Many marketing departments will say there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done, however, the problem is that quite often they’re focusing on the wrong things.
For example, most marketers report that building an email takes between 30-50 minutes and landing pages up to two hours. Others simply don’t have the time to complete such tasks. Why is this still the case?
Throughout 2020, savvy professionals must be prepared to readdress the balance so that they can not only engage customers effectively but leave work at a reasonable hour knowing they’ve done a good job. That doesn’t mean reducing the quality of creative output or the content – in fact, it’s quite the opposite.
The industry’s focus should be on sophisticating marketing methods, building stunning images and promoting rich content, and less about fiddling with emails and landing pages. Remember, it typically takes an average of six commercial touches before a brand’s message convinces a customer to convert. So, time and intelligent output are of the essence – and every email counts.
If a savvy professional can positively answer the questions, ‘Have I engaged my audience enough?’, ‘Was my artwork on point?’ and ‘Was the content what my customers wanted to read?’ then they’re on the right track.
For those still unsure, a good starting point is to look at how empathetic the touchpoints have been throughout each phase of their comms campaign. It might sound strange, but empathy is the best quality a human possesses – and it’s something the AI bots won’t ever take from a marketer. Tapping into this asset can enable a marketing department to relate exactly to how a recipient is feeling, at that specific moment in time.
When they begin to understand how powerful relatable and empathetic comms can be, brands should be in a much stronger position to cherry-pick the best content, subject lines and calls because they know each email they’ve produced meets their audience’s needs.
Spending the right amount of time on delivery
A marketer’s job is to produce content that sounds exciting and delivers a fresh piece of insight that an audience can’t do without. Whether that’s via a whitepaper, guide or feature, its prominence should dictate the amount of effort a marketing department invests into the comms. A recommendation would be to spend an hour plugging SEO blog content, three-five hours on high-value blog articles, 10-15 hours on low-value PDF downloads and 30-40 hours on high-value PDF downloads.
In addition, it’s better to ungate SEO blogs, send out two emails and five social media posts for a high-value blog article, six emails and 10 social media posts for gated, low-value PDF downloads and six emails and 18 social media posts for gated, high-value PDFs. This delivery is purely a benchmark, of course, but it’s a level of sophistication that should provide marketers with the intelligence in how to best promote content.
And, implementing this way of working can help readdress the balance to ensure the department is focusing efforts on content that works, rather than over-compensating and losing valuable time on the pieces that are failing to engage – or have a lighter-touch purpose.
Utilising intuitive tools to produce sophisticated campaigns
In an era of intuitive analytics, the pressure to evidence ROI and ensure marketing departments are delivering comms that are relevant and timely is now more pertinent than ever before. And yet, despite the additions to a bulging workload, many professionals are still not making it easy for themselves. Simply put, if a marketer is managing spreadsheets, or uploading/downloading lists from an email platform themselves, they’re wasting time.
Why isn’t the industry being kinder to itself and using automation to take care of the manually intensive jobs that they don’t have to do anymore?
Smart technology can do so much today – look at how important segments are when understanding how much a modern-day customer’s interests and online behaviours can change by the second. With consumer’s expectations higher and attitudes diversifying depending on how they feel, how can marketers truly know what users want without an intuitive level of detailed insight?
For example, a contact thoroughly searching a brand’s website without provocation should trigger marketers to send more personalised emails directly to them because of their engagement. A reactive piece of comms lets the customer know they’re being listened to and can further encourage a conversion. Having such sophisticated intelligence on hand can further a marketer’s targeting and lead scoring capabilities, so they’re able to feed in hot leads to their sales departments to convert with minimal effort.
Conversely, automation can highlight when an audience or individual is receiving too many emails, which enables marketing departments to then adjust the content being sent so they can continue to target contacts at the right time, with the right message and via the right channels.
For marketers to ease their workloads and still appeal to customers and prospects over the coming 12 months, they must focus on value, promotion and the metrics that matter. Customers’ online behaviours and buying habits are evolving rapidly but by utilising intuitive tools to make everything happen – and ultimately save a marketer’s precious time – the industry should view 2020 as an exciting time to land the right messages perfectly, capitalising on a wealth of opportunities before them.
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