Ted Seward, ResponsePoint’s Director of Marketing and Business Development, shares his thoughts on how marketing and sales lead generation has changed during his tenure in the industry. No big surprise— data is a critical part of marketing success.
I’ve witnessed a lot of changes in the marketing world throughout my career. But when asked about the biggest, most impactful change, I have to answer:
Data!
Data is the lynchpin of marketing success. It’s required for successful and measurable outbound efforts, and it’s generated from inbound efforts.
How you run, analyze, and utilize data is critical to marketing, sales leads, and revenue.
Marketing technology doesn’t exist without data. It is the Achilles’ heel of any organization. If you don’t measure you can’t improve, strategize, or produce reports of substance.
“Eighty-seven percent of marketers consider DATA
their organizations’ most underutilized asset.”
Long before the advent of marketing automation, I was an advocate for campaigns proving ROI. It was paramount that I proved marketing’s contribution to pipeline and revenue. Refining targeted messaging started and finished with data. And now, in a much more data-centric marketing world, the tools and approaches have evolved, but the fundamentals remain.
Developing and implementing a lead process for sales and marketing objectives is absolutely necessary to navigate the inherent challenges of a complex process, disparate data, and variable systems. Businesses are often paralyzed by their overly complex CRM and API integration around data. Now, more than ever, marketing is a discipline requiring vigilance, strategy and smart data management.
Interested in Learning More?
Are you interested in learning more about what it takes to implement a smart, strategic data plan to give your ROI a big boost? Get in touch with the experts at ResponsePoint. We’d be happy to give you a free 15-minute phone consultation and answer any questions you may have.
Second Thoughts
So if data is now, what’s the future of marketing?
The inherent flaw with data is that you must be able to use it. The lynchpin for all of this comes when the insights become more refined and exact—when creating target markets and segments is done predictively from the current insights and data. And, even if your data set is too small there are models that you can apply that mimic the data learning through AI.
Marketing will become less subjective and more exact. Now only in its infancy, campaigns are starting to be tested via AI based on outcomes from previous efforts.
Along with this predictive and artificial intelligence will be better attribution of the nano meta data gathered from the points of action between influence and engagement of a potential client. Think of it as the caller ID of the past, but relative to a multitude of buyer interactions that can be interpreted and predicted.
Before any of these evolutions can occur, the oversaturation of martech tools needs to be culled down via consolidation. Marketers need to have fewer tools that do more, and do it more intuitively. Once AI fully enters the ring, it will be a whole new world.
This is part of a four-part blog series partially excerpted from an interview Ted Seward gave to Sword and Script. Frank Strong is the founder and president of Sword and the Script Media, LLC, a veteran-owned business focused on PR, content marketing and social media for the B2B market space. You can find the original article here
WHO DOES YOUR DATA?
Using data effectively requires more than a cursory knowledge of Google Analytics. If you are going to invest the time and money into a solid data practice, you want to build the right team. That means working with qualified, strategic analysts, and marketing professionals who know what to do with the data results they are given to produce sales leads and revenues. It also requires your clients to be either data savvy or open to the process. It’s still a very shiny and unknown world for a lot of older companies, but the proof can be shown very easily in the numbers. Before you build a data component into your marketing program, be sure you’ve got the right players on your team.
