30 Jan Marketing Has Changed. Are You Ready?
A lot of companies and organizations and their marketing departments continually remark that their messages don’t reach the customers very well, campaign response rates are rapidly decreasing and their cost per lead is increasing dramatically. When I speak with contacts in sales and marketing I hear many reasons like ‘our services are too expensive’, ‘the competition is really stepping up their game’, ‘our marketing messages are not compelling enough’ or many other similar comments. These may be true or at least close to truth but they don’t help to fix the issue.
The only question is how can a company ensure that potential and existing customers get their message – when these customers live every day online with extreme information overload.
Why do companies struggle so hard to reach their customers? The massive amount of online and traditional marketing messages delivered every second as you go through your day. We are exposed to between 3,000 and 20,000 of those messages per day per day. Only a very small fraction of those messages gets into our active memory and drives us to connect. So, we have a drastic decrease in marketing effectiveness overall. The main theme is that the real and very scarce resource is attention.
The primal shift from throwing money at a marketing problem to a full integration of strategies that aim to bring value to to the user through valuable content and community is a drastic change from traditional marketing.
Current customers spend 67% more than new customers.
By adapting inbound marketing methodologies and implementing integrated technologies, marketing companies today are able to help every stage of the sales conversion funnel while decreasing customer aquisition cost (CAC).
By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human. (Gartner Research)
We use specific tools with a focused approach to delivering valuable content to customers with these four goals in mind:
- Increasing traffic and leads
- Increasing leads and improving visitor-to-lead conversion rates
- Increasing qualified leads and reducing the sales cycle
- Utilizing Big Data to improve sales performance and revenue
Spending on marketing analytics is expected to increase 60% by 2015. (CMO Survey)
Analyzing your return-on-investment is the main key for continuously improving and refining your omni-channel marketing efforts. Reviewing your marketing campaign analytics to see how it’s performed, picking apart why a piece of content is working better than another and streamlining future marketing work based on this report data, to bring you the greatest results over time possible.
CONCLUSION:
Integrated marketing, marketing automation and big data offer us the tools that we need to deliver improved customer value in the marketing process. The only thing that is holding our bottom line back is the speed in which we all pivot to address the shortfalls in the traditional marketing process.
Interested in finding out more about Inbound Marketing and how you can effectively change the way you reach your customers?
Learn More about Inbound Marketing