, we are committed to identifying actions we can take in the fight against racism and injustice, and elevating BBIPOC voices is paramount to inspiring change. Follow along and read other posts in this series here.
This post is authored by Kerel Cooper, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at LiveIntent.
The fights for racial equality of 2020 have been a catalyst for companies and organizations to rethink their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Across the board, companies and organizations are thinking about how they recruit and develop more diverse talent and how to instill DEI efforts into their everyday way of life.
And while the conversations and efforts are great, there is still a very long way to go.
These efforts and impact must be sustainable over a long period of time or they are for naught. Regardless of your race, gender, sexual orientation and background, we all have a part to play.
Our idea
For an industry that does a great job of talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, the fact of the matter is there was very little progress made.
As you see in the chart from the ANA, only 12% of CMO’s are non-white. That is unchanged from 2019.Source: ANA Diversity Report for the Advertising/Marketing Industry (2020)
Back in April of 2018, my friend Erik Requidan called me up one evening and said that he had an idea. The idea was to create a platform for diverse voices within advertising technology to tell their personal stories and journey. Erik came up with the idea as a response to the widely held feeling of exhaustion that comes from going to industry conferences and events and seeing only a few of “us” in the room and even less on stage.
Erik’s idea was fueled by his desire for change and I loved it. He asked me to join him, to which I responded with an emphatic yes! After a few brainstorming sessions, Erik’s idea turned into the Minority Report Podcast, which we launched in May 2018.
Our purposeful mission
Over the past 2½ years, the Minority Report Podcast has evolved into a platform that highlights people of color, women & LGBTQ+ communities within business, media and technology as we tap into their experience and subject matter expertise. To date, we have recorded 65+ episodes featuring a wide range of diverse individuals.
Our discussions dive into family background & upbringing, career journey, career advice, how they’ve dealt with discrimination, ideas for improving DEI, and insights into how they see the world through their unique lens.
Of course, we also delve into business models and the ecosystem in which their businesses thrive, and how their experience informs their leadership.
We know this podcast is having a positive impact on the industry. Here is a great text I received from a former guest of the podcast: ”[I] wanted to say thank you for what you guys did with the Minority Report Podcast. Whatever ppl and companies are trying to recognize ‘diversity and inclusion’, you guys were already at the forefront, shining a light on [DEI efforts] a couple years back.”
Erik and I like to say that we’ve created one of the largest collections of stories from diverse individuals in the world of business, media, and technology. But even more importantly, these stories live on as a catalogue for the next generation of leaders to reference.
Stories of people like us, their experiences, and their expertise were missing from our careers as Erik and I were coming up in the industry.
Our hope is that our content will fill that void by shining a light on diverse talent. There’s no shortage of diverse talent out there! Creating this content library is our way of contributing to change and turning an idea into a purposeful mission.Minority Report Podcast Guests
Advice for turning an idea into a purposeful mission
Again, regardless of your race, gender, sexual orientation or background we all have a part to play. And there are many ways in which we can contribute.
If you have an idea and may be stuck on how to move forward, here is some advice for turning that idea into a purposeful mission.
Be unapologetic
Do not express regret about speaking up and taking a stand. One thing I always try to remember is to never start a conversation with “I’m sorry but..” Instead, stand firm and don’t apologize for sharing your perspective.
Follow your passion
There are many ways to impact DEI. When deciding how you will impact DEI, the key is to follow your passion. That passion will be what sustains you over a long period of time and help you maintain consistency. You could write a blog, starting a podcast, getting involved in company ERG programs, being a strong ally, assisting with company recruiting efforts, or anything else you can think of.
The important thing is that, whatever it is you do, you have a passion for it.
Stay focused on your mission
Again, there are many ways to impact DEI and it’s easy to try to get involved in too many things. But if you spread yourself too thin, you’ll burn out and you won’t be able to continue your work.
It’s much more impactful to stay focused on a couple of things and do them really well as opposed to spreading yourself too thin.
Wrap up
There is no one way to impact DEI. The most important thing you can do is get involved and stay involved. If you’ve got an idea, follow through. You might not be able to influence the number of non-white CMOs all by yourself, but any well-placed effort contributes to that change.
The more people involved in these initiatives, the better! No matter how small you might think your idea is.
A few key points to remember:Only 12% of CMO’s are non-white, a number that’s unchanged from 2019.
There’s still a widely held feeling of exhaustion that comes from going to industry events and seeing only a few of “us” in the room—and even less on stage.
Share your story. Stories live on as a catalogue for the next generation of leaders to reference.
Be unapologetic as you speak out. Your work is needed and necessary.
Following your passion will help you stay motivated for the long run. There’s still a lot of work to be done and nothing will change overnight. Finding an idea you’re passionate about will help sustain you when a moment of emotion or the news cycle has moved on.
Keep your focus on one or two things instead of on every thing. There are a lot of great ideas out there, but you have limited time, resources, and energy. Choosing one or two projects you love will keep you from burning out.Remember, all great change starts with an idea.
Kerel is the Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at LiveIntent. He currently leads the marketing team and works closely with sales, product, engineering and customer success to create awareness and generate leads for key products and features. Kerel has 20 years of digital media experience building and leading Advertising Operations, Account Management, Partnerships & Product Marketing teams.
Prior to LiveIntent, Kerel Cooper held positions at Advance Digital as the Senior Director Ad Platform Strategies and JupiterMedia as Director of Advertising Operations. Kerel is also the co-founder and co-host of Minority Report Podcast which highlights people of color, women & LGBTQ community within media, business and technology. Kerel has a Bachelor’s degree in Management Science/Marketing from Kean University, an MBA from Regis University, and Diversity and Inclusion Certification from Cornell University.Visit this page to see more in the series, or check back in for our next guest post.
CM Group is a family of global marketing technology brands including Campaign Monitor, CM Commerce, Delivra, Emma, Liveclicker, Sailthru and Vuture. By joining together these leading brands, CM Group offers a variety of world-class solutions that can be used by marketers at any level. Headquartered in Nashville, TN, CM Group has United States offices in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York City, Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and global offices in Australia, London, New Zealand and Uruguay.
The post Turning an Idea Into a Purposeful Mission appeared first on Campaign Monitor. -
SalesForce – Automate Marketing Collateral
Hello! I am looking for some insight in regards to automating the creation of co-branded marketing flyers and promotional collateral for sales reps. Our current process looks like this:
Sales rep fills out a hubspot form for a marketing request which is sent to my email. I reach out to sales rep to discuss any extra info needed. I create a flyer from a template with the desired information on it, including the reps contact information. In few cases, I develop completely custom flyers or social images. The rep then downloads this as an image or PDF, then sends it out to their clients via email.
This process is messy and slow. I was wondering if there are any SalesForce solutions that would allow reps to create their own marketing based off of a list of dropdowns or is prepopulated with account info. I’m new to marketing automation and not familiar with all SalesForce can offer, so I am looking forward to hearing from some of you! Thank you
submitted by /u/mark_shotgun [link] [comments] -
How to Use Customer Insights to Enable the Omnichannel Experience in Your Contact Center Today
Ask any contact center leader for data and you’ll likely end up with a hefty pile of metrics and analytics. Most companies can pull up copious documents, spreadsheets, and reports with endless data and analytics. But too often, that data just sits there, gathering digital dust. Companies understand that gathering data is important. But they often neglect to do anything with it. The essence of a good omnichannel strategy is making your data actionable to improve your customer experience. Unless you can connect your data across teams and platforms, much of it is useless. Here are four ways companies benefit by using big data to enable the omnichannel experience.
Actionable data enables you to personalize your omnichannel experience
Customer data reveals how your customers like to communicate
Insights from your contact center help connect KPIs to customer outcomes
Better reporting reveals weak spots in the customer journey (so you can improve!)
Full article: https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/4-reasons-to-put-your-data-to-work-how-to-use-customer-insights-to-enable-the-omnichannel-experience-in-your-contact-center-today-02364175
submitted by /u/vesuvitas [link] [comments] -
Today is Worldwide Backup Day
Google is not your friend, it’s a tool.
It’s been 2,702 days since they shut down Google Reader and people still remember.
Or consider that Google can shut you out of all their services with no recourse or appeal possible. All your data, photos, calendars, emails… gone.
But yes, you can back up your data. Do it today…
Visit this page to start the process. It’s free. Hopefully, you’ll never need it. Press a few buttons and back up your data to a cloud service so that it’s in two places–This should happen automatically, but since it doesn’t, it’s worth doing.
The internet was originally designed as a resilience machine, designed to heal itself and work around interruptions. And the essence of it was a distributed, peer-to-peer network that worked precisely because it was open. As data is hoarded, manipulated and monetized, that original intent has been turned upside down.
Resilient systems don’t have to trend toward monopoly. In fact, it’s better when they don’t. And don’t forget to backup your data.
[PS the post from earlier today was skewed by homonyms. Thanks to alert readers for pointing it out… sorry about missing it, but the metaphor is still worth thinking about.] -
How to Connect Virtual and In-Person Marketing Experiences in the All-Digital Marketplace
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, but it’s also more complicated than ever before. There are more customers, more channels, and more opportunities to succeed and fail. But these are the challenges that marketers like Nick Runyon, CMO of PFL.com, thrive on.
PFL is a leading provider of tactile marketing automation and helps brands deliver special customer experiences by combining digital marketing efforts with physical direct mail. In the tactile marketing automation equation, gifts and swag plus great digital ads equals excellent customer memories.
Nick recently appeared on the Marketing Trends podcast to talk about multichannel marketing. With two decades of marketing experience, he joined PFL in late 2019 — just in time for the tumultuous year that has been 2020. Here’s how he’s helped the company keep innovating as the marketplace has shifted to digital.MAKE VIRTUAL ENGAGEMENT AS TACTILE AS YOU CAN
As everyone’s shifted to working from home, many B2B marketers’ prospects have dispersed. If your buyers are no longer in the office, how do you reach them? And once you figure out how to reach them, how do you create experiences that are engaging, valuable, and lead to reliable revenue streams for your company?
Zoom is one of PFL’s clients, and though millions of people are using the free version of Zoom, the company also has an interest in retaining paid customers. To help Zoom achieve this, PFL created customized, interactive landing pages and links that their sales team could send out on a one-off basis.
Now, Zoom’s sales team sends those links to customers they’re interested in retaining. On the interactive landing page, the customer can explore the value they’d get from upgrading to a paid Zoom account, and choose from a list of customized swag kits to receive for free from Zoom — including items like drink coolers, webcams, microphones, and headphones.
Once the kit is delivered to the customer, Zoom’s sales representatives are immediately notified through PFL’s software, and they can follow up with an email or a phone call. By melding the physical and virtual worlds through gifts and ads, you can create truly compelling and personal experiences for your buyers.PLUG SALES INTO THE MARKETING EQUATION
In our new all-digital marketing landscape, sales and marketing alignment is more important than ever. At PFL, it’s been really important for sales to plug into everything marketing is doing. The more they know about PFL’s customers, the more relevant their engagement can be. For example, if a customer’s profile says they’re a proud graduate of the University of Alabama and a big college football fan, sales teams can send them Crimson Tide-themed gifts.
When you can give your customers the gift of a physical object that’s relevant and personalized to their interests, it shows that your marketing and sales teams are thinking about them and value their business. In Nick’s view, that’s a good place to be, and it sets your teams apart from less thoughtful or distracting marketing.
But the gift doesn’t close the deal. What really matters is providing relevant service and delivering value to the right person with the right product at the right time. No matter how great your swag is, the customer experience across digital and physical channels is key.
MAKE YOUR MARKETING REMARKABLE
In B2B marketing, you have to generate real conversations, not just awareness. After all, it’s no good if a bunch of people know about your product but never talk about it together. To generate the conversations you need, your marketing needs to be remarkable.
That’s where the value of a physical gift comes in. As Nick says, if there’s something in the room from your brand, that’s a conversation-starter. People want to know where the object came from and the story behind it — and that story has the potential to be a great story about your brand.
Ultimately, a gift is never just a gift. It’s a storytelling device — especially now that almost every other form of marketing engagement has to take place digitally. A relevant, personalized gift has the power to tell an exciting story and set your brand apart. And with marketing automation, it’s easier to send those gifts at scale.
To get more insights about the power of marketing automation and relevant swag for your B2B buyers, listen to Nick Runyon’s episode of the Marketing Trends podcast. -
Develop Digital Customer Relationships, Not Single Purchases
COVID-19 hasn’t just driven an unprecedented upsurge in web activity; it’s sparked a huge shift towards digital-first living and behaviours that look set to become permanent changes. Alongside record levels of time spent online, the year so far has seen ecommerce sales rise by £4.5 billion and 17.2 billion consumers — equal to 25 percent…
The post Develop Digital Customer Relationships, Not Single Purchases appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine. -
How to Predict and Analyze Your Customers’ Buying Patterns
Buyers don’t think like marketers or salespeople. Anyone who works in these departments can admit that. More importantly, buyers don’t think like each other either.
Each consumer follows their own set of buying patterns, whether they recognize it or not. For instance, someone who walks to work every morning may grab a coffee from the Starbucks on the corner — to them, that’s part of their routine. To Starbucks, that’s an established buying pattern.
But if this person happened to move neighborhoods, they’d likely establish a new routine (and buying pattern).Buying patterns are important to recognize, analyze, and measure because they help businesses better understand and potentially expand their target audience. Buying patterns also fall in step with the customer journey, although they connect more with the psychology and motivations behind each stage.
In this post, we are going to discuss buying patterns and how to predict those of your customers.
What are buying patterns?
Buying patterns refer to the why and how behind consumer purchase decisions. They are habits and routines that consumers establish through the products and services they buy.
Buying patterns are defined by the frequency, timing, quantity, etc. of said purchases.
These patterns are determined by factors such as:Where someone lives
Where they work
How much money they make
What they enjoy and prefer
What their friends and family recommend
What their goals and motivations are
The price of the product or service they’re interested in (and any active sales or discounts)
Any product displays
The necessity of the product or service
Festivals, holidays, rituals, or celebrationsFor example, let’s say the customer mentioned in the introduction is named Robert. Robert’s coffee-buying pattern is one coffee every weekday morning, and this pattern is primarily influenced by where he lives and what he likes to drink.
Therefore, when Robert moves neighborhoods, he’ll likely choose a new morning routine (and establish a new buying pattern) that allows him to still snag that morning coffee.
So, in this case, why should Starbucks care?
Well, by understanding Robert’s buying pattern, Starbucks could better understand the buyer persona he represents, predict in-store traffic, and analyze how they could better market their products to similar customers.
Predicting Customer Buying Patterns
Many, many things influence a customer’s buying behavior and patterns. In the case above, Robert’s neighborhood and coffee cravings influenced his daily Starbucks routine, but that’s just one example of his buying patterns. Robert also has established buying patterns for his groceries, gym usage, clothing purchases, and more.
These types of purchases fall into four consumer behavior categories:Routine purchases (e.g. weekly grocery shopping)
Limited decision-making purchases (e.g. a new salon recommended by a friend)
Extensive decision-making purchases (e.g. a new car)
Impulse purchases (e.g. a pack of gum at the register)Buying patterns are present in all of these types of consumer behavior, but they’re most prevalent and predictable through routine purchases. (We’ll dive more into these types and examples in the following section.)
Marketers at companies in all these industries work to uncover and understand the buying patterns of their customers. Most buying patterns are established through the typical buyer journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.
When a pattern is established, however, the buyer then no longer has to become aware of their problem and consider a solution — they simply repeat the decision stage over and over, thus creating the pattern.
So, how can marketers and salespeople uncover the current buying patterns of their customers? The most straightforward way is to ask. Once you set a baseline of customer behavior and expectations, you can then start to predict their patterns — and those of similar shoppers.
Here are some questions to ask in a customer survey or focus group:Why did you first purchase
?
Who in your household decided to purchase ? Does this person make all the buying decisions?
Where do you go when looking for ?
How long does it take to decide to buy ?
Do you buy other
What’s your budget for ?
How far would you travel to buy ?These questions help you understand the why and how behind your customer purchase decisions, thus uncovering their buying pattern as it relates to your product or service.
The most important takeaway about buying patterns is that they’re ever-changing. Not only do they differ between your customers and buyer personas, but they may also change as an individual’s life changes — as we saw above with Robert.
Customer Buying Pattern Examples
In the previous section, I outlined the four main types of consumer behavior. Below, I’ll unpack an example of a customer buying pattern for each of the types of consumer behaviors.
1. Routine Purchases
I mentioned above that routine purchases typically yield buying patterns. This is true because these patterns are the most prevalent and predictable.
For example, let’s say Betty goes grocery shopping every Monday morning after taking her kids to school. She buys many of the same items every week since her kids are young and prefer to repeat their favorite meals for dinner. Sometimes, she’ll splurge on an extra dessert or fancy coffee, but for the most part, she sticks to the same list.
On one Monday, her kids’ school is closed for maintenance. She has to take them to the grocery, vastly changing her grocery routine as her kids pull a variety of snacks and treats off the shelves. She decides to buy a few to placate her kids and treat them to a special day off.
This is also an example of how a buying pattern can be altered based on who accompanies the decision-maker.
2. Limited Decision-Making Purchases
Limited decision-making purchases are typically rendered through a trusted recommendation by a friend or family member. Because of the recommendation, the decision-maker doesn’t consider it to be a tough decision or feel the need to do much research. This type of purchase can actually be the catalyst for an altered buying pattern.
For example, let’s say Georgia has gone to the same hair salon for five years. She’s never disliked her services there, but when her friend mentions an amazing new salon that has opened down the street, Georgia is curious to try it.
When she goes, she is so impressed with the service that she decides to make it her new routine salon, thus altering her buying pattern due to outside influence or recommendation.
3. Extensive Decision-Making Purchases
Extensive decision-making purchases are usually those that are for expensive, seldomly-made purchases. These may include a new car, computer, or even a home. Because of their ticket size, there’s little room to establish a buying pattern between purchases.
However, some consumers are loyal to certain brands or stores. For example, let’s say Austin decides it’s time for a new car. He and his family have always owned Fords, so when it comes time to shop for cars, he doesn’t think twice about looking for a new Ford.
While he’s uncertain of what model he’ll buy (sedan versus SUV), he knows for sure that he’ll purchase a Ford vehicle, thus creating a buying pattern between his few-and-far-between car purchases.
4. Impulse Purchases
Impulse purchases are exactly how they sound — impulsive purchases made with little planning, research, or forethought. For this reason, buying patterns are hard to establish with these kinds of purchases.
However, one consistent factor in impulse buying is convenience; consumers often make impulsive purchases when they need something quickly or see something they (think they) need. The convenience factor of impulse purchases allows for buying patterns around location and proximity.
For example, let’s say Gio likes to add a little something extra to his takeout purchases when he orders on his food delivery app. He often changes where he gets food from, but he typically throws in an add-on (e.g. fries, a drink, or a cookie) when prompted before check-out.
In this case, there’s no buying pattern established in what Gio orders or where he orders from, but the app tracks his add-on purchases to analyze how often he makes impulse buys on the app. Then, they know to continue prompting those add-ons or perhaps increase the number of products listed.
Tools for Analyzing Customer Buying Patterns
Customer buying pattern analysis is all about analyzing customer behaviors, and there are plenty of tools that can help.
1. Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics provides a deep-dive view of your customers’ behaviors on your website. From traffic numbers to user demographics, Google Analytics can show you how your customers are interacting with your website. It can also help you establish baseline behaviors from which you can track patterns (or new behaviors that indicate breaks in patterns).
2. Facebook Audience InsightsIf your audience is active on your Facebook Page, you can learn a lot about their behaviors and patterns through Facebook Audience Insights. These patterns may not always result in a purchase, but understanding how your audience behaves on social media can teach you how to optimize your social and other promotional content to better entice them to buy.
For example, if you see your followers engage the most on posts that ask a question, perhaps you start posting inquiries that relate to your product or service (versus blatantly promotional posts that don’t otherwise interest your audience).
3. HubSpot CRMHere at HubSpot, we’re strong advocates of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. So much so that we offer a free one. Not only do CRMs help align your sales, marketing, and customer service teams, but they provide natural, seamless places to store and track customer behaviors — including buying patterns.
If you link your CRM to your register and/or ecommerce platform and track your customer’s purchases, it will quickly show you patterns in purchase frequency, timing, and more. All you have to do is stay diligent in your data collection.
4. HubSpot Service HubHubSpot Service Hub includes valuable Customer Feedback Software that can help you run surveys and collect insights about your customer buying patterns. The tool offers many pre-written and templatized survey options so you can dive right into gathering information around your customer behaviors and preferences.
For example, if you surveyed 25 known customers through HubSpot Service Hub, their answers and preferences would then be recorded in your HubSpot CRM, making it easier for you to track behaviors and establish buying patterns.
Buying patterns can tell you a lot about who’s buying from you and why. Use this information to better understand your customers, and fashion your marketing to match their expectations and meet them where they are.
To dig deeper, read our blog post on marketing psychology next. -
How to Get Started With CRM-Powered Advertising [+ Why You Should]
HubSpot was founded during a time when people were under constant attack from aggressive outbound marketing tactics.
I’m sure nobody misses the unwanted ads, spam emails, and cold calls that used to interrupt their day back in the mid-00s.
Ad retargeting wasn’t a thing, so we all had to settle for repeatedly seeing the same ads for products we had absolutely no interest in.
Marketing has changed a lot since then. Thankfully.
Nowadays, companies have the ability to develop engaging advertising campaigns that complement their inbound strategies and speak directly to their audiences’ needs. The concept of journey-based advertising has been widely adopted and marketers can now create customized content for individuals at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Targeting has become more sophisticated, meaning that ads are now less interruptive and more informative — so sophisticated, in fact, that that we now take for granted the quality of the ads we get served in our Instagram feeds and YouTube videos.
Dare we say it — in some cases, the ad suggestions are actually really useful: “Oh, hey ad for that new running watch that I didn’t know I needed but now am obsessed with.” There is still a lot of bad advertising and mediocre marketing out there, but it’s important to recognize just how far we’ve come.
But, as advertising capabilities have evolved, so too has the digital landscape. And that has created a host of new challenges for marketers.Cutting Through the Noise
There’s more choice online now than ever before, and what was previously helpful has, in many cases, become noise. Where we were once served two ads a day for a new jacket, we’re now served 22. Where there was once three restaurants in the local area offering takeaway menus, there’s now 30.
In 2020, this trend has accelerated due to COVID-19, as more and more businesses have moved online and added to the ever-increasing competition for attention. This increased volume of noise is causing consumers to tune out, and customer acquisition costs to go up. And marketers are struggling to make an impact.To overcome these new challenges, marketers need a new approach — one that allows them to adapt the way they advertise to how consumers like to buy.
Today, the buyer’s journey is rarely linear. Consumers now interact with brands on laptops and smartphones and via social media, websites, and third-party influencers on the path to a purchase. And they still expect a consistent brand experience throughout.
Nowadays, the only way advertisers can break through the noise online and deliver a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints is with extreme relevance: both in terms of content and location.
Relevant messaging is the key to grabbing consumers’ attention, engaging them, and guiding them to the next stage of the buyer’s journey. The first step towards delivering this is meeting the audience where they are. With over four billion people worldwide now working from home, consumers’ purchasing behavior and content consumption habits are changing rapidly.
In the U.S., staying home has led to a 60% increase in the amount of content consumed — Americans are now watching roughly 12 hours of media content a day, according to Nielsen data. Knowing where an audience is paying attention is as important as knowing what messaging is likely to resonate.
Once a marketer understands where their target audience is spending their time, the next challenge is to create ad content that addresses their needs in an engaging way and is tailored to whichever stage of the buyer’s journey they are at.
For example, if a prospect is at the attract stage, an ad that helps them become more familiar with a brand name and core value proposition would probably perform much better than a niche ad that highlights a specific new feature. That type of ad would likely work better with audiences that are much closer to a purchase decision and comparing the feature sets of different products.
However, most companies today are struggling to deliver the type of relevant, engaging ad content that resonates with consumers. And, in most cases, the cause can be traced back to a disconnection between their marketing, website, and sales efforts.
When these elements aren’t working in unison, it becomes extremely difficult for marketers to get a clear view of where prospects are spending their time and which stage the buyer’s journey they are at. This makes it virtually impossible for them to deliver relevant messaging and leaves them with little choice but to resort to those dated outbound tactics I mentioned earlier.
In 2021, the secret to delivering better advertising lies in marketers’ ability to unlock the data at their disposal and leverage it to deliver hyper-relevant messaging and a unified buying experience.
At HubSpot, we call it ‘CRM-powered advertising.’
A Data-Driven Approach to Advertising
CRM-powered advertising enables marketers to create more relevant, engaging ads for prospects in three key ways:By providing them with up-to-date customer data, which allows them to understand their audiences’ preferences and purchase intent.
By giving them reliable reporting based on holistic customer data, which provides insights into what’s working and what’s not.
By enabling them to automate their ads based on live CRM data, which allows them to continually deliver relevant ads as prospects move to different stages of the buyer’s journey.Let’s take a look at an example.
Say you’re a demand generation specialist working at a B2B company. Competition is rising in your industry and you’ve seen a decline in the number of qualified leads coming from your ads each month. You know that a more targeted and personalized approach is needed. And you turn to CRM-powered advertising.
As a first step, you create a different campaign for each stage of the buyer’s journey. For the attract stage, for example, you use data in your CRM to create a lookalike audience based on your happiest customers. This will be your target audience. You know that your company’s security features are a key differentiator in the market so you create ads that highlight that aspect of your value proposition.
Because the target audience you’ve created is reflective of your best customers, you get a high percentage of click-throughs. This leads prospects towards the next stage of the buyer’s journey, where they get the opportunity to download an ebook to learn more about your company’s products and services. Your software gives you the ability to create custom fields on the download form, which helps you to gain more granular preference data, and ultimately, get to know your prospects better.
You have set up your campaign to automatically route these new leads to your sales team, and because you’re working out of a shared CRM, you see a number of prospects move into the “demo” stage of their journey.
Again, using your CRM data, you sync these lifecycle stages to the display network you’re using, which automatically begins to serve a new set of ads to prospects based on the next stage of their journey. This allows you to deliver hyper-relevant messaging that addresses the pain points that are specific to prospects who are on the verge of making a purchase decision, such as social proof from happy customers.
As deals close, you then use attribution reporting to see exactly which new customers engaged with your ads and report to your leadership team on the number of deals your CRM-powered strategy influenced.
How to Get Started With CRM-Powered Advertising
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is built to enable marketers to launch CRM-powered advertising campaigns and deliver a seamless experience for prospects — from the first time they see an ad to the moment they become a customer and beyond.
It offers ads tools that allow marketers to build deeply segmented audiences, serve different ads for different stages of the buyer’s journey, and precisely measure the performance of every campaign — all informed by rich CRM data.
Advertising has come a long way since the days of interruptive, irrelevant, and irritating content that once dominated our screens. A new era is unfolding — one in which consumers expect relevant messaging across every touchpoint and in which companies must find new ways to cut through the ever-increasing volume of noise online.
A CRM-powered advertising strategy, driven by a CRM platform built with this purpose in mind, empowers marketers to not only gain deeper insights into their customers’ needs, but to turn those insights into engaging content with the potential to delight prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey. -
Smart, generous and kind
The Ngram tracks words used in books over the last 200 years. Here’s what a million authors and a billion readers think:
Kindness matters.
[Update: I’m realizing that kind has more homonyms than the other two words, and yet the idea still resonates…]