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We have the privilege of spending a lot of time with a lot of marketers from different industries — travel, telco, utilities, and finance, to name a few. Marketers who are taking matters into their own hands. Marketers who understand that in order to progress, they have to continuously challenge the status quo and rethink the way they were doing things.
You'll find tons of articles and videos all over our website sharing these experiences and insights, and we thought it would be inspiring to offer you a short-and-sweet overview of 7 of the most important tips from 2019 to inspire your 2020 strategy:
1. Dare to challenge the way you generate and nurture leads.
Particularly in more traditional industries like energy and utilities, it can be hard to challenge the status quo. In 2019, the Vattenfall Digital Marketing team took on this challenge and ended up drastically improving their lead gen model.
They were bringing in plenty of leads, but their funnel progression wasn't properly eliminating less qualified leads in time, which meant their call center was being inundated with more work than it could handle. Under-qualified leads were getting calls they didn't want, and highly qualified leads weren't getting the calls they requested.
The Vattenfall digital marketing team went into problem-solving mode and ended up completely revamping their lead scoring model in collaboration with their Relay42 consultant. The result was a more personalized, more complex funnel that did a far better job of leading customers and prospects to the information they really wanted in the moment.
Their willingness to try something new brought better results for Vattenfall and — more importantly — resulted in a better journey for their customers.
2. Accept that growth hacking isn't dead — and it's not too late to get started.
Growth hacking has become such a popular approach because it succinctly combines science and creativity. It offers a way for marketers to take a structured, logical approach to discovering what works — and by laying out a structure with rules, it actually provides much-needed room for creative thinking and experimentation.
KLM airlines have done their share of growth hacking over the years to great success. Want to learn more about their approach? Get the free ebook on growth hacking by KLM here.
3. Leverage customer data to streamline advertising and increase engagement.
Pelle den Engelsman, Campaign Strategist at European low-cost airline Transavia, embraced this tip to reduce advertising costs, increase load factor, and automate key internal processes. In hard numbers, Pelle's team is saving almost 50% on their annual retargeting budget with a single use case built around this ideology.
>> Read how they did it in this article.
4. Be proactive about customer-centricity.
It's one thing to say your organization should be more customer-centric, it's another thing to establish concrete KPIs around customer-centricity and work it into your core business strategy.
In fact, according to research by Deloitte and Touche, customer-centric companies are up to 60% more profitable than their product-centric counterparts. We believe that truly customer-centric organizations focus on 5 important pillars: leadership, strategy, people, processes and platform.
>> Dive into the 5-pillar customer-centricity model >>.
5. Continuously re-evaluate your KPIs.
Are you stuck in a KPI rut? It happens to most of us at some point — the reports and dashboards are set up, we know what to report on, and if it's not broke why fix it?
Business KPIs have a tendency to be conceived from the inside out. You need to prove that your marketing efforts are effective for the company, so you report on how many times your ad is being clicked. From your customer's perspective, however, clicking on your ad doesn't necessarily equal success. Perhaps that ad was irrelevant to them, and they wasted their time clicking for nothing.
That's why we encourage businesses to regularly review their KPIs, approaching them from the outside-in. See switching up your KPIs as an opportunity to refuel your strategy and hone your efforts.
Want to read more on this topic? Check out this article for 3 KPIs you can change right now for a more customer-centric organization.
6. Take a use-case-first approach.
Maurice Pordon, Marketing Manager at online investment platform Evi, put it perfectly:
“If you’re going to take a data-driven approach, you have to start by asking yourself what you want to achieve. Then you decide what you want to measure. Next, document what you want to change and how you’re going to measure that. Then you’re ready to test. It’s a long process, but a worthwhile one — it's all about having the right mindset.”
We all want results — preferably as quickly as possible. But if we don't take the time to lay down the foundation, we're going to keep building sandcastles. This was just one of the 5 lessons in data-driven marketing that Maurice learned when implementing the Relay42 platform over at Evi.
7. Don't assume anything about your customers — or their journeys.
One of the most exciting things about being in marketing and customer experience today is the amazing technology we have at our disposal. We have the tools to organize, automate, measure and optimize our processes. And that means we have no excuse to leave our customer journeys up to guesswork.
We suggest taking the time to visualize your customer journeys. Hash out the details; share with colleagues in different departments; share with the colleague sitting next to you. So much gets lost in business silos, including customers, but mapping out customer journeys can help you start to bridge the gap an ensure your customers all get where they're trying to go.
Customer satisfaction ladders up to customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy — and it all starts with better personalization through customer data. Get the best new strategies and insights in our Insights Hub:
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