I had the pleasure of attending GrowthBeat 2015 last week, to connect with – and learn from – some of the best growth marketers in the tech industry. Throughout the two day conference, 3 key marketing trends came up again and again:
- Personalization: When it comes to marketing your products, one size rarely fits all. The best example of this came from Chris Brull, VP Marketing at Kawasaki Motors. His customers range from the thrill-seeking 20-and-30-somethings who “want to ride 200 mph” to farmers who use Kawasaki products to make a living. While many products won’t have such diverse user groups, catering to different personas gives marketers the opportunity to show how their products meet the unique needs of each potential customer. My recruitment tech clients, for instance, may be selling to CEOs of small companies and HR leaders at very large companies – each with a distinct pain point they need to solve. Personalizing our marketing based on implicit and explicit data points allows us to speak directly to each potential customer about the things that matter most to them.
- Data: Building upon the previous trend, data – both implicit and explicit – is a key component of modern growth marketing. Julie Bornstein of StichFix said, “Try both implicit and explicit personalization, and see what works best for your brand. What people say and do and be different.” In the case of HR software, let’s say you have explicit data from a website form field that says your potential customer’s biggest pain point is sourcing qualified candidates, but implicit data shows they spend most of their time looking at your resources around interviewing. Test to see whether emails focused on sourcing or interviewing get better click throughs and conversions, and use the results of that test to inform your email marketing automation workflows. Everything should be tested and measured so that hard data is informing all of your marketing decisions. In my experience as a marketer, I’ve discovered time and again that “best practices,” and things that have worked in the past, don’t necessarily work for each of my clients. Each client, product and target market is different – and you don’t know what will work until you test it.
- Multi-touch attribution: Building on the previous point again, it’s important to collect data along each point of the buyer’s journey to better inform your marketing strategy. Many companies are only measuring the last touch before a conversion, ignoring the many touch points that nurture the prospect into a lead. As a result, they may discontinue marketing tactics that don’t appear to have a return on investment or, worse, allocate time and money to the wrong lead generation programs because they *think* they are contributing to lead conversions. With the right data, you can attribute conversions to the many touch points that happen between a prospect’s first interaction with your company, all the way through to the point in which they become a lead. You can then use this data to optimize your marketing program for conversions. As an example, if you know that 50% of your prospects convert on your website after looking at your features, pricing, and testimonials pages, you should optimize your email workflows and website CTAs to encourage prospects to visit those pages. Or, if organic search traffic to your blog is the number 1 source of first touches, you should focus your efforts on the blog – perhaps with social ads or an influencer program.
While these 3 marketing trends aren’t by any means new, they are (in my opinion) underutilized by most companies. The companies that are employing these trends well – including many of the companies that spoke at GrowthBeat – are using proprietary marketing systems and data scientists to do so.
As marketing technology becomes more advanced, however, the barrier to entry will be lower – and personalization, data and multi-touch attribution will be used more widely. For instance, we have the ability to personalize marketing communications through marketing automation tools, but integrating with predictive analytics tools and utilizing closed-loop reporting will be a game changer. With all of the right data being collected and analyzed, marketers will be able to use it to reach their target audience at the right time, with the right content.