Customers, Journeys, Skills matter in online marketing
Customers Matter
No matter how smart your team is, not putting customers first will lead to failure. Hey, that is is easy you might say. Let me tell you: It is the toughest part.
Why? Everybody seems to know what the customers wants, there are a ton of opinions, but often very little facts and even less alignement between functions such as exec leadership, marketing and product/IT. When asking how does our customer insight feed into priorization or marketing automation, it gets really tricky.
How to: Implement personas at macrolevel
Once you break down your business objectives and strategy into personas, you will have a common basis for discussion. At the macro level, engineers, product owners, marketeers have now mental models of prototypical customer personas.
At the micro level, each function will have their own metrics, but as long as these metrics are tied to the macrolevel /persona level, everybody can relate.
Journeys Matter
The funnel is dead. Customers do have a number of preferred brands when starting their journey. However, unlike conventional wisdom tells us, customers enlarge their set of choices during the information gathering process online.
Only after known brands and new choices (which were not in the initial set) have been identified, the customers starts converging in the decision stage. Most important, only in the usage stage, customers will make up their mind if they become loyalt to you.
How to: Map tactice to stage in buyer jounrey
Online marketing, which does seek to maximize customer life time value via loyalty compression (meaning previous customers does not go throught the search phase again) will not be profitable.
Journey stages need to be mapped with every marketing channel and tactic (Slide 5). And even within single channels such as SEA, you should map your informational keywords vs. your decision keywords.
Skills Matter
Today’s modern marketing stands on the should of giants. And I mean the giants in academia and corporate prior to online marketing. Aknowledging that the fundamentals of marketing are still important, there are not sufficient to be sucessful today.
Today’s marketers need be well versed in analytics as well as educated in tech. These insights allow you to have meaningful discussion with your peers in data science and engineering.
How to: Create a diverse team, also of non-marketeers
For a well working modern marketing team look for diversity: a) in background and b) in experience. If your math geeks, techies, customer advocates, and product guys are working as a team your performance will skyrocket.
Bringing together such a team is challenging, as it requires thinking beyond the functional silo and a lot of managerial expericen to manage diverse backgrounds.
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