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5 Best GDPR & HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing Tools & CRMs

Data technology has advanced significantly over the past few decades to a point where companies of any size can collect personal data on a large scale.

At the same time, data regulations around the world are intensifying, mainly with the aim of keeping tech giants like Google in check, but the same rules also apply the smallest of businesses handling user data.

This has a major impact on the way businesses operate as an organisation and it also makes it harder than ever to choose software platforms that are compliant with regulations. So, in this article, we got the five best email marketing and CRM tools for GDPR and HIPAA compliance.

What are we looking at in this article?

In this article, we’re looking specifically at email marketing and CRM tools that are both GDPR and HIPAA compliant. While it’s increasingly easy to find software platforms that comply (or, at least, claim to) with the newer GDPR regulations, it’s not so easy to find software tools that are compliant with the older, more specialist HIPAA guidelines – and even more difficult to find platforms compliant with both.

So this article will help you if any of the following apply:

You need GDPR-compliant software for the EU marketYou need HIPAA-compliant software for the US marketYou need both GDPR and HIPAA-compliant software as a single solution for the US and EU markets

Given that HIPAA is specific to the healthcare industry in the US, this article will be most beneficial to healthcare organisations operating in the US and EU with the need for a single platform to meet their email marketing and CRM needs – for example, a health insurance company looking to provide cover for customers in both markets.

Given that the US and the EU are the world’s biggest healthcare markets and they also happen to have the strictest data protection laws, having software that’s both GDPR and HIPAA-compliant is crucial for any company looking to expand across the international stage.

In this article, we look at the best five email marketing and CRM platforms for compliance with GDPR and HIPAA regulations. First, though, let’s take a closer look at what these regulations involve and how they differ.

GDPR & HIPAA – what are they & how are they different?

GDPR and HIPAA are two very different sets of data privacy regulations. In 2018, the EU introduced GDPR into law as a set of regulations to protect the data privacy of everyone in the European Union and hold businesses handling their data accountable for their capture, storage and use of this data.

Meanwhile, HIPAA is US federal law that dates back to 1996, regulating the protection of patient confidentiality and their personal data. So, HIPAA is specific to the healthcare industry in the US, GDPR applies to all personal data collected from European citizens – from people visiting your website to employee data of any EU citizens working at your company.

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of laws introduced on May 25, 2018, by the European Union. The regulations grant EU citizens expanded rights and control over their personal data while placing compliance on any company or organisation that collects or stores such personal data.

In other words, if you collect and/or store personal data from individuals in the European Union, you are accountable for following GDPR guidelines as the data controller.

Data controller — The person who decides why and how personal data will be processed. If you’re an owner or employee in your organization who handles data, this is you. – GDPR.eu

It doesn’t matter whether you, as the data handler, are located inside or outside of the EU. If you’re handling personal data from people within the EU, you are accountable for complying to GDPR guidelines.

Failing to comply with GDPR can result in hefty fines of up to 4% of an organisation’s global annual revenue or up €20 million. To date, the largest fine has been handed to Google, to the sum of €50 million, in 2018.

Google made $33.74 billion in Q3 2018 alone.

Key to GDPR-compliance is understanding the EU’s definition of personal data. Here’s a brief summary from the official GDPR.eu website:

“Personal data is any information that relates to an individual who can be directly or indirectly identified. Names and email addresses are obviously personal data. Location information, ethnicity, gender, biometric data, religious beliefs, web cookies, and political opinions can also be personal data. Pseudonymous data can also fall under the definition if it’s relatively easy to ID someone from it.”

GDPR guidelines apply specifically to personal data so compliance is only required when you’re collecting or storing information that can be used to identify someone.

If you’re in any doubt over your GDPR-compliance obligations, seek professional legal advice – don’t rely on blog posts like these.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the key regulations defined by GDPR.

Data protection principles

If you process personal data of individuals in the EU, you must comply with seven protection and accountability guidelines defined in Article 5.1-2:

Lawfulness, fairness and transparency — Processing must be lawful, fair, and transparent to the data subject.Purpose limitation — You must process data for the legitimate purposes specified explicitly to the data subject when you collected it.Data minimization — You should collect and process only as much data as absolutely necessary for the purposes specified.Accuracy — You must keep personal data accurate and up to date.Storage limitation — You may only store personally identifying data for as long as necessary for the specified purpose.Integrity and confidentiality — Processing must be done in such a way as to ensure appropriate security, integrity, and confidentiality (e.g. by using encryption).Accountability — The data controller is responsible for being able to demonstrate GDPR compliance with all of these principles.



Accountability

Under GDPR, data controllers must be able to demonstrate that they are compliant and the EU suggests several steps organisations can take to ensure they can prove their compliance:

Designate data protection responsibilities to your team.Maintain detailed documentation of the data you’re collecting, how it’s used, where it’s stored, which employee is responsible for it, etc.Train your staff and implement technical and organizational security measures.Have Data Processing Agreement contracts in place with third parties you contract to process data for you.Appoint a Data Protection Officer (though not all organizations need one — more on that in this article).

The EU is very clear about the fact that, if you think you are compliant with the GDPR but can’t show how, then you’re not GDPR compliant”.

Data security

To become and remain GDPR-compliant, data controllers must implement measures to protect the data of individuals from potential losses, leaks, hack and other vulnerabilities.

The regulations require data controllers to implement both “appropriate technical and organizational measures“.

“Technical measures mean anything from requiring your employees to use two-factor authentication on accounts where personal data are stored to contracting with cloud providers that use end-to-end encryption.”“Organizational measures are things like staff trainings, adding a data privacy policy to your employee handbook, or limiting access to personal data to only those employees in your organization who need it.”

In the event of a data breach, you have 72 hours to inform the data subjects about the compromise or face penalties – although this requirement may be waived if you use technological safeguards, such as encryption, to render data useless to an attacker.

Consent

Under GDPR guidelines, you can only collect personal information from users with their consent and the regulations set out specific requirements for acquiring consent that complies with its rules.

Consent must be “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous.”Requests for consent must be “clearly distinguishable from the other matters” and presented in “clear and plain language.”Data subjects can withdraw previously given consent whenever they want, and you have to honour their decision. You can’t simply change the legal basis of the processing to one of the other justifications.Children under 13 can only give consent with permission from their parent.You need to keep documentary evidence of consent.

This is why anyone browsing the web in the European Union these days is bombarded with full-page consent forms, forcing them to either accept or go through the same process every time they visit any website or refresh the page.

That’s a story for another day, though.

For a more comprehensive look at GDPR guidelines, head to the official GDPR.eu website and, once again, if you’re in any doubt over your obligations or compliance, get the necessary legal help.

What is HIPAA?

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law in the United States of America, setting out national standards to protect patient information from being disclosed without their consent or knowledge.

So this is specific to healthcare organisations in the US and completely independent from GDPR. However, in cases where healthcare organisations handle data from individuals in the US and the EU, said organisations are obliged to follow regulations in their respective regions.

This will be the case for global health companies operating in the US and the EU, handling personal information protected by both sets of regulations.

Source

HIPAA is applicable to four types of organisations and individuals, known as “covered entities”:

Healthcare providers: Every healthcare provider, regardless of size of practice, who electronically transmits health information in connection with certain transactions. These transactions include claims, benefit eligibility inquiries, referral authorization requests, and other transactions for which HHS has established standards under the HIPAA Transactions Rule.Health plans: Entities that provide or pay the cost of medical care. Health plans include health, dental, vision, and prescription drug insurers; health maintenance organizations (HMOs); Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare+Choice, and Medicare supplement insurers; and long-term care insurers (excluding nursing home fixed-indemnity policies). Health plans also include employer-sponsored group health plans, government- and church-sponsored health plans, and multi-employer health plans.Exception: A group health plan with fewer than 50 participants that is administered solely by the employer that established and maintains the plan is not a covered entity.Healthcare clearinghouses: Entities that process nonstandard information they receive from another entity into a standard (i.e., standard format or data content), or vice versa. In most instances, healthcare clearinghouses will receive individually identifiable health information only when they are providing these processing services to a health plan or healthcare provider as a business associate.Business associates: A person or organization (other than a member of a covered entity’s workforce) using or disclosing individually identifiable health information to perform or provide functions, activities, or services for a covered entity. These functions, activities, or services include claims processing, data analysis, utilization review, and billing.

Source: CDC.gov

There are two primary components of HIPAA: the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the HIPAA Security Rule. Failure to comply with HIPAA can result in fines ranging from $100 to $50,000 per violation.

HIPAA Privacy Rule

The HIPAA Privacy Rule covers the use and disclosure of individuals’ health information, known a “protected health information” (PHI). Both the organisation and individuals are called “covered entities,” confirming that HIPAA standards apply to them respectively.

The HIPAA Privacy Rule defines the actions organisations must take to comply with the HIPAA laws and individuals’ rights to understand how their information is being used.

Essentially, organisations must protect the personal information of patients and refrain from disclosing it to other parties.

“A major goal of the Privacy Rule is to assure that individuals’ health information is properly protected while allowing the flow of health information needed to provide and promote high quality health care and to protect the public’s health and well being. The Rule strikes a balance that permits important uses of information, while protecting the privacy of people who seek care and healing. Given that the health care marketplace is diverse, the Rule is designed to be flexible and comprehensive to cover the variety of uses and disclosures that need to be addressed.”

Source: HHS.gov

For a more comprehensive breakdown of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, you can find guidance and links to official sources via HHS.gov.

HIPAA Security Rule

The HIPAA Security Rule defines regulations for the management of electronic data (ePHI).

“The HIPAA Security Rule establishes national standards to protect individuals’ electronic personal health information that is created, received, used, or maintained by a covered entity. The Security Rule requires appropriate administrative, physical and technical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and security of electronic protected health information.”

Source: HHS.gov

The Security Rule is the more comprehensive set of regulations and, while covered entities need to ensure they’re compliant across both rules, the Security Rule is what you need to pay attention to when you’re choosing email marketing, CRM and other software tools.

Top 5 GDPR & HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing Tools & CRMs

Now that we’ve covered the basics of GDPR and HIPAA, we’re ready to look at the top five email marketing and CRM platforms that are compliant with both sets of regulations.

Here’s a quick summary of the five platform’s we’ll be looking at in this section:

ActiveCampaign: The best all-in-one email marketing and CRM solution with robust compliance and security – but no dedicated features for managing your data.Salesforce: The famous CRM provider which also offers dedicated tools for you to protect your data while it’s stored on your server (this is only half the battle).Zendesk: Excellent customer service products with advanced security add-ons which provide a certain level of support for compliance.Enquire: The specialist CRM for healthcare providers which taps into Microsoft’s impressive security data.Paubox: The only email system for healthcare providers that aims to provide complete HIPAA compliance.

As you can see, there are pros and cons to each of these options with ActiveCampaign offering the best marketing solution but also the weakest compliance features.

Something you’ll notice with software providers that claim to be GDPR and HIPAA compliant, though, is that they’re only capable of offering partial compliance and only Paubox claims to be fully HIPAA-compliant – and there are caveats here, too.

All will be explained throughout the remainder of this article.

#1: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is our top pick for an all-in-one email marketing and CRM platform for businesses of all sizes. This is the platform we’ve been using here at Venture Harbour for more than half a decade now and it regularly features in our recommendations for the best email marketing, automation and sales tools.

There aren’t many all-in-one platforms that provide as much as ActiveCampaign, with such a level of consistency, and fewer still that are this competitively priced.

It’s not that ActiveCampaign is the cheapest option on the market but more to do with how the prices increase between plans. The point of an all-in-one email marketing and CRM platform is that it should help your business automate growth, meaning you’ll naturally bump up to more advanced (and expensive) plans as your business grows.

A lot of providers offer low entry prices but hit you hard once you’re bumped up to more expensive plans. By this time, you’re locked into the platform because it houses all of your data and your team knows how to use it.

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, pries its plans with incremental increases, so you’re not hit with unaffordable bills for hovering over your contact limits for one month. The company wants to remain good-value at every price point so that businesses will continue to use its platform as they grow and this philosophy has been crucial to its success in a market otherwise dominated by more expensive options.

How is ActiveCampaign compliant with GDPR & HIPAA?

You can find out how ActiveCampaign protects your data by visiting the data protection and security page on the company’s website. On this page, you’ll see ActiveCampaign specifically lists compliance with GDPR and HIPAA, as well as SOC 2 data protection.

“ActiveCampaign is heavily focused on GDPR, SOC 2, and HIPAA compliance. We constantly improve our security to go above and beyond compliance standards.”

ActiveCampaign uses the following techniques to protect your data (and your customers’) from vulnerabilities:

Information classification: All our data is classified and restricted, which lets us prioritize the most sensitive information. Single-tenancy architecture means that each person’s data is kept separate from everyone else’s. Along with secure, world-class data centers, this data separation helps keep your data secure.Authentication and access security: Personnel have the exact level of access required, and user access is regularly audited to ensure data protection. In keeping with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) requirements, data access is protected by multi-factor authentication, password control, keys, and other best practices.Access zone security: Our networks use a layered access classification framework to provide data separation. Each client-protected single tenancy data store, whether physical or virtual private cloud, is a fully security-hardened stack that includes endpoint and network threat prevention, application firewalling, and vulnerability scanning.Secure software development lifecycle: Security is baked into our software development—developers are active participants in securing the code that they write. Security scanning tools and code analysis help them resolve any issues with open-source packaging, misconfigurations, and potential vulnerabilities.Internal offensive security: Our in-house Red Team engages in continuous penetration testing. We try to break our own production systems every day—so that we can stay ahead of the curve and address potential issues.

HIPAA compliance is available to all customers on ActiveCampaign’s enterprise plan and the company will sign its own Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with covered entities but it stresses that each customer is responsible for using the service in a HIPAA-compliant manner.

While other providers may offer dedicated features, like built-in apps to help you remain compliant, it’s important to understand that compliance is always your responsibility.

Summary

ActiveCampaign provides advanced security and data protection features in the back-end of its system to keep your data secure. Crucially, it also signs its own Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with covered entities that need to comply with HIPAA regulations.

The potential downside is that it doesn’t provide built-in apps or features that actively help you achieve compliance on the front-end of the system. Instead, the company draws a clear line in the sand that it’s your responsibility to use the platform in a compliant manner while its system provides the security you need to achieve this.

There are pros and cons to this approach. The negative is that you don’t get any dedicated tools of frameworks for data compliance included with your plan. The positive is that you don’t end up with a system that only partially provides the tools you need to achieve and manage compliance, which can actually make things even more confusing – something we’ll explain in more detail as we look at our next platform.

#2: Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the biggest names in customer relationship management (CRM) and data is at the heart of everything it does. Unlike ActiveCampaign, this isn’t an all-in-one email marketing and CRM platform so you would still need to integrate Salesforce with a third-party email marketing tool to manage this channel.

This can complicate GDPR and HIPAA compliance slightly as you’re then required to ensure that all platforms are compliant.

How is Salesforce compliant with GDPR & HIPAA?

You can find out how Salesforce complies with GDPR, HIPAA and other regulations by visiting the extensive compliance section of its website. Here, you’ll find a comprehensive breakdown of the platforms certificates, measures and services relevant to data regulations across the spectrum;

You can start with these two pages for information specific to GDPR and HIPAA:

Salesforce GDPR complianceSalesforce HIPAA compliance

Much like ActiveCampaign, Salesforce will sign its own Business Associate Addendum (BAA) with covered entities requiring HIPAA compliance. However, the company goes an extra step further in terms of providing tools to help you protect your data and, once again, there are pros and cons to this but, also, the perfect opportunity to explore the complexity of software compliance in more detail.

Salesforce provides a dedicated data security app, called Shield, that helps you protect the data housed on your CRM. With Shield, you can achieve compliance with both GDPR and HIPAA data protection requirements but only partially.

More specifically, under the HIPAA Security Rule, data stored on your server and viewed within a platform like Salesforce is considered “data at rest”. Shield will protect this data and help you achieve compliance for this type of data but it doesn’t help with “data in motion,” which refers to data being sent via emails and other communications or exchanges.

As Compliancy Group explains:

“HIPAA applies to data in motion as well as to data at rest. Data in motion is data that travels over a public network, like the Internet. Such data needs to be encrypted in transit… Covered entities must encrypt data in motion. The encryption must be performed before the message is sent, for HIPAA compliance to be achieved.”

To encrypt this data and achieve compliance across both forms of data, you’re going to need dedicated tools for encrypting data before it is sent anywhere. There are plenty of tools that can do this, such as DataMotion, but it’s important to understand this distinction and realise that you’re not going to get all of the tools you need to achieve compliance from Salesforce alone.

#3: Zendesk

Zendesk is primarily a customer service platform but it also provides an extensive range of tools for sales teams, including a CRM platform, live chat, social messaging and omnichannel communication.

The glaring omission is that there’s no email marketing platform and the automation features provided are pretty basic by today’s standards. That said, Zendesk is a truly excellent customer service platform that also provides a quality CRM, making it ideal for integration with an email marketing and automation tool that doesn’t have a built-in CRM.

How is Zendesk compliant with GDPR & HIPAA?

Zendesk offers an Advanced Security add-on, available on its Professional and Enterprise plans, that helps you achieve HIPAA compliance with data stored on the platform. However, as this support page clarifies, “Adhering to HIPAA compliance while using Zendesk largely depends on how you use the software” – a common theme you’ll hear while assessing HIPAA-compliant software.

Be prepared to pay $2,000/month for the privilege of using this add-on, though.

Another possible issue is that HIPAA regulations apply differently across Zendesk products, depending on the way they store and handle data. So the steps you need to take for one product can differ from another. Zendesk does provide a solid amount of documentation to help you achieve compliance across its products.

It’s a similar story with GDPR compliance on Zendesk. You can enhance the security features through add-ons but, ultimately, it’s your responsibility to ensure you meet compliance regulations as a data controller, as specified on the website:

“Zendesk customers that collect and store personal data are considered data controllers under the GDPR. Data controllers bear the primary responsibility for ensuring that their processing of personal data is compliant with relevant EU data protection law, including the GDPR and uniquely determine what personal data is submitted to, and processed by, Zendesk in accordance with the Services.”

Much like Salesforce, Zendesk can provide some of the tools you need to achieve compliance in terms of protecting stored data but you’re still going to need to take care of data capture, consent and data usage through your own means.

#4: Enquire

Enquire is a specialist CRM, marketing automation and contact centre solution designed specifically for senior living and healthcare services. So, if any software provider is going to go all out in terms of HIPAA compliance, it’s going to be a company like Enquire.

Funnily enough, Enquire doesn’t specify the steps it takes to achieve or provide HIPAA compliance anywhere on its website although it constantly references compliance across every product and feature page on its website – without going into any great detail.

How is Enquire compliant with GDPR & HIPAA?

If you browse the Enquire website, you’ll see plenty of references made to HIPAA compliance but you’ll struggle to find any specific information. There are some clues scattered around the site that can point you in the right direction, though.

“Our system is HIPAA compliant and all data is hosted in Microsoft’s trust center so that you never have to worry about hosting, maintaining or losing data.”

So Enquire is actually tapping into Microsoft Trust Center for data security, which includes extensive support for compliance across every major region – including HIPAA and GDPR.

Here are some of the security measures you can expect:

Microsoft proactively guards against threats in the cloud from both malicious software and cyberattacks.[It also] helps your organisation manage user identities and access privileges.Helps protect your data with encryption.Complies with applicable regulatory requirements.Helps support compliance with HIPAA and the HITECH Act.Helps protect the privacy of PHI and other data.

What isn’t clear is exactly how many of these features and measures Enquire brings into its own platform courtesy of Microsoft’s Trust Center. On the plus side, the company does provide more in-depth documentation related to GDPR compliance and the features it provides to help you remain compliant, such as Enquire MAP.

#5: Paubox

Paubox is the only email marketing provider in this article that specifically positions itself as the HIPAA-compliant platform for healthcare companies. In its own words, Paubox is the “HIPAA compliant email marketing solution” that healthcare companies have been waiting for.

In all honesty, the software itself makes for a drab experience but the company does deliver a dedicated email marketing platform for healthcare companies that need to achieve HIPAA compliance and, perhaps most importantly, easy-to-understand documentation.

Paubox has also impressed at the awards this year, living up to its aim of delivering a platform that makes the complex world of HIPAA compliance that little bit easier.

How is Paubox compliant with GDPR & HIPAA?

Essentially, Paubox’s “HIPAA-compliant” revolves around email encryption, which brings us back to the “data in motion” side of compliance that platforms like Salesforce can’t provide.

There are four key components to this:

Email encryption: The only HIPAA compliant email solution with zero-step encryption on all sent emails. Your staff will love you for it. Your recipients too. Inbound email security: Leverage ExecProtect, our patent-pending technology, to eliminate display name spoofing attacks. Ransomware and phishing protection also included.Email DLP: Set your own Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules so no sensitive data gets sent or received.Email archiving: Archive Inbound and Outbound email for eDiscovery and disaster recovery compliance. Archived messages are stored encrypted at rest.

Paubox also signs Business Associate Agreements with covered entities and you can store PHI data on the platform securely.

As a result, Paubox provides some of the most comprehensive HIPAA compliance measures available, both for data at rest and data in motion. There are some caveats to this, though. Namely, Paubox isn’t going to provide all of the marketing, automation and other features you need to maximise the results of your email marketing strategy, which means you’re going to need other platforms, which might not offer the same compliance.

The other big issue here is that Paubox doesn’t offer any dedicated GDPR compliance measures – so you’ll need to choose carefully which tools you use alongside Paubox to ensure you have the coverage you need.

Which is the best email marketing & CRM tool for GDPR & HIPAA compliance?

If anything, the key takeaway from this article should be that no single platform is going to take care of GDPR or HIPAA compliance for you. All of the tools we’ve looked at in this list provide partial compliance – at the very least, in terms of meeting their responsibilities as data processing tools.

Some go even further to provide dedicated tools to simplify compliance for you but it’s impossible for any of them to do all of the work.

These are the five email marketing and CRM that come closest to providing compliance measures for you, but there’s no getting past the fact that, as a data controller, you have to ensure that your organisation is compliant to all relevant data regulations.

The post 5 Best GDPR & HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing Tools & CRMs appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Ops

Marketing operations is a broad term but it plays a specific and crucial role in today’s successful marketing teams. As companies wrangle with growing quantities of data, an increasing number of channels and an expanding range of technologies, marketing operations brings everything together into a manageable strategy.

Marketing ops is responsible for defining and managing processes that ensure your primary objectives are achieved while departments, teams and individuals focus on hitting their respective goals.

In this article, we explain what marketing operations is and why it’s essential in today’s data-driven, multichannel and technology-led marketing environment.

What are we looking at in this article?

The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive explanation of marketing operations and how to implement your own marketing ops process to meet the needs of your team.

To cover everything, this article is broken up into the following four sections:

What is marketing ops?Why is marketing ops important?Five key roles of marketing operationsHow to implement a marketing op strategy

So let’s get started by explaining what marketing operations is and, as you’ll see from the next section of this article, the answer is a little different for every business.

What is marketing ops?

Marketing operations (MO), or marketing ops, is the management of marketing, data and technology as an integrated process.

For a modern business, these three disciplines overlap so heavily that it’s sometimes difficult to draw lines between them. More to the point, modern marketing can’t function without the other two, which means businesses need a higher tier of management to integrate these three disciplines into a cohesive strategy.

Marketing operations provides this tier of management to ensure marketers have the data and technology they need. In addition to that, marketing ops is in charge of establishing, managing and optimising processes that empower teams to maximise performance and achieve their goals.

Gartner

The best marketers in the game aren’t necessarily the best IT experts or data scientists – and nobody should expect them to be. There are plenty of IT experts and data scientists for that. However, each of them plays a key role in achieving the marketing objectives of the business they work for.

Marketing operations builds processes to pull these departments together with the businesses marketing goals in mind. This allows marketers to be marketers, analysts to be analysts, etc. while all working towards the same objectives.

For example, marketing ops will ensure your company is using the best CRM to integrate your sales and marketing efforts while meeting the needs of both departments. They will measure the success of teams using said CRM, confirm the platform improves marketing performance and address any issues experienced.

It will also ensure your company remains GDPR-compliant while using your CRM to manage customer data – or, at least, it should. This is a good example where compliance is essential for marketing but the data infrastructure won’t be built by marketers themselves.

That’s just one example of the kind of role a marketing ops team plays but we’ll take a more comprehensive look at its key roles later.

Marketing ops can be tricky to define

While I’m confident in my definition of marketing ops as there unified management of marketing, data and technology, it is a difficult thing to define. This is party due to how broad marketing ops can be and the fact that it means something slightly different to every business.

In situations like this, I always like to reference some definitions from trusted names in the marketing industry to provide some other perspectives and allow you to make up your own mind.

First up, we’ve got this explanation from CoSchedule:

“Marketing operations is the piece of the puzzle that defines how a marketing team runs behind the scenes. It makes sure campaigns run smoothly, team members are happy, and more importantly – meet their goals.”

CoSchedule, Marketing Operations: The Start to Finish Guide for Busy Managers

In the article above, Elise Dopson lists the following three key aspects of marketing operations:

DataTechnologyPeople

This makes a lot of sense, too, because it is the people within marketing, data and technology departments that marketing ops manages. Although, I would argue it’s also the responsibility of MO to make sure the correct processes are in place and functioning properly – for example, reporting is delivered in the most efficient way for marketers and analysts to extract reliable insights as fast as possible.

This is echoed in HubSpot’s explanation of marketing operations although the company also acknowledges the challenges of defining it:

“Marketing operations doesn’t have the most clear-cut definition because it describes a variety of functions. Generally, marketing operations defines the team in charge of the technology and processes needed to help marketing teams run effectively.”

HubSpot, Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Operations in One Place

The same article goes on to explain that at HubSpot, “the marketing ops team is responsible for supporting the systems and processes that enable the marketing team to perform optimally in their roles.”

The Venn diagram above was originally published by Gartner and used in an article by Marc Brown, entitled Why Is Marketing Ops So Vital For Sales and the C-suite?. We’ll be asking the same question in the next section of this article but, first, let’s see how Marc explains the role of marketing operations.

“The vision for a marketing operations function is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing across people, processes, technologies, and data to achieve desired business outcomes.”

He goes on to explain: “Marketing Operations should serve as a core function for marketing, providing cross-functional coordination, communications, and reporting. Your marketing ops team will be instrumental in successfully transforming marketing into a revenue and growth engine for your company.”

Why is marketing ops important?

The simple answer is that marketing can’t operate as an independent entity in today’s data-driven world. Rewind back to a decade or so ago and big data was reserved for tech giants and enterprise brands with advanced IT infrastructures and large in-house teams of data scientists and developers.

However, the latest advances in technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing and automation have opened up big data to businesses of all sizes.

Source: Kissmetrics

In 2020, we have plenty of affordable tools for collecting and handling big data, such as Kissmetrics, SAS and Qualtrics. Likewise, smaller businesses that can’t generate enough of their own data to hit big status can tap into open data from third-party sources to gain valuable insights to drive growth while their own datasets expand.

As a result, prices and data access are no longer barriers to entry for smaller businesses.

However, businesses (and marketing teams) still need the right expertise, tools and processes to capture the right data, extract meaningful insights and then use them to inform smarter marketing and business decisions.

This is one of the key roles marketing operations plays and, just as big data is now accessible to businesses of all sizes, marketing ops is equally important to smaller businesses as their larger counterparts.

Managing the complexities of modern marketing

Big data isn’t the only reason you need a robust MO system in place. Marketing becomes more complex with every year that passes and its overlapping with other departments and technologies creates grey areas where a lack of expertise, integration or processes can cause serious problems.

For example, your developers (whether in-house or outsourced) might be geniuses when it comes to building immersive experiences but do they have the data insights or instructions to know where strategically adding friction benefits your marketing objectives? Let’s say, adding an extra step to unsubscribing from your email lists or closing customer accounts.

Sometimes, adding friction can help you achieve your marketing objectives.

In this scenario, marketing ops unites the goals of UX designer and marketer with the core objectives of the businesses and, crucially, your MO team has the authority to ensure decisions are made with these interests in mind.

Here’s a look at some of the other areas where marketing operations creates processes for the complexities of modern marketing:

Big data: Ensuring the right data is collected, valuable insights are extracted and improved marketing/business decisions are made.Technology: As marketing becomes more complex, businesses rely more heavily on technology – both in terms of complexity and the number of tools required – which requires processes for choosing the best software, implementing it and maximising its performance.Multiple channels: The number of channels modern businesses need to be active on is always growing and the technical requirements are increasing (eg: programmatic chatbots, voice search, augmented reality, etc.), requiring a deeper integration of marketing efforts and software/platform development.The customer journey is growing more complex, too, forcing businesses to reach prospects with hyper-relevant messages across tens or hundreds of micro-interactions – all of which requires the right mix of marketing messages and technical delivery.Teams / departments: Businesses need a broader pool of talent on board than ever to manage a successful marketing strategy (marketers, content writers, designers, developers, analysts, etc.), increasing the managerial challenges of keeping everyone working towards the same goals (and individual ones where necessary).Agility: The more complex marketing becomes, the less agile your teams are and the longer it takes to strategies, approve and deploy new marketing campaigns.Conflicts: With more teams or departments comes the increased risk of conflict (eg: marketing goals vs sales goals) and you need a senior team with the authority to decide where priorities lie.

Marketing operations is in charge of overcoming these challenges by managing the cross-over of disciplines. This ensures your marketers have the reports and software tools they need to achieve their campaigns goals. It also aligns the goals of different departments when their usual priorities might not always be the same.

Perhaps most importantly, marketing ops tracks the performance of your marketing processes and strategies to identify areas for improvement. For example, it might spot inefficiencies in your process for getting campaign ideas out of the creative stage and approved for deployment.

By removing these delays, your marketing team can react to new trends faster and send campaigns live while opportunities are still hot.

5 key roles of marketing operations

Throughout this article, we’ve talked about marketing operations as the management of marketing, data and technology. However, this is a broad definition and it explains the specific roles marketing ops plays within a modern business.

So, in this section, we look at five key roles MO plays and how it empowers your brand to do more with data and technology.

#1: Marketing objectives

The most important role of marketing ops is to make sure your business is achieving its marketing objectives. During simpler times, many marketing departments may have overseen this themselves – especially at small-to-medium size enterprises.

However, this doesn’t work in today’s data-driven age where marketing objectives aren’t only achieved or missed by the marketers themselves.

TrueNorth helps you achieve your marketing goals, one by one.

Now, you need experts with enough knowledge in data science, computational technology, business software, IT and marketing to keep all of these elements working towards your goals. You need experts who can measure the performance of these elements – both collectively and individually – and understand where things aren’t working as well as they could.

Above all, you need the expertise to see where marketing objectives are in danger of being missed and the ability to find out why – and this is the most important role of marketing ops.

#2: Process management

Arguably, the most important word in marketing ops is “process” and this is where the bulk of work lies within MO. In a calculated, goal-driven marketing strategy, you need clearly defined processes in place for everything – from campaign management and A/B testing to product design and debugging.

The exact processes your marketing ops department is in charge of will depend on the nature of your business but here are some key processes every brand needs.

Budget management

The average company spends 26% of their annual revenue on marketing and this is spread out across an ever-growing list of channels and strategies, including:

Content marketingOrganic searchPaid advertisingEmail marketingSocial mediaAccount-based marketing (ABM)

Marketing operations needs to ensure that budgets are set correctly and distributed where it’s going to achieve business goals most effectively. This can change over the course of the year, multiple years and decades, meaning agile budgets need to adapt to changes, challenges and new opportunities.

Campaign management

Marketing ops is also responsible for campaign management at the highest level. This doesn’t mean your MO team is involved in the day-to-day management of campaigns (you’ve got marketers for this) but, rather, the management of campaign processes to maximise efficiency and performance.

This is especially important where marketing campaigns incorporate other disciplines, such as conversion rate optimisation (CRO), where UX design, software optimisation, testing and data management are brought into the mix.

Lead management

As the consumer journey becomes more complex (multiple channels, devices, sessions, interactions, etc.), the more you have to nurture leads across this process to turn them into paying customers.

Due to the multichannel nature of this journey, you need processes in place to incorporate different marketing strategies and the other disciplines involved in covering the entire customer journey – sales, customers service, software development and more.

With ActiveCampaign, you can build automations like this to manage leads across the customer journey.

Marketing ops is responsible for putting these processes in place so that websites are designed and optimised to achieve your marketing objectives, sales and marketing are integrated where necessary and new channels are built to cover gaps in your marketing funnel (eg: multi-step forms, live chat widgets).

Asset management

Modern marketing teams deal with an overwhelming number of assets, including logos, templates, images, automation workflows, custom-built tools and data (that last one is particularly important).

Once again, you need processes for storing, managing and protecting your assets so that nothing is lost, overwritten or deleted. Likewise, you need processes in place to ensure non-owned assets, such as images taken or created by people outside of your organisation, are used properly.

In the age of GDPR and intensifying data regulations, it’s fair to say that customer data is your most important asset and you certainly want to make sure you have robust processes (and back-up processes) for this.

Technology implementation

The demands of data-driven marketing are intense and having the right technology on your side is just as important as having the right personnel. Every process marketing ops is responsible for involves a range of technologies and software tools to operate effectively – everything from design tools and your CRM to A/B testing software and analytics tools.

Marketing ops needs to make sure you have the right tools to achieve your marketing objectives, create the required assets, manage campaigns and measure performance. It also needs to make sure these tools are integrated and working properly and identify any technology issues that are holding back progress.

#3: Alignment & unification

When marketing teams can’t achieve their objectives without the help of other disciplines (design, sales, development, etc.), you need processes in place for collaboration and marketing ops is there to help them work together as effectively as possible.

This starts with aligning their goals so that everyone’s pulling together in the same direction.

One of the most common examples of this for modern businesses is integrating sales and marketing. This can be challenging because it’s difficult to define where marketing ends and sales begins while there’s also a history of conflict between the two disciplines.

In fact, Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy describe this conflict as a full-blown “war” in their article for Harvard Business Review, Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.

“When sales are disappointing, Marketing blames the sales force for its poor execution of an otherwise brilliant rollout plan. The sales team, in turn, claims that Marketing sets prices too high and uses too much of the budget, which instead should go toward hiring more salespeople or paying the sales reps higher commissions.”

Your marketing and sales ops managers are responsible for unifying these teams where necessary and aligning their goals where overlaps occur. By having authoritative leaders who understand the need for alignment and compromise, any in-fighting between teams becomes irrelevant.

Marketing ops is senior to the sales team (as is sales ops to the marketing team) and has the authority to ensure marketing objectives are prioritised where necessary. Of course, this relies on having the right marketing and sales ops personnel (and senior figures above them) who can work out the best overall approach for the business.

#4: Reporting & analytics

Data should inform every marketing decision your business makes but you’re only going to make good data-driven decisions if you have the right data processes in place.

This starts with collecting the right data and, then, compiling and cleaning it to remove anything that might compromise your insights.

In the age of big data, we’re generally talking about datasets that are too large for humans to analyse and this is where you need machine learning tools to process large amounts of data and spot trends reliably.

Data visualisation is another crucial component, especially when you’re dealing with large datasets or complex reports.

Once again, it’s up to your marketing ops team to create the necessary data processes to achieve valuable insights, manage those processes and ensure your marketing team has all the data tools (and reports) they need to hit targets.

#5: Process optimisation

Creating and managing marketing processes is one thing but MO also needs to optimise these processes to spot weaknesses and improve performance. Earlier, we touched on a common problem businesses face in today’s marketing environment where it takes longer to get campaign ideas off of the drawing board and approved for deployment.

This is a perfect example of where marketing ops needs to analyse this process, find the weaknesses and provide solutions that create a more effective system of approval.

Another good example would be your process for tracking and reporting on budget performance and ROI. Marketing ops should analyse this process to look for weaknesses, delays or errors in the reporting that limit your ability to set and redistribute budgets to achieve the highest performance.

By optimising and improving this process, you can react to changes, reallocate budgets and adapt faster to new opportunities.

How to implement a marketing ops strategy

By this point, you should have a good idea of how to implement a marketing ops strategy that meets the needs of your business. There are six key steps to building and implementing a strategy successfully although you may add further steps between these if you have specialist requirements – eg: developing your own in-house software.

The six steps are:

Set clear goals for your marketing ops strategyGet the necessary expertise on boardDefine your marketing ops processesBuild your marketing ops tech stackAssign roles across all marketing activitiesMeasure performance & optimise your processes

As with all strategic measures, your first task is to set specific goals for your marketing ops strategy to guide your implementation and management from start to finish.

Step # 1: Set clear goals for your marketing ops strategy

As we’ve explained at multiple points throughout this article, marketing operations means something slightly (or very) different for every business. As a result, the potential goals of any given MO strategy can vary significantly , making it all the more important that you define clear, specific goals.

Here are some examples:

Align marketing & salesReduce campaign deployment timeImprove budget allocationIncrease the quality of data insightsRespond to market shifts fasterIntegrate multichannel strategiesIncrease customer retention rates

Those are just some ideas to get you started and your marketing ops goals should be even more specific than the suggestions in that list – eg: increase customer retention rate by 7.5% by the end of 2021 with targets set for the end of each quarter until then.

What you don’t want to be doing is setting goals like “increase revenue” without specifying processes, channels or targets to focus on.

Step # 2: Get the necessary expertise on board

Once you know what your marketing ops objectives are, you should understand what kind of talent you need to bring on board. First of all, you need to make sure you’ve got the right personnel and skillsets on each team and, then, you can start thinking about marketing ops and managers.

Keep in mind that marketing ops is all about establishing and optimising processes that unify data, technology and marketing so you’re going to need a rounded level of expertise in all three areas on your marketing ops team/manager.

This doesn’t mean they need to be marketing experts, data scientists and IT technology masters but they do need enough rounded expertise to work with all three departments and help them achieve the best results.

Think GP rather than a healthcare specialist.

Step # 3: Define your marketing ops processes

Now, we get down to the crux of your marketing ops strategy where you define processes for every marketing activity. This is where the bulk of your marketing ops workload lies, providing frameworks for manual processes your team members have to complete.

A comprehensive process should include documentation for the five Ws:

What teams and individuals need to do to complete a task.Who specifically should handle each task involved.How the task in question should be completed.When the task should be completed or how long it should take.Why, as in the target, purpose or goals of each action (where relevant).

This may sound elementary but it’s crucial for building robust marketing processes that assign every task to the relevant person with clear steps and objectives.

The more detailed your processes are, the more control you retain over marketing activities and the more effectively your marketing ops strategy can manage and optimise these processes to improve performance.

Step # 4: Build your marketing ops tech stack

Technology is central to marketing operations and there are two key tasks you need to address at this point:

Ensuring your marketing ops team/personnel have the tools they needEnsuring every member of your marketing team has the tools they need

Like many things, the best tools for your business is highly subjective but you need to go back to your marketing ops goals and choose technology based on the effectiveness of achieving your objectives.

Cost is always a factor, too, of course, but don’t overlook the importance of integration. You don’t want to waste time manually repeating tasks or transferring data between apps when these actions can be automated with integrations.

We’ve got plenty of articles on our blog looking at the best marketing tools across a broad range of categories, if you need help with this.

10 Best Email Marketing Software & Email Automation Tools of 2020The 7 Best Marketing Automation Tools & Platforms in 202030+ Best Free Marketing Tools53 Business Automation Tools That Skyrocketed Our Growth by 330%

Also, be sure to check out Marketing Automation Insider for free, personalised recommendations, based on your business’ needs.

Step # 5: Assign roles across all marketing activities

One of the key functions marketing ops plays is ensuring tasks are clearly assigned to the relevant person or team. Everyone should have an explicit understanding of their role, responsibilities and authority to make decisions – as well as where their responsibilities end.

This is particularly important where marketing teams overlap (eg: SEO and content marketing) or marketing efforts overlap with other departments, such as sales and customer service.

Step # 6: Measure performance & optimise your processes

Once your marketing operations strategy is running, there’s a settling in period where you might need to work out any kinks. During this period, you should already be measuring performance and collecting data across every process so that you can build up a reliable database to optimise and improve each process over time.

This brings us back to the goals you set out in step #1 and the first task is to measure the success/failure of your initial processes in achieving these objectives.

Over time, marketing ops should constantly scrutinise each process, test data-driven improvements and optimise them to achieve your objectives more effectively.

For example, if your goal is to respond to market shifts faster, your processes for collecting and compiling data, processing data and extracting insights, strategising responses and deploying campaigns should all be optimised to reduce times without compromising quality.

Achieve goals faster & set more ambitious targets

Marketing ops is all about empowering your marketing team to achieve your goals more effectively. Faster goals completion allows you to set more ambitious targets and increase growth rates by taking full advantage of big data and technology that’s advancing more every year.

As marketing becomes more complex and integrated with other business disciplines, marketing operations put processes in place for every team and individual to maximise performance and helps them integrate with others under shared goals.

The post Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Ops appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Instagram Influencer Marketing from the Ground Up

A quick three-second scroll on Instagram is all it takes to see post after post of influencers who partner with brands to promote their products.

And there’s a reason why.

With more than one billion monthly active users worldwide on Instagram and millions of loyal influencer-led communities, Instagram can be a goldmine for influencer marketing campaigns. Just ask the nearly 90% of marketers who say Instagram is important to their influencer marketing strategy.

How can you tap into this influencer goldmine and take some of the rewards for your business? In this guide, we will walk you through what influencer marketing is, why it is important, and how to launch profitable influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram.

What is Influencer Marketing and Why is it a Goldmine for Marketers?

Before we talk about what influencers are and what they do, let’s first discuss how influencer marketing can benefit businesses.

Businesses are earning $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing 80% of marketers  find influencer marketing effective 89% of marketers  say ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels

These are promising statistics. But, instead of just waving some shiny statistics in front of your face, let’s dig a little deeper.

We’ve witnessed the power of influencer marketing, and we know it works. But, let’s talk more about why it is so powerful, and also how this power has waned in recent years, and what marketers can do to adjust to the changes.

The reason for influencer marketing’s rise to power over the last decade is due to two concepts: trust and authenticity.

Consumers grew tired of in-your-face advertisements, pushy sales channels, and biased brand-generated content. As consumers started buying from influencers’ recommendations instead of brand advertisements, businesses realised they needed to take advantage of this trend—or get left behind.

Influencer marketing presented a way for marketers to overcome these hurdles and show consumers their excellent products—without aggressive sales techniques or overt bias.

Who are Influencers?

Influencers are essentially, “influential” people, who boast a loyal following of die-hard fans.

Consumers trust influencers over brands because they are not companies. They don’t have a bottom line to worry about. Influencers are ordinary people who organically attracted large communities of highly engaged and loyal followers, without coercion. An influencers’ communities follow them because they want to, not because they clicked on an ad, or filled out a form.

In today’s online shopping environment, it’s more difficult for brands to be transparent without face-to-face interactions. Yet, consumers crave authentic recommendations and interactions, and influencers provide that for them.

Influencer marketing allows brands to get access to these loyal communities for a fraction of what digital advertising would cost. Instead of fussing with targeting to find your ideal audience, you can get direct access to people who are already interested in what you are selling and are ready (and excited) to buy whatever influencers recommend.  

The Tides are Shifting

Influencer marketing has become lucrative for influencers as well. Influencers realised the opportunity to build a business off of their personal brand.

Here’s the problem, though. As more consumers realised how brands partner with influencers, and as more influencers traded their authenticity for a buck, influencer marketing has hit a few bumps in the road.

But, all is not lost—that is, for the influencers who never sold their authenticity. Brands need to shift their marketing strategy and focus more on working with truly authentic influencers who aren’t willing to sell out their communities for a paycheck.

In a later section of this guide, we will discuss how to find these authentic influencers. It may take a little longer to find them, but it will be worth it. You want to work with influencers who genuinely love your product, as authentic influencers will not recommend a product unless they like and/or use it themselves. Avoid working with influencers who will recommend any product if it lands them a check. Eventually, these influencers may lose trust with their communities and dilute their authenticity.

Types of Influencers

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, there are five types of influencers: Mega, macro, mid-tier, micro, and nano. While numbers may vary, generally, the influencers are categorised by the number of followers:

In this article, we will focus on micro- and nano-influencers, as most businesses typically focus on these two types of influencers.

One of the reasons we recommend working with nano- and micro-influencers is because they are more affordable. Still, more importantly, they have the most loyal followers, which directly affects the ROI of your campaigns.

Influencers with 50K to 250K followers deliver a 30% better ROI per dollar spent than macro-influencers, and a 20% better ROI per dollar spent than influencers with more than one million followers.

Celebrities and macro-influencers don’t enjoy the same level of trust and loyalty as micro-influencers because they aren’t ordinary people, so the majority of Instagram followers can’t relate to them. For example, fashion influencers with large followings may have feeds that look like fashion magazines, yet the regular Instagram follower can’t relate to professional photoshoots and couture fashion prices.

Consumers trust people they can relate to—the part-time Instagrammer with two kids who between managing her chaotic life, takes the time to engage with her loyal undying community and show them what real life looks like—messy and all. These micro-influencers are relatable, vulnerable, and authentic—this is where their power lies.

Source

Micro-influencers also focus on specific niches. Coffee-loving fitness instructors will post content on coffee and fitness products because their feed is more of a passion project. They will draw a similar following of passionate coffee and fitness lovers who feel a connection of interests. These niche communities are more passionately engaged with their influencers and more likely to buy from a recommendation because consumers think the recommendation is authentic.

Micro-influencer communities also consider their influencers experts in the niches or passions they post about. For example, beauty influencers build followings of people who believe this influencer has expertise with makeup application, even if the influencer has no professional training. These influencers are good at creating targeted, creative content that strikes a chord with followers.

How Much Does Instagram Influencer Marketing Cost?

We’ve talked about why Instagram influencer marketing is beneficial for brands, but before we dive into how to execute successful campaigns, let’s first talk dollars and cents.

Assessing influencer marketing costs is about as predictable as asking one hundred graphic design freelancers how much they charge to design a website and expecting the same answer.

You will get varying answers from all levels of influencers. According to Later, when asking influencers how much they charge, this was the response:

Source

Dizzy yet?

One school of thought is to pay one cent per follower and to adjust from there. So an influencer with 100,000 followers would cost $1,000, and an influencer with 10,000 followers would cost $100.

Engagement rate, creative direction, budgets, production costs, and alternate content (i.e., Instagram story mentions) also affect the cost, and how you negotiate. For example, if you are at a standstill with price negotiations, you could request an Instagram Story mention to seal the deal.

If an influencer belongs to a platform, typically the rates will be more standardised. As the industry has progressed, influencers have become savvier with pricing and treat their sponsored content as more of a business. But, you would be surprised by how many micro- and nano-influencers still accept free products or a small fee in return for a mention. The influencers who would be willing to accept free product are those who either already love your product or would potentially love your product because they match your target audience.

The key here is to take what we say as a starting point and go from there, as your campaigns may follow a different path. Check out this article for more information on influencer marketing costs.

How to Launch Successful Instagram Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Let’s walk through the steps to launching a successful influencer marketing campaign on Instagram. In this section, we will discuss how to set goals and KPIs, how to find authentic influencers, and how to contact them directly.

Before you launch your influencer marketing campaigns or even start looking for influencers, create your goals. This step is critical because your goals will dictate the type of content you or your influencers will produce, your KPIs, and your criteria for selecting the right influencers.

What are your goals? Generally, influencer marketing goals fall into two main categories: brand awareness and conversions.

If your goal is brand awareness, the idea is to expand your audience and expose more people to your product.

Examples of KPIs for brand awareness campaigns might be:

Social engagement (likes, comments, shares, mentions)Traffic (views, clicks)Reach and interest (media mentions, brand searches)

If your goal is to increase conversions, focus on direct responses (your target audience takes a specified action and becomes a lead or buys something).

Examples of KPIs for conversions or direct response campaigns might be:

LeadsSalesDownloadsRegistrationsSignups to a particular campaign

Can you drive brand awareness AND conversions, and make them both your goals? Yes, but things can get chaotic if you don’t pay attention.

To target both goals, keep your campaigns separate and document everything to stay organised. For example, influencer #1 may be part of your brand awareness campaign, but if this influencer starts to work well for you, you also might want them to advertise a product for conversions. Each goal will require a different type of content and KPIs, so just make sure to stay organised and track your goals separately.

How to Find and Evaluate the Right Influencers

There are several ways to find influencers: Influencer platforms, influencer agencies, or manual searches. In this guide, we will cover how to search for Instagram influencers manually. But, whether or not you work with an agency or platform, it’s still important to understand what qualifies an influencer to work with you.  

Brand Relevancy

Determining whether or not your potential influencer is relevant to your brand isn’t that difficult.

If you sell at-home fitness equipment and your targets are people who want to stay fit, lose weight, and adopt a healthier lifestyle, it’s safe to say that you wouldn’t work with an influencer who is a chef who prepares decadent high-fat French pastries.

But, let’s take this one step further. Just because you sell at-home fitness equipment doesn’t mean that every fitness influencer will be a perfect match. Some influencers may attract bodybuilders; others may attract runners who want fitness equipment at home to augment their running workouts; still, others may attract mothers who wish to lose post-pregnancy weight.

How do you hone in on relevancy? Read through the influencers’ content and identify the main topics discussed. Review the comments and their community’s profiles. Ultimately, you are looking for an alignment of brand values, vision, and community profiles that are similar to your target audience.

Dive deeper into the influencers’ community and look for demographic similarities to your target. Characteristics such as location, gender, educational status, or other traits that will help you find some matches to your targets. Note that you are not looking for 100% of the influencer’s community to match your target audience. Look for a subset of people where the influencer’s audience and your targets overlap.

Brand Love and Authenticity

What do you do after you find influencers with communities which are relevant to your brand?

Relevancy is not enough. Next, ask yourself, do they love my products? Will they love my brand? Authentic influencers won’t be able to sell products they dislike. But this is a good thing. Because of this, they will have the most engaged and responsive communities, which will boost your campaign’s ROI.

One way to start an authentic influencer search is to identify influencers who are already using your product. These influencers will be happy to work with you because they already like your products enough to recommend them to their cherished communities without sponsorship.

Your best influencers will be those who can become brand advocates, and lovers of your brand’s vision and purpose. These influencers will show authentic excitement and creativity, which will be evident to their communities.

High Engagement

Don’t be fooled by high follower counts. An influencer with a lot of followers does not equate to a perfect match. Focus on high engagement instead, which measures the interaction followers have with a profile. High engagement indicates a high chance that you will receive an ROI on your influencer marketing campaigns.

Note that some “influencers” will artificially inflate their follower counts and create fake profiles. They will even get fake comments posted to make it look like their followers are highly engaged. To weed out these fake accounts, review the comments. Counterfeit comments are either awkwardly worded or will be short and non-specific like “Nice!” or “Love this!”

How do you measure engagement? What does “high” engagement look like?

The formula to measure engagement is:

At a minimum, you are looking for 1-2% engagement. The higher, the better.

Technically, the best way to get an accurate assessment of engagement is to calculate the average engagement across more than one post (ideally a dozen or more) and then divide that number by the total followers, rather than taking one post in isolation. This is tedious to manually calculate for every influencer, however. There are free tools to help you calculate engagement, but they aren’t as reliable as paid tools. NinjaOutreach and similar programs allow you to search influencers on their platforms. They also provide engagement data and other important information when you search.  

Additional engagement tips

Likes are not as popular an engagement metric as comments because they may not indicate genuine engagement. It’s a lot easier to double-tap on an image than it is to stop and leave a comment. Also, in the past Instagram has indicated that it would test hiding likes from the public. Only the profile owner would be able to view the number of likes on a post.

Also, when assessing an influencer’s engagement, review the engagement of sponsored posts vs organic posts. If organic content gets a much higher engagement rate, it could denote that this influencer lacks authenticity. If you see this discrepancy, but you still want to work with this influencer, have the influencer create content that mimics their top-performing posts. This is a good tip for any influencer if you’re going to boost ROI.

Influencer’s Reach

Reach refers to how many unique users see your content, but it can also refer to how much reach an influencer has outside of Instagram. Suppose an influencer also has a large following on Facebook, YouTube, or another social media site. In that case, when you work with this influencer, you may be able to expand your promotions outside of Instagram. An expansive network like this also indicates that the influencer has a broad reach and knows how to attract large communities on any platform.

How to Contact Influencers

For micro- and nano-influencers, reach out directly on Instagram or via email if they provide one in their profile.

Since marketers inundate popular influencers with similar requests, make your message stand out by following these tips:

Engage with the influencer before you send the message. Like their posts and comment on their content. Show a genuine interest and an alignment of values without asking for anything in return.Be kind and empathetic. In your initial message, show influencers that you took an interest in their profile. Mention something you like or a recent post they published.Consider influencers as partners. Authentic Influencers might be concerned that your content may not align with theirs. As you engage in conversation, make it clear that you are looking for a creative partner, and you will give them creative freedom so they can use their authentic voice and style.Be concise. Get to the point, but keep the message warm and inviting. The influencer should never feel like they are being sold to, but rather that you are excited to start a rewarding partnership.

Below is a sample influencer outreach email:

What Type of Content to Post

The content you collaborate on with your influencer will depend on your campaign goals. For example, if your goal is to get more sales conversions and measure sales as your KPI, you might want to post product photos and give influencers a discount code for their community.

Here are a few types of content for your influencer marketing campaigns:

Sponsored giveaways

You launch a product giveaway to spread brand awareness for your new product launch or special promotion. Partner with influencers to create content for your brand that features your products and the giveaway details.

Sponsored content

Sponsored content is what you would typically see influencers post. This content includes feed images and captions, or Instagram Story mentions of your brand and products, or both, depending on your goals.  

The home goods store Bed Bath & Beyond works with influencers to show its products in real homes.

Source

[image error] Branded content

Feature influencers in your content to show your brand’s popularity. You can also use the influencers’ photos (if you have permission) in your product shots and promotional messaging.

The apparel brand Good Night Macaroon features influencers on their website, Instagram feed and in promotional email messages.

Ambassador programs

Recruit brand ambassadors to post about your brand and products, and reward them with a percentage of the sales.  

How to Measure the Success of Your Instagram Influencer Marketing Campaigns

How well are your Instagram influencer marketing campaigns performing? Are they better or worse than past campaigns? What metrics stood out to you? Did you meet your goals? Why or why not?

These are just some of the questions to ask yourself upon the completion of any influencer marketing campaign. But, to do so requires a deep dive into key marketing metrics we will cover below.

Impressions – How many times a post has been seen by a userEngagement (post likes, comments) – A good metric to use to gauge whether the influencer will benefit your future campaigns or not. Use Cost per Engagement (CPE) which measures how much money each like and comment costs your campaign.Traffic – Measure the website traffic the influencer generated. To do this, use UTM code  to provide each influencer with a unique tracking link.Conversions – The easiest way to gauge a campaign’s ROI is to track conversions using either a custom link or a custom discount code unique to each influencer.Profile growth – If one of your goals when launching your influencer marketing campaigns is to increase brand awareness, track how much growth (followers and engagement) you received for your brand’s Instagram profile after you launched a campaign. This is a little more difficult to track, but it starts with your goals (i.e., 10% follower increase in 10 days) and determining the value of each follower (customer lifetime value, etc.). Compare your pre-campaign with your post-campaign results to determine success.

Note that you will need to get some of this data directly from your influencers. Before you work with them, ensure they have an Instagram business account, and they are willing to share data on your content, and other content on their feed so you can compare metrics. You can also track metrics with analytics software such as Iconosquare.

Conclusion

The power of instagram influencer marketing is there for brands willing to do the work. But launching marketing campaigns can still feel like a gamble—even if you leverage reliable data, set realistic goals, and plan accordingly.

TrueNorth gives marketers a way to discover which campaigns will work without wasting budget. With TrueNorth, you can gain more confidence in your marketing plans, bring order to chaos, and prove the value of your marketing across all channels.  

TrueNorth is open for Beta access by application only. Apply here to get first in line to test this groundbreaking marketing platform.

The post Instagram Influencer Marketing from the Ground Up appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Autopilot Review: Is It The Best Marketing Automation Software?

Autopilot is a dedicated marketing automation platform that’s made a real name for itself since it launched in 2012. Instead of trying to offer every marketing tool a business could ever need, Autopilot focuses entirely on providing powerful, yet usable automation features that any business can pick up and use – without writing any code.

In other words, Autopilot is an automation specialist and this means it really needs to deliver some class-leading tools and features to justify its claim as the perfect balance between power and ease-of-use.

We’re always on the lookout for better automation tools here at Venture Harbour so we spent a few months getting to grips with Autopilot. We’ve also surveyed 10,000+ marketers on the industry’s leading software platforms.

So this review is based on our in-house experiences of using Autopilot and feedback from thousands of other users.

Autopilot pros & cons

First, let’s take a look at the pros and cons we’ve experienced while using Autopilot. This will give you an idea of which way this review is going and provide you with a quick snapshot of its strengths and weaknesses.

Here are the main points we’ll be highlighting throughout this review:

Autopilot pros



Excellent automation featuresUsabilityAutomation templatesEasy collaborationAutomate actions between apps (similar to Zapier)Strong integration options



Autopilot cons



No built-in CRMRoom for more analytics & reportingCheaper options available

The short story is that Autopilot is an excellent piece of software and our CEO Marcus Taylor let slip that, if we were looking to move away from ActiveCampaign (I’ll explain why we’re not later), Autopilot would be his preferred choice for our marketing automation platform.

Regular readers will know this is a big statement because we’re all about automation here at Venture Harbour and everything we do is focused on automating growth.

As soon as you start using Autopilot, you realise this is a serious piece of software, even if its design has a bright and friendly appeal to it. This visual design concept is a key part of its code-free automation experience, which makes the complex world of building automated workflows as easy as we’ve ever seen from a tool like this.

The drag-and-drop builder means anyone can pick up the tool and start creating their own workflows. But the thing we loved most about Autopilot is how much easier it is for teams to collaborate on the same workflow.

Team members can annotate sequences with notes, emojis and stickers to provide contextual meaning for their colleagues. In all honesty, my initial reaction was that this made workflows look like a clipart nightmare from the early 2000s but the thing is, it works.

The notes and graphics make it so much easier to understand the logic of a workflow someone else created – something that can take hours to decipher without explanation. This feature alone makes it so much easier for us to collaborate on automation workflows, debug and provide feedback.

On the negative side, Autopilot doesn’t have a built-in CRM and this is a shame – especially as this isn’t the cheapest platform of its kind (we’ll look at this in more detail later).

That said, Autopilot integrates nicely with HubSpot’s free CRM and some of the biggest names, including Salesforce and Pipedrive. In fact, integration is another one of Autopilot’s biggest strengths and this partly makes up for the lack of a built-in CRM.

Autopilot’s argument is that “all-in-one software suites are a thing of the past” and the company insists it pays to use specialist software tools like its own for dedicated purposes. And there’s some merit to this argument, too, especially when Autopilot provides some of the best marketing automation features on the market.

How much does Autopilot cost?

So we know that Autopilot delivers in terms of quality and we’ve already mentioned that it’s not the cheapest option on the market. It’s not that the monthly fees themselves are particularly expensive but more to do with the low thresholds for contacts before you’re moved up to a more expensive plan.

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

If you pay monthly with no contractual agreement, you’re looking at the following fees:

Silver – $49 / mo for 2,000 contactsGold – $149 / mo for 5,000 contactsPlatinum – $249 / mo for 10,000 contacts

You can send unlimited emails on every plan and you get access to all Autopilot’s features. Unlike most software providers, the company doesn’t limit access to its more advanced features on cheaper plans.

You can bring the total cost of your plan down by committing to a year-long contract and further still by paying for the full year in advance.

Either way, you’re soon going to find yourself bumped up to the platinum plan and once you have more than 10,000 contacts, you’ll have to negotiate a deal with the company’s sales team. The good news is that, by this stage, you’ll start to get better value, pound for pound.

Also, keep in mind that software like this is designed to save and make you more money than it costs.

Autopilot add-ons

While Autopilot doesn’t restrict features on its cheaper plans, there are some enterprise features in the form of add-ons that you can pay extra for if needed:

Expert Setup & Training – $1,699: Get expert training and have our implementation specialists help you configure your account. This service includes help building your first journeys. This is an optional service.VIP Support – $159.20 / mo: Jump the queue! Get priority support on live chat and email 24 hours a day, 6 days per week. Your chat and email requests will be answered first by our team. This add-on includes backup restoration and access to our highest level of technical support.Salesforce CRM integration – $159.20 / mo: Unlock marketing automation for Salesforce with our native Salesforce integration. Selectively sync leads and contacts, assign new leads to sales, nurture leads not ready to buy, assign tasks, update fields and create new opportunities.Custom IP (advanced) – $119.20 each / mo: Control your individual sender reputation with a custom IP. Includes an automatic warm-up plan to establish a positive reputation and help when you need it from our expert email deliverability team.Activity Streams (advanced) – $159.20 / mo: Stream real-time activity data from your account to your data warehouse or favourite analytics tool for analysis. Includes pre-built connectors for Segment Sources and Heap Analytics.

Once you get past the 10,000 contacts mark and you’re negotiating a fee with Autopilot’s sales team, you may be able to get some of these add-ons thrown in or bring down the equivalent cost.

What features do you get for your money?

We’ve spent a good chunk of this article praising Autopilot marketing automation features so let’s take a closer look at what you actually get in return for your money.

Marketing automation

Autopilot combines an impressive range of automation features into its platform, allowing you to create customer journeys that automatically capture and nurture leads along the buying process.

The star of its platform is the drag-and-drop automation builder that we talked about earlier, which allows you to create sequences without writing any code.

The builder makes it possible for anyone with an automation idea to put their concept into action, regardless of technical capabilities. And, don’t let the ease-of-use fool you – this is a serious platform that allows you to create some heavyweight automations.

As we mentioned earlier, the builder is also great for teams that want to collaborate on workflows. For us, this was perhaps the most impressive aspect of Autopilot as our team spends a lot of time strategising and building new automation sequences.

Automation templates

Autopilot’s innovative automation builder makes it fast and easy to build sequences but a newly-rolled out feature promises to make automation even faster.

Automation templates are currently in beta, offering hundreds of pre-built automation sequences that you can use in a matter of clicks. For example, you can automate email responses when you capture a new lead from a form on your website, send gated content to users as soon as they sign up for access, activate and deactivate free trials without any manual input or reach out to leads who visit your pricing page – plus hundreds of other automations workflows every business can benefit from.

Create customer journeys

Autopilot’s primary purpose is to help you build customer journeys by connecting triggers, actions and events, based on the conditions of your choice, so that you can automatically deliver marketing messages at different stages of the consumer journey.

You can build these journeys in Autopilot, using the drag-and-drop builder to cover each stage of your marketing funnel and ensure leads are always heading in the right direction. You can also segment leads and chase up prospects who slip through the gaps or fail to complete the next action along your journey.

Integrate with best in class apps

Autopilot integrates with a fleet of the most popular marketing and sales apps – including Slack, Trello, Delighted, Facebook, Google, Intercom and 800+ more apps.

Another feature that really impressed us is that you can link your existing apps together through Autopilot and automate actions between them, in a similar way to how Zapier operates.

This opens up a huge space for automating repetitive tasks and cutting down on the manual labour of your marketing strategies. You can spend less time copying and pasting data to spreadsheets and more of it on coming up with the next killer strategy.

Email marketing

As you would expect with automation software like Autopilot, there’s a big emphasis on email marketing and the platform provides a complete set of features to help you create and automate effective email campaigns.

Once again, Autopilot’s automation builder is at the heart of your campaigns, allowing you to instantly respond to leads, create drip campaigns and use event triggers to automatically send emails to leads as they progress along the consumer journey.

Autopilot also provides a complete toolkit of email marketing features to help you build campaigns faster – as always – without writing any code.

Drag-and-drop email builder

With Autopilot’s drag-and-drop email builder, you can visually create HTML emails without coding the markup yourself. You can build your own email from scratch for 100% control over the design process or you can start with a template and customise the design from there.

Autopilot’s email builder runs smoothly in the browser so all you need to do is pull elements from the menu, drop them where you want and customise the styles to suit your design.

You can also preview your emails to see what they’ll look like on different devices and fine-tune your designs until you’re happy to send them off. You can also create and save your own templates for future use to save time on future designs and maintain stylistic continuity.

Email A/B testing

Any successful email marketing strategy requires some testing and experimentation to pinpoint the most effective message. This means you need solid A/B testing capabilities and Autopilot provides this, built into every plan of its software.

You can also integrate with third-party A/B testing software if you’re already using another platform, but it’s always good to see this natively included in a marketing automation platform.

Autopilot makes it easy to test your emails and it also provides the email analytics features you need to measure and compare email opens, clicks, replies, unsubscribes, bounces and conversions.

High email deliverability, guaranteed

Email deliverability is a key component of any email marketing platform and Autopilot works with all of the major ISPs to maintain its reputation to maximise deliverability. The company also has policies to ensure its customers are responsibly sending emails, which helps it retain a positive reputation – something that benefits all users of the platform.

You can also take full control over your deliverability and build a clean reputation from scratch by using Autopilot’s dedicated IP address add-on.

Lead management

The primary role of marketing automation is to turn leads into paying customers and drive growth without any human input. This means managing leads and guiding them along the sales funnel until they commit to the purchase and, then, nurturing them into repeat customers.

So let’s take a look at what Autopilot has to offer here.

Native CRM integrations

While Autopilot doesn’t provide its own built-in customer relationship management (CRM) system, you can integrate your existing CRM with its platform. Autopilot will pull the data in from your CRM, allowing you to create data-driven, automated campaigns that deliver the most relevant messages to users, based on their needs and position along the buying process.

Lead scoring & segmentation

Autopilot allows you to assign scores to leads based on the actions and behaviour with your website or content. This enables you to prioritise the leads that are most valuable to your business and the action-based scoring systems means leads are automatically targeted with higher-priority campaigns when their score increases.

With lead scoring, you waste less time on prospects that are unlikely to buy and you keep your list of contacts from getting clogged up with useless leads (contacts cost money, remember).

You can also use this feature to follow-up with leads, reactivate customers and track every interaction your customer has with your website or product.

Lead scoring is an important feature for companies that want to align their sales and marketing teams, too. It ensures the right department is always dealing with relevant leads as they progress along the customer journey and helps both teams prioritise their targets.

Lead nurturing

Combine Autopilot’s lead scoring features with its excellent automation software, you can automate lead nurturing strategies to guide prospects across the entire sales funnel, chase up lost leads and create automated customer retention campaigns designed to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers.

For example, as soon as a lead converts through one of your lead generation forms, you can send a follow-up email and add them to a lead segmentation list, based on the information they provide. You can then track their future visits to your sites and attribute more data to their profile, adapting their lead score as they continue to interact with your brand.

Every time they complete a new action that signifies progress along the sales funnel, they’re automatically sent the next email campaign and this new data is added to their profile.

This process continues as you target them with messages encouraging them to take the next step, until they make it all the way to the finishing line.

Multi-channel marketing

Automation platforms like Autopilot prioritise email marketing because it’s an owned channel where you can compile data for individual prospects and target them with highly relevant messages.

However, Autopilot is very much a multi-channel marketing platform and email isn’t the only strategy you can automate.

Autopilot allows you to collect data and set automation triggers across all of your marketing channels and deliver content to prospects on the platforms that matter most to them:

SMS Marketing: Cut through the noise and directly target your customers on the device they use the most – their smartphones.In-App Messaging: Connect with your audience on your website and in your app.Facebook retargeting: Use Autopilot to create Facebook retargeting campaigns and follow-up with Facebook leads faster than your competitors.Google Ads retargeting: When only ~2% of site visits result in conversions, marketers need to find new ways to encourage and persuade their audience to take action.Postcard Marketing: Give your customers something they can physically hold in their hands and encourage a new form of interaction.

Meanwhile, Autopilot’s built-in reporting and analytics mean you can track results across every channel and compare performance to find out where your marketing strategies are most effective.

How does Autopilot compare to the competition?

To help our readers choose the best marketing automation software for their individual needs, we asked more than 10,000 marketers to give us feedback from their experiences of using the 100 most popular software options.

We compiled all of this data into a spreadsheet and ranked all 100 software tools based on nine key categories:

Ease of useCostDeliverabilityFeaturesCRMReportingIntegrationsSupport & trainingSecurity

Out of 100 software platforms, Autopilot made into the top 10, placing 8th in our 10 Best Email Marketing Software & Email Automation Tools of 2020 ranking.

Not only that, but Autopilot won the title of the best tool for email marketing automation. Above all, this is because it offers some of the most comprehensive marketing automation features alongside an intuitive drag-and-drop builder that genuinely makes teamwork and collaboration easier for companies serious about strategic automation.

Autopilot is extremely intuitive and great for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences. If we had to move from ActiveCampaign, this is likely where we’d go.

Venture Harbour CEO, Marcus Taylor

As we mentioned earlier, one potential sticking point is that Autopilot isn’t the cheapest option, based on the contact limits of each plan. To give you an idea of how this compares to the other software options in our top 10 ranking, here’s a table for key contact counts:

ToolMonthly price for 2,500 contactsMonthly price for 10,000 contactsMonthly price for 100,000 contacts
MailerLite$15$50$360
ActiveCampaign$39$111$299
Moosend$20$125$585
Omnisend$36$102$570
SendinBlue$39$66$173
ConvertKit$49$119$679
Autopilot$149$249Not Public
MoonMail$149$149$949
Rejoiner$120$320$1,195
Hubspot$150$420$3,100

As you can see, this puts Autopilot among the more expensive options but it’s worth remembering that the company doesn’t throttle features on any of its plans – so you’re always getting the best out of the platform, no matter how much you pay.

Perhaps more importantly, you’re getting some of the best marketing automation features currently available – if not, the best.

While pricing may not be one of Autopilot’s strongest points, it ranked 2nd out of 100 in our survey for integrations, thanks to its ability to link your favourite apps together and a solid offering of free Zapier integrations.

TypeZapier TriggersZapier Actions & Searches


HubspotFree1317
ActiveCampaignFree1311
ConvertKitFree75
AutopilotFree44
MoosendFree35
MailerLiteFree22
SendinBlueFree21
RejoinerFree (beta)21
OmnisendFree02
MoonMailFree01

Above all, Autopilot is unrivalled when it comes to native integrations and only HubSpot was able to beat it in this category, thanks to its extensive list of integrations with major software providers.

Is Autopilot the best marketing automation software?

Based on our data and experience with the platform, we have to say that, yes, Autopilot is the best marketing automation software – because automation is precisely what it excels at.

The company positions itself as an automation specialist and fires a shot at software providers that try to do everything.

So, if you’re looking for an out-and-out marketing automation platform, Autopilot is hard to beat. Aside from industry-leading automation features, you get all of the email marketing tools you need to build lead nurturing campaigns and multi-channel coverage to cover the entire customer journey.

The lack of a CRM and pricing might be an issue for some companies but the Silver plan is reasonably priced and gives you access to all of Autopilot’s features – making it an excellent option for smaller businesses.

The post Autopilot Review: Is It The Best Marketing Automation Software? appeared first on Venture Harbour.

The Marketing Mix: Build a Complete Strategy With the 7Ps

“The marketing mix” aims to provide a complete framework for modern business models and marketing strategies across the entire customer journey.

While there are many variations of the marketing mix, the most common framework consists of seven elements, collectively known as the 7Ps. The idea is that a business can adopt the 7Ps principle and use it as a seven-step framework for building a successful marketing strategy that covers every stage of the buying process.

In this article, we look at how you can use the marketing mix to build a complete strategy, plus a few tips for improving the 7Ps model.

What is the 7Ps model?

The 7Ps marketing model is a framework designed to help businesses build a complete marketing strategy, from start to finish. In theory, a new business should be able to use the 7Ps model to devise an entire marketing strategy from scratch.

The name derives from the seven elements outlined in the 7Ps model, which all begin with the letter “P”:

ProductPromotionPricePlacePeopleProcessPhysical evidence



Source: Smart Insights

The 7Ps model is an evolution upon the 4Ps model originally founded by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960, in his book Marketing: A Managerial Approach. The original marketing mix concept was created during a time when the majority of businesses sold physical products and it was updated in the 1980s as more service-oriented businesses started to emerge.

The evolution from 4Ps to 7Ps

As mentioned in the previous section, Jerome McCarthy’s 4Ps model was created for businesses selling products to consumers.

As Smart Insights explains:

“The 4Ps were designed at a time where businesses were more likely to sell products, rather than services and the role of customer service in helping brand development wasn’t so well known.”

The original 4Ps included:

ProductPlacePricePromotion



Source: Hurree

These same four elements still exist as the primary components of the 7Ps models. As business and consumer markets have evolved, the application of the marketing mix has adapted, too. In 1981, Bernard H. Booms and Mary J. Bitner expanded McCarthy’s model into the 7Ps marketing mix we know today.

While the original 4Ps remain in place, Booms and Bitner added a further three Ps in the mix:

PeopleProcessPhysical evidence



Source: Hurree

The 7Ps model was created to reflect the emergence of service-oriented businesses where “Product” can mean either prospects or services. The expanded model also increases the emphasis upon customer service, as a result of increased consumer power and competition in every industry.

Like its predecessor, the 7Ps marketing mix has adapted to the evolution of consumer trends and new technologies.

In his book, Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, digital strategist and co-founder of Smart Insights, Dave Chaffey, refreshed the 7Ps model for the modern digital age.

Source: Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Dave Chaffey

Some marketers argue that the 7Ps model is outdated but, even in 2020, it’s the backbone for business models and marketing theories. In fact, even the older 4Ps model is as relevant today as it was in 1960, even if it doesn’t cover the entire marketing mix in the modern, digital age.

This will become more obvious throughout the rest of this article as we look at each of the 7Ps individually and, later, assess whether there are any gaps or weaknesses in the model.

Applying the 7Ps to digital marketing

Now that you understand the basic premise of the marketing mix, let’s take a closer look at the 7Ps model that’s most widely associated with it today. Let’s start by reminding ourselves of what the 7Ps stand for and explain a little bit about what they actually mean.

Product: The product or service, including its features, unique selling points and the overall quality on offer.Promotion: The methods used to promote the product across multiple channels.Price: The long-term pricing strategy of the product in question, including sales, discounts & deals.Place: Where people find your product, learn about it and, ultimately, buy it.People: The people who come into contact with your target customers – both directly and indirectly.Process: Your methods for delivering the product to customers and providing the best possible experience.Physical evidence: Tangible items and experiences that tell customers your offer is real – for digital, this can include website visits, confirmation emails, testimonials, customer reviews and more.

Now, it’s worth reaffirming the point that the original 4Ps are solid figures in the updated 7Ps model but you will find some variation in the three additional Ps added into this model, depending on where you get your information from.

We’re sticking to the original 7Ps model for this part of the article but we’ll look at ways you can adapt and expand it even further to meet the needs of your business later on.

#1: Product

The first P in this marketing model is “Product” and this is almost unanimously featured as the first P in all versions of the marketing mix. This is because one of the core principles of this theory is that marketing begins with your product.

At the end of the day, if you’ve got a lousy product – especially in this day and age – you’re going to have a hard time marketing it.

The key elements of the product in your marketing mix can vary, depending on which market you’re and who your target audiences are. But, at the very least, you should invest good resources into the following:

Quality: Higher product quality makes everything else you do in marketing and sales so much easier.Image: This refers to how people see your product and this is what separates products like the iPhone from Android devices or sports cars from cheaper, more practical vehicles.Branding: Closely linked to “image”, this is the brand story you build around your product and how it incorporates with your wider brand image.Features: The features of your product or service, which should place a heavy emphasis on USPs and benefits for your target customers.Variants: The different versions of your product or service, who they target and how you differentiate them.

The list could go on-and-on for Product and if you go back to Dave Chaffey’s version of the 7Ps we looked at earlier, you’ll see this is the longest list in his visualisation.

His list isn’t definitive or complete either; it’s up to you to decide which items belong on this list for your business. The point is that your product (or service) is the focal point of your marketing strategies and you want to do everything you can to ensure the right level of quality is there.

In terms of the branding aspects, this varies from one business to the next. Companies like Apple and Nike put huge resources into the branding of their products, not only the brand name itself. This isn’t necessarily the case companies like Google, Amazon or Intel that put more emphasis on market penetration.

#2: Promotion

Promotion refers to your marketing, advertising and sales activities across all channels. Once again, your channels of choice will vary depending on the nature of your business. For example, a B2B company may prioritise account-based marketing while a B2C company in the same industry might focus more on direct marketing methods.

Above all, you need to be present where your target audiences are active and interested in a brand like yours.

Given the rapid evolution of multi-channel marketing, this is one area where a version of the 7Ps model from as recent as five years ago can quickly look dated.

Here are some key elements to consider in 2021:

Multi-channel marketing: The consumer journey takes place across more devices, sessions and platforms than ever before, making it all the more important that you’re present on the channels that matter most to your target audiences.Personalised experiences: The more relevant you can make experiences to individual users, the more engaging your messages become and the more “locked-in” customers are to your brand.Integrated marketing & sales: Today’s brands need seamless integration between marketing and sales strategies to prevent leads getting lost along the funnel.Lead nurturing: A lot of brands make the mistake of focusing all of their attention on lead generation without dedicated enough resources to lead nurturing – especially customer retention.Branding: Today’s consumers want authentic experiences and brands are scrutinised for their ethical practices, making brand image more important – and fragile – than ever.PR: Brands don’t always give PR the attention it deserves in the digital age but it’s an invaluable tool for building, maintaining and even changing your brand image.Automation: As the digital marketing workload increases, brands need to automate as many repetitive tasks as they can to manage multi-channel campaigns successfully, maintain costs and achieve the fastest possible growth.

There’s no doubt that the Promotion aspect of the 7Ps model is getting more challenging with every year that passes, as technology and consumer trends become more complex.

The days of running a few TV ads and blasting out some unsolicited email campaigns are long behind us.

Serene is a productivity tool that helps teams and individuals get more done every day

Today’s brands need to use the right marketing and sales software to maximise productivity, automate repetitive tasks and manage campaigns across an ever-growing number of channels.

Take a look at some of our software recommendation articles for help with this:

30+ Best Free Marketing Tools10 Best All-in-One Email Marketing, Automation & CRM Platforms53 Business Automation Tools That Skyrocketed Our Growth by 330%



#3: Price

Price is pretty self-explanatory but the mistake companies normally make is underestimating the amount of detail that goes into pricing a single product – let alone an entire range of products or services.

Here’s a list of just some of the things you need to strategise:

Positioning: Where do you see your product, service or brand positioning in the market?Competition: The price of rival products, brand image of rival brands and competing quality of the products on offer.Justification: As soon as someone spends money on goods or a service, they instinctively spend time trying to justify the expense – and you need to make sure the result is worth the asking price.Discounts: Discounts should be strategic and planned out to maximise interest, demand and sales – not to clear unwanted items off the shelves.Credit: Are you going to offer credit options to make large purchases and expenses more manageable for your customers?Payment methods: Which payment methods are you going to provide your target customers?Free or value-added elements: Which freebies, value-added elements and incentives are you going to use to sweeten the deal for your prospects.

Value is highly subjective and the happiness of your customers with their purchases is determined far more by emotion than logic. As we’ve explained before in our articles on cognitive biases, you can influence consumer perception with simple psychological techniques.

A common example of this is software pricing pages where companies start with the most expensive price on the left side of the page. This exploits a cognitive weakness known as anchoring bias where people instinctively set the first piece of information they see as default, meaning any lower prices that follow naturally feel like good value.

#4: Place

Place is the final P in the original 4Ps model and this traditionally refers to the place where customers physically buy products and services. Of course, in the digital age, things are a little more complex and we have to expand the concept of place across multiple channels throughout the customer journey:

Discovery: The “places” both online and offline where potential customers discover your brand and its products/services.Browsing: The locations where prospects can browse through your offers alongside competitors (eg: an online store) or within your own domain (eg: a product category on your website).Learn: Places where target audiences can learn more about your products or services, such as third-party reviews.Comparison: Where potential customers go to compare your offers against rival brands.Physical interaction: Any place where prospects are able to physically touch the product or service (if relevant) although this could apply to free trials and demos for digital products, too.Purchases: Online and offline locations where your customers can purchase from you.Customer services: The channels where customers can reach out for care after making the initial purchase.Retention: The channels you use to target customers after the initial purchase to entice further sales.

Place in the digital age refers to every strategic location where potential customers engage with your brand and its product or services – both before and after the sale.

The point is, you need to control these locations, which starts with choosing the right channels of discovery to capture new leads and then nurturing prospects along the sales funnel with targeted interactions.

#5: People

In today’s customer-centric approach to marketing, you might assume “People” refers to your target audiences, buyer personas and customers. However, the People in the 7Ps model actually refers to the people within your organisation that interact with your customers – both directly and indirectly:

Marketers: The 7Ps model highlights the importance of hiring the best talent for every position on your marketing team.Sales team members: These are the people who typically handle the first person-to-person interactions with your customers – and often seal the deal.Customer service team: The individuals tasked with keeping your customers happy, even when things aren’t quite going to plan.Recruitment: Hiring the best talent starts with having quality recruitment personnel.Training & skills: The people responsible for ensuring all of your team members encompass the brand ethos and meet your requirements.Managers: The people with people skills to manage teams, get the best out of everyone and ensure you hit targets.

Chances are, you’ll have several other groups or teams included in your People. Here at Venture Harbour, we’ve got the developers who build and test our products, designers who create the best possible experience for our customers and a pool of freelancers we turn to for a range of different tasks.

An overview of our team structure here at Venture Harbour

Everyone in our team contributes to building and delivering the best product and experiences we can to our customers – and it’s important we recognise the value in that.

For more information on how to build and manage a marketing team effectively, you can read our guide:

Marketing Teams: How to Structure & Manage Them Effectively



#6: Process

Process in the 7Ps model refers to your processes for delivering the product or service to your customers, as well as any additional customer service and post-purchase systems you have in place.

At the very least, you should have processes in place for the following:

Customer-end delivery: The customer’s process for attaining your product or service, whether it’s ordered online and delivered via a courier, bought in-store, downloaded from your website or accessed through an online signup process.Business-end delivery: Your processes for facilitating customer-end delivery and safeguards for resolving any potential issues (eg: technical issues preventing online purchases).Customer service: Your processes, systems and channels for providing customer service beyond the initial sale.Resolutions: Your processes for dealing with problems that prevent usual delivery systems from completing successfully and instances where customers are unhappy with the process/service received.Incentives: Measures designed to keep unhappy customers engaged with your brand so you can keep them on board and win them over.Returns & refunds: Your systems for dealing with returns, cancellations, refunds and any other processes for customers who refuse to stay on board.Feedback: Your processes for collecting customer feedback and applying these insights to product/service improvements.T&Cs: The terms and conditions that your customers agree to, specifying your processes and protecting your business in any instance where things don’t go to plan.

You have to carefully and strategically build processes for every customer interaction, down to the finest detail. When your primary method of delivering products or services to your customers fails, you need a solid backup plan – and another one for when your Plan B fails, too.

Today’s customers have more options than ever and modern businesses need to satisfy these expectations – from delivery methods and payment options to customer service channels and financial guarantees.

If you’re doing this properly, you’ll be forced to make some difficult decisions and it’s not always a question of doing what’s best for the customer. For example, you don’t want to make it too easy for customers to seek a refund, return items or close accounts. You want to carefully add some friction here and there to provide crucial time for resolving issues and encourage continued use.

ActiveCampaign offers a range of support channels, prioritising online methods to make customer service more manageable.

Likewise, your customer service processes need to be effective in terms of keeping customers on your side but they also need to be affordable and it’s not always realistic to have an in-house team of customer care staff sitting by the phones every day.

Once again, technology can help you strike the right balance between customer care and profitability – for example, using chatbots to handle the first interactions with customers. Likewise, personalised automated email responses can cut the perceived time it takes for human team members to contact customers directly.

#7: Physical evidence

The final P in the 7Ps stands for Physical evidence and this used to refer to actual physical items and forms of interaction: products, stores, receipts, packaging, bags and other branded items that could be seen and touched.

Of course, these are all forms for physical evidence today but, in the digital age, we have to reconsider our definition of “physical”.

So what does physical evidence really achieve?

Well, on one hand, it helps customers feel more confident that they’re dealing with a legitimate business before they make a purchase. A company with stores across the country, great products and nice packaging must be doing pretty well for itself and, surely, this wouldn’t be possible if they weren’t taking good care of their customers – right?

“Physical” evidence that my empty coffee capsules are going to be collected and recycled by Nespresso.

The second key role physical evidence plays is after the initial sale by providing customers with evidence that the transaction took place, their payment was received and their products or services will be delivered.

Places: This was the fourth P on our list of 7Ps and these locations act as physical evidence – whether it’s your website, physical stores or trusted third-party platforms.Third-party evidence: Customer reviews, press coverage in major publications and positive press are especially important in the digital age where simply having a website doesn’t provide the level of physical evidence real-world stores.Online experience: That said, the quality of your website and the user experience it provides are crucial forms of physical evidence in the modern consumer journey.Feedback: Sales staff provide all kinds of feedback through conversation, facial expressions and body language, which is lost in the online experience. So it’s important to design intuitive feedback into the experience – everything from click confirmations and animations to on-page feedback when forms are completed and payments are submitted.Order confirmation: Whether it’s physical receipts or confirmation emails, customers need to know their transactions are successful.Product packaging: Both the physical and digital packaging/branding of your products or services.

Physical evidence is primarily about easing consumer concerns and purchase anxieties by reassuring potential customers that your business is legitimate, their money is in good hands and the purchase is going to go smoothly.

By providing feedback across the entire customer journey, you can confirm that every little interaction is successful and build reassurance as they get closer to putting their money on the line.

What are the limitations of the 7Ps model?

There’s no such thing as a perfect marketing model and, no matter how comprehensive a list we make for each of the 7Ps, there’s no way it can cover every aspect of a digital marketing strategy.

In fact, there are various different versions of an 8th P added to the model of seven, depending on which marker you speak to. As Smart Insights explains in this article, “An eighth P, ‘Partners’ is often recommended for businesses to gain reach online… although some would argue it’s part of Place.”

Other incarnations of a proposed 8Ps model may include Performance, Productivity, Packaging or a range of other alliterated alternatives for the enigmatic title of the eighth P.

If this debate tells us anything, it’s that the 7Ps model clearly has its limitations and there have been plenty of expansions or alternatives proposed in the past.

For me, the glaring omission in the 4Ps and 7Ps models is the lack of reference to the end customer in both of them. In fact, on a broader scale, neither model even makes a reference to market research and ensuring there’s a large enough target audience for the product or a demand for it.

I guess you could solve this problem without changing the 7Ps model by simply including customers in People and market research in Product. However, stronger alternatives have been offered in “the age of the customer” while others can be used to expand upon the 7Ps model.

Source: Consuunt

In 1990, Robert F. Lauterborn proposed his customer-centric alternative to the 4Ps model, which we can crudely call the 4Cs:

Customer needsCostConvenienceCommunication

This offers a more customer-centric alternative to the traditional 4Ps model that feels a lot more suitable for the modern age. However, there are problems with simply replacing the Ps for Cs.

As we mentioned in the Process section earlier, if you only consider the customer in your delivery methods, you can easily overlook the business management side of things. Likewise, if you think of the customer with your customer service processes, then you can end up creating a system that hurts your bottom line – either by being too generous or overspending on your customer care systems.

While it sounds great to talk about the customer experience as the priority (perhaps it should be), it’s not the only factor in a successful business, by any means – or a complete marketing strategy for that matter.

As Hannah Tow suggests in her article for G2, we might be better off extending the 7Ps even further to include the 4Cs, allowing us to look at Price from the business’ perspective and also the Cost from the customer’s point of view.

Create the model that works for you (and your customers)

The 7Ps model isn’t a fixed framework that you have to follow religiously. It’s more of a template that helps you consider every aspect of marketing across the entire journey – so you don’t overlook key factors like how physical evidence increases confidence and enhances the customer experience.

It’s a model that you should scrutinise, adapt and reshape to suit your business, your target audiences and your customers. Whether this means staying relatively true to the original 7Ps, expanding it with the 4Cs or coming up with your own version is entirely up to you.

Just make sure you cover all of the essential bases to avoid leaving gaps in your marketing strategy and the customer experience.

The post The Marketing Mix: Build a Complete Strategy With the 7Ps appeared first on Venture Harbour.

How to Use Marketing Segmentation to Improve Marketing Campaigns

Double your marketing campaign’s performance overnight with this one easy trick.

If that sounds like one of those weight loss ads you’ve seen a thousand times, well, that’s because it is.

Sort of.

Unlike those “one weird trick” ads, there’s actually some truth to my outrageous marketing claim.

It won’t happen overnight, and it isn’t snap-your-fingers easy, but there is a tried-and-true way to potentially double your marketing campaign’s performance with the audience you currently have.

Marketing segmentation.

What’s in This Guide?

Are you one of the 89% of marketers leaving conversions on the table?

If so, this guide has you covered. And, true to its subject matter, it’s broken into seven segments:

What is marketing segmentation?Why does segmentation work?The four Cs of marketing (not the four Ps)Which channels can be segmented?Five ways to segment your target audienceHow to incorporate marketing segmentation into your business todayHow to monitor campaign performance using tools like TrueNorth  to optimise returns

Let’s start at the top.

What Is Marketing Segmentation?

Marketing segmentation is the practice of dividing your target audience into smaller groups with similar needs, interests, or other characteristics who are likely to respond positively to targeted marketing campaigns.

Segmenting your marketing campaigns requires more work — understanding your audience, creating multiple campaigns, and optimising those campaigns — but it’s proven to drive massive returns.

Just take a look at these statistics on the benefits of segmented email marketing campaigns:

14.3% increase in email open rates101% increase in clickthrough rates760% increase in email-driven revenue

Sources: HubSpot and Campaign Monitor

Why Does Marketing Segmentation Work?

Marketing segmentation works because it puts the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

Let’s say you’re in charge of marketing for a pet food brand, and your company sells the highest-quality, all-natural dog and cat food. Your company just released its newest formulations for both dogs and cats made with real Alaskan salmon, each of which sells for $50.

You have an email list of 10,000 enthusiastic pet owners split into two equal-sized groups:

5,000 who only have dogs5,000 who only have cats

(For the sake of simplicity, we’ll pretend no one on the list has both a dog and a cat.)

What’s the best way to promote your company’s newest product to your email list subscribers?

Let’s look at two different email marketing campaigns.

Campaign 1: Unsegmented

The easiest option is to send one email to all 10,000 subscribers unveiling your new products for both dogs and cats.

You use a generic subject line — “Hey, [name]…does your pet like REAL Alaskan salmon?” — and pitch both the new dog and cat food in the body of your email.

The results?

17.5% open rate (1,750 opens)22.9% click-to-open rate (400 clicks to product page) for a 4% clickthrough rate2.25% conversion rate on your product page (9 conversions)$50 average order value (each conversion buys one, either for dogs or cats)$450 revenue and $0.045 per subscriber



Campaign 2: Two segments

Another option is to segment your list based on what you know about your subscribers: the types of animals they have. You create two separate emails — one for dog owners and one for cat owners — and drive recipients to the appropriate landing page.

The first difference is the subject line. This time you can get more targeted:

“Hey, [name]…does your DOG like REAL Alaskan salmon?”“Hey, [name]…does your CAT like REAL Alaskan salmon?”

Those targeted subject lines result in higher open rates.

Each email body is more targeted too. And because you aren’t wasting valuable email real estate pitching cat food to dog owners and vice versa, you’re able to write more compelling email copy that boosts your click-to-open rates.

Another benefit: Your targeted landing pages are more tailored to your subscribers, promoting only the relevant product.

The results?

20% open rate (2,000 opens)40% click-to-open rate (800 clicks to product page) for an 8% clickthrough rate2.5% conversion rate on your product page (20 conversions)$50 average order value (each conversion buys one, either for dogs or cats)$1,000 revenue and $0.10 per subscriber

Scenario 2’s segmented campaign generated $550 more revenue (+122.2%) despite marketing to the exact same list.

Why (exactly) did the segmented campaign outperform the unsegmented campaign?

The segmented campaign’s 122.2% increase in revenue was due to a series of incremental improvements to every stage of the email marketing funnel:

Increased open rates due to more personalised email subject linesIncreased click-to-open rates due to more targeted email copyIncreased product page conversion rates due to more targeted product page copy

When linked together in your sales funnel, these increases multiply for massive incremental campaign returns.

Best of all, the numbers used in the example above are in line with the statistics about the benefits of segmented email campaigns mentioned at the beginning of this guide.

Let’s compare the performance Campaign 1 and Campaign 2’s:

Email Funnel StepCampaign 1 (Unsegmented)Campaign 2 (Segmented)ChangeCompare Improvement ToDelivered Emails10,00010,0000 (0%)–Opened Emails1,7502,000+250 (100%)14.3% (HubSpot)Clicks to Product Page400800+400 (100%)101% (HubSpot)Product Page Conversion Rate2.25%2.5%+0.25 (11.1%)Assumption*Conversions920+11 (122.2%)–Revenue Per Conversion$50$50$0 (0%)–Total Revenue$450$1,000+$550 (122.2%)–Revenue per Subscriber$0.045$0.10+$0.055 (122.2%)–

*Targeted email campaigns let you create targeted landing pages, which increases conversion rates.

If you could get a 100% increase on your email campaign’s clickthrough rate and a 111.1% increase in both conversions and revenue just by creating an extra email and landing page targeted to your recipients, wouldn’t you?

The 4 Cs of Marketing (not the 4 Ps)

Intuitively, this all makes sense. Put the right message in front of the right person, and you’ll increase the likelihood of that person completing your desired action.

But that begs a new question: What is the right message, and how do you create it?

Traditionally, your marketing campaign’s message began with your marketing mix, also known as the four Ps:

Product: Understanding the features, usability, value, and life cycle of your product.Price: The amount you charge and how that price relates to both the real and perceived value of your product.Place: Where to sell your product.Promotion: How to sell your product and communicate its value to your target customers.

Do you see the problem with this approach? None of those Ps talk about the customer.

Today, most marketers have replaced the four Ps with the four Cs:

Customer Wants & Needs: The problem your product solves for the customer. Use empathy and help them realise why they need your solution.Cost: The amount your customer pays for your product and how they perceive that price. This also includes the opportunity cost to your customer of choosing to spend their finite resources on your product over either competitor products or other initiatives unrelated to your product.Convenience: How easy it is for customers to find your product and purchase it. This includes how seamless your sales funnel is and your order fulfilment and shipping time.Communication: The conversation you have with your customers to communicate how your product solves their problem and make them feel confident in both your brand and their purchase.

The four Cs cover the same factors as the four Ps, but they do it from the customer’s perspective instead of the business’s.

Why does this subtle shift in thought process matter? Think of it this way: When you’re at a holiday party meeting new people, which of these two people are you more likely to remember favourably:

Mark, who asks about your hobbies and genuinely tries to get to know you.Dave, who talks the entire time about why mountain climbing is “just so rad.”

Don’t be Dave. Communicate with your audience. Don’t talk at them.

Which Marketing Channels Can Be Segmented?

Segmentation most often is associated with email marketing, but you can segment virtually every marketing channel for optimised results:

Email: When you build your email list, think about what you know about your subscribers. Which of your products are they interested in? Where are they in your sales funnel? Have they purchased from you before? Your initial email to someone who hasn’t purchased yet will be different than your upsell or support email to someone who has.Social Media: Each platform has different user demographics, which means the makeup of your audience is different. What messages are you communicating to followers on each platform? Is it targeted to that platform or generic across all social media platforms?PPC: Think about the keywords you’re targeting. What’s the intent for people searching with those keywords? Does your ad speak to those users? Are you directing them to a relevant landing page?Content Marketing: When you create and publish content, what topics and keywords are you targeting with that content? When people consume it, where are they in your marketing funnel? Are you putting the right CTA in front of them?Podcasts: Podcast advertising offers access to a growing, niched-down audience that’s highly-responsive to carefully-segmented marketing campaigns with 67% of podcast listeners reporting they remember brands and products  from podcast ads. Consider the podcast you’re advertising on. What’s the style, theme, and tone of that show? How can you seamlessly integrate your brand’s message so it seems like native advertising?Traditional Offline Marketing: If you’re purchasing a billboard or newspaper ad, where will people see your campaigns? What do those people care about?

That isn’t an exhaustive list of marketing channels, but the point is clear: No matter which channels your brand uses, think about the audience you’re speaking to and tailor your message to them.

Well, hold up. How do you evaluate and segment your audience?

5 Ways to Segment Your Audience

There are five ways to segment your audience, regardless of whether you’re a B2C or B2B company:

DemographicGeographicPsychographicBehaviouralContextual

Let’s take a look at each.

1. Demographic

Demographic segmentation focuses on quantifiable, population-level characteristics. Most people are familiar with segments in the context of B2C companies:

AgeSex and genderRace and ethnicityIncomeEducationRelationship statusFamily environmentHomeownership status

For B2B companies, think about the quantifiable, industry-level characteristics of the companies you market to:

Industry or verticalNumber of employeesAnnual revenue

Many of these characteristics, both for B2C and B2B companies, are easy ways to include or exclude customers and narrow your campaign’s focus quickly.

2. Geographic

Geographic segmentation focuses on the physical location of your customers:

CountryRegionState or provinceCityPostal codeUrban, suburban, or ruralClimate

If you’re a brick-and-mortar business offering services in a specific city, it’s important to narrow your marketing efforts to people within your service area.

3. Psychographic

Psychographic segmentation focuses on the personality traits, preferences, motivations, and attitudes of your customers. Because they’re harder to see, they’re usually harder to measure.

Examples of psychographic segments include the following:

Personality, such as being an introvert or extrovertLifestyle, such as the importance of health and fitnessSocial status, such as the importance of glamour or having the “latest and greatest”Values, such as the importance of familyMotivations, such as pridePriorities in life, such as advancing their careerActivities and interests, such as cycling or cinemaPolitical beliefsFears, such as abandonment or financial struggle

Psychographic segmentation isn’t limited to B2C companies, though. Even if your business markets to other businesses, remember that those businesses are still made up of people. What do your contacts at those businesses care about?

Brands that have both psychographic information about their audience and well-developed psychographic profiles for their marketing personas can create highly-targeted and effective campaigns that resonate with customers.

4. Behavioural

Behavioural segmentation focuses on actions and interactions with your brand, other brands, and as a consumer in general:

ImpulsivenessUser status, such as non-user, existing user, or former userSales funnel statusPrevious interactions with your brandPrevious interactions with other brandsHow they use your productBrand loyalty



5. Contextual

Every guide to marketing segmentation includes the first four — demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioural — but most forget this one because it isn’t a trait or characteristic of your target customer.

Contextual segmentation is more about your target customer’s instantaneous situation. Here are a few examples:

Recent major life milestone, such as just married or laid offState of mind, such as happy or sadTransient physical location, such as at work or at homeShopping situation, such as at the store with a spouse or alone

It may feel like contextual segmentation overlaps the four common marketing segments above, but, in reality, it’s adding an extra level of detail or granularity that can take an already-targeted campaign and make it feel intimate.

Example: Going back to our all-natural pet food brand, let’s say you have a customer persona named Pete. Pete is a 30-something male and first-time pet owner who has a medium-sized dog. He has a full-time job and no significant other or kids, he owns his own home in the suburbs, and he enjoys running with his dog.

That’s a lot of valuable information about Pete to create a targeted marketing campaign. But what if you also knew Pete, a first-time pet owner, just adopted his dog last week?

Contextually, Pete is a novice pet owner even by first-time pet owner standards. Now you can create hyper-targeted campaigns pitching all sorts of dog food, training treats, and other products to catch Pete in his dog-ownership honeymoon phase.

How to Incorporate Marketing Segmentation for Your Business Today

Integrating segmentation into your brand’s marketing plan may seem daunting, but it’s less complicated than you think.

1. Research your market

The first step in segmenting your audience is to understand it.

If you’re an existing brand, you probably have a wealth of customer data available to you:

Information about who’s purchasedWebsite visitor demographic and geographic data from Google AnalyticsContent performance statistics from Google AnalyticsHistoric email marketing campaign performanceHistoric PPC campaign performanceSurveys, questionnaires, or other forms of customer feedbackSocial media audience insights

If you’re a new brand without an existing audience or following, there are a few ways you can estimate your market:

Information about your competitors and their customersYour product, the problems it solves, and who cares about those problemsPublicly-available data, such as industry research and reports and census dataFocus groups, surveys, and user-testing

Perfect is the enemy of good, especially if you’re just getting started with marketing segmentation. If you only have basic demographic data available to you, start with that and work to improve your audience tracking and campaign performance over time.

2. Segment your audience by developing buyer personas

Buyer personas are detailed profiles of fictitious customers based on your market data. Each persona represents one group of customers who share common demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioural, and contextual characteristics. It even helps to name your personas.

Developing and naming personas may seem like an unnecessary step; they’re invaluable when creating your specific campaigns.

If everyone on your team knows Pete, the male, 30-something, first-time dog owner with a full-time job, his own home, and a love of running, then it’s easy for everyone to envision how well Pete will respond to each email in your autoresponder sequence.

Just like everything else in marketing, your buyer personas should be under constant review and refinement. As you interact with Pete through subsequent campaigns and transactions, you’ll learn more about him, which allows you to add new psychographic or behavioural traits to shape how you communicate with him.

3. Create your campaigns

It’s time to begin creating your segmented marketing campaigns using your newly-developed buyer personas. This is where the 4 Cs come into play:

Customer Wants & Needs: What does Pete want? What problems is Pete experiencing, and how does our product address those problems?Cost: How much value does Pete perceive our product to have, and how does that compare to our product’s price point?Convenience: How easy it is for Pete to find and purchase our product? Is it easy for him to complete the transaction? Are there any post-transaction gaps we need to address for a seamless user experience?Communication: How do we need to communicate with Pete? Where is he in our sales funnel? Have we communicated with him before? If so, how has he responded to our messages? How do we speak to Pete in a way he’ll be receptive to listening?

Now that you have a well-defined persona and a well-developed persona to communicate with that persona, it’s finally time for your campaign to go live.

4. Measure and optimise

But the work doesn’t end when your campaign begins. As potential customers begin to interact with your campaign, you can start collecting data on how they respond to it:

What’s your email open rate?What’s your clickthrough rate?What’s your landing page’s conversion rate?How many Facebook shares do your posts get?What’s your cost per click for your PPC ad campaign?How many qualified leads are you generating?What’s your cost per lead?

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There are 51 marketing metrics you should know as you track campaign performance. You don’t want to track every single one, but you do want to identify the core metrics that tell you whether your campaigns are meeting expectations. These are your True North metrics.

You also don’t want to wait months for your campaigns to run their course before assessing their performance. Short 1-3 week Agile marketing sprints can help you use early data to optimise your marketing efforts:

Identify your high-performing marketing channels.Optimise your campaigns to those channels.Cut your low-performing channels and campaigns.Refine your buyer personas for better efficiency.

This real-time, read-and-react approach is crucial to maximise each campaign’s ROI and make the most of your company’s marketing budget.

Conclusion

If marketing segmentation doubles clickthrough rates and powers a 760% increase in email-driven revenue, then why do just 11% of marketers use it?

Complexity.

Your first segmented campaign doesn’t need 13 personas to be effective, but it does help to map out a few segments, measure their performance and optimise for better returns. While not rocket science, that’s more effort and moving parts than many marketers are used to.

And that’s where tools like TrueNorth shine.

TrueNorth is a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans, track campaign performance and prioritise high-performers. Its centralised reporting and ease of use are invaluable for brands trying to harness the power of segmentation.

If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader, you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.

The post How to Use Marketing Segmentation to Improve Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Venture Harbour.

15 Marketing Tactics That Work (And How to Plan Them)

Social ads, in-depth blogs, live video, podcast interviews—you are likely juggling so many marketing tactics that you forgot why you are doing them in the first place. Yet, you keep on juggling because you know you need them to grow your business.

But as you juggle, the painful reality sets in when you notice that the money is going out a lot quicker than it is coming in.

While we can’t wave a magic wand and immediately fix all of your marketing problems, hopefully, we can steer you in the right direction. In this guide, we will first talk about the difference between a marketing strategy and a tactic. Comprehending the difference will help you stay more focused on the right marketing tactics instead of being distracted by shiny new object syndrome, which wastes money and resources. Then, we will cover 15 highly effective marketing tactics you can execute right away. Let’s dive in!

What are Marketing Tactics?

Put simply, marketing tactics are strategic activities that promote your brand and products to your target audience. The purpose of your marketing tactics will be defined by your strategy and company goals. Some marketing tactics may promote your content, some may generate leads from landing pages, others may involve advertising to promote free trial signups, and on and on and on. The point is that there are thousands of marketing tactics you can employ. But not all of them will match your goals or strategy.

Strategy vs Tactics

You may have read numerous articles that discuss marketing tactics like content marketing, search engine optimisation, and lead generation. The problem is, these concepts are better defined as strategies, not tactics.  

A marketing strategy aligns with your goals and determines the direction of your campaigns, your marketing budget and how you will communicate and distribute your message to your audience. Your marketing strategy defines the tactics you will use to fulfil your marketing goals. 

Suppose you randomly choose marketing tactics without first defining your marketing strategy, goals, KPIs (key performance indicators) and budget. In that case, you will feel like you are running in a hamster wheel, working harder every day but never getting ahead. Then, If you do get ahead, you won’t know which tactic helped you get there if you didn’t set goals or track KPIs.

Here is an example of marketing strategy vs tactics:

Marketing strategy/goal/KPI: Use content marketing via blogging to increase leads by 25% in the fourth quarter to boost awareness of our new product launch.Marketing tactic #1: Insert dynamic CTAs into blog posts to publish more relevant CTAsMarketing tactic #2: Create one in-depth blog post a month to boost traffic from long-tail keywords.Marketing tactic #3: Run Facebook ads to boost traffic to in-depth blog posts

In this guide, we detail 15 marketing tactics, not strategies. Use them only if they align with your marketing strategy and goals.

While there are thousands of marketing tactics we could talk about in this guide, we focused on some common and uncommon ones that can boost the ROI of most businesses. We also categorised the tactics by marketing strategy:

Content marketingEmail marketingConversion rate optimisationSocial marketingInfluencer/referral marketing

Each tactic can help you generate more leads, sales, traffic, referrals, signups, and brand awareness.

Content Marketing Tactics

Content—you know you need it, but ongoing creation and publishing can be overwhelming and challenging to realise an ROI.

Content can be highly effective though, we promise. It just takes consistency and the right tactics that align with your marketing strategy. Below are three of our favourite tactics for supercharging your content marketing campaigns.

1. Exercise Transparency and Authenticity

While we firmly believe that transparency is a content marketing staple rather than a tactic, we include it here because it’s essential to an effective content marketing campaign.

Consumers enter the customer journey guarded and sceptical. They know businesses are in it to make money, but they want to be able to trust the brands they purchase from. Transparent content can bridge that gap and turn sceptical consumers into loyal customers.

What does it mean to publish transparent content? First, find out what your audience cares about, whether it’s how you develop your products, how you come up with new product ideas, your processes, operations, customer service, and even revenue numbers. What you reveal will be unique to your company, but the key is to show a little humanity to remove the invisible barrier separating you from connecting to your consumer.  

What type of transparent content can you publish? Here are some ideas:

Behind-the-scenes videos and other content that portrays the inner workings of your business—what consumers don’t see every day.Wins and losses. What marketing tactics were successful? Which ones failed? What lessons have you learned? You don’t need to give away all of your proprietary strategies, but let your audience know you are human, and you face similar frustrations.Get ahead of mistakes and publish them before your audience gets a chance to call you out on them.Show revenue numbers in blog posts if this aligns with your marketing strategy.Give away your best stuff in your free content, and your audience will come back to buy your offerings. As an example, we’ve done this with posts like our ultimate guide to creating a value proposition  or the ultimate marketing plan . We give away our best content to empower our audience to win and win big.



2. Dynamic CTAs

Close more leads using dynamic CTAs in your blog content.

Standard CTAs are static; you add a lead offer to a web page or content asset, and it remains there until you change it. Dynamic CTAs increase conversions because they adjust based on who views the content, which makes the offer more personalised.

How can you take advantage of dynamic CTAs? Personalise them by:

User profile – Promote different offers depending on the buyer persona.User behaviour – Ex: Retarget users who landed on your automated webinar registration page but haven’t signed up.Buyer’s journey – Promote different offers depending on where the consumer is in the buyer’s journey. For example, you would promote an educational article to a consumer in the awareness stage, but if the consumer is in the decision stage, a better offer would be a case study.User interactions and interests – If a user downloaded your Facebook promotions lead offer, they may also be interested in your Twitter ads lead offer.

For more information, consult this in-depth guide on dynamic CTAs.

3. Automated Evergreen Webinars  

Webinars are a highly effective lead generation strategy, but running live presentations ongoing may not be practical for most businesses. They can be costly and resource-intensive to do right.

The benefit of creating an evergreen automated webinar is it doesn’t require ongoing manual work. You set it up once, and let your campaign run for an extended period. So essentially, you will generate leads on autopilot.

One caveat is that these webinars may not be as effective as live webinars because viewers cannot interact in real-time. Also, depending on your industry, even if you create evergreen content, an unexpected change in your industry or market may render some of the webinar content outdated.

Still, the benefits of automated evergreen webinars outweigh the downsides. Here is an in-depth guide on how to conduct automated evergreen webinars.

Email Marketing Tactics

Personalisation, automation and customer loyalty are three powerhouse strategies to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns. Below, we detailed one tactic for each of these strategies to help you boost your ROI and meet your marketing goals.

4. Automate Referral Campaigns

Referrals are integral to business growth, but managing a manually-driven referral program is tedious, and you might miss out on potential referrals if you don’t automate the process.

Set up automated referral campaigns via email using your small business CRM or another tool that enables you to automate your email marketing. We use and love ActiveCampaign, which gives you the ability to set up automated referral workflows and customise them based on your unique setup.

Here is what a typical automated email referral workflow looks like, according to ActiveCampaign.

Source

Essentially, you are directing your campaign to send an email based on your users’ behaviours. You can send automatic emails and tag users who want to refer a friend. Once a user says they want to refer a friend, your campaign automatically sends them an email introducing your referral program.

5. Behavioural Targeting

Want to boost conversions and connect with prospects? Behavioural marketing is a must. Behavioural targeting via email considers users’ actions on your website and in emails and sends automated emails based on this data.

Behavioural marketing works because of the concept of relevancy. When you target prospects with relevant content (based on past behaviours, interests or intentions), they are more likely to engage with it. According to McKinsey, businesses that leverage customer behavioural insights outperform peers 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margin.

Now, couple behavioural marketing with automated workflows and you have a conversion-boosting email marketing system running on autopilot.

So, for example, if a user fills out a form on your website to get your lead offer, but then doesn’t download the offer after three days, set up an email sequence to re-engage them. Tailor the email sequence to the users’ behaviour (i.e., “I see you downloaded our XYZ ebook,” etc.).

There are many different ways to customise automated email workflows. Here are a few examples of what an automated email workflow may look like:

Source

Suggested reading: Check out our in-depth guide on multiple automated workflows.

6. Subscriber Specials

Reward your customers and subscribers by emailing them with special offers, discounts, and gifts. Make customers feel special with offers only they can access. This type of customer engagement increases customer retention and urges prospects to do business with you.

The jobs database Flexjobs offers subscriber specials by crowning October 20th as National Flex Day. Subscribers can enjoy 50% off their services, entrance into giveaways, and exclusive educational webinars and training.

Conversion Rate Optimisation Tactics

Got a lot of traffic? Great. Are you converting that traffic? If not, your traffic isn’t very valuable. Try these three tactics to boost conversions and snag more leads and sales.

7. Live Chat Data

Live chat provides a way for your website users to get immediate answers to their questions while perusing your site. Mitigating customer concerns and solving their problems in real-time can enhance the customer experience.

But aside from user communication, you can also collect data from user’s live chat messages that will also help you to improve customer experience, thereby increasing conversions.

Users are likely messaging you in real-time with valid concerns. Gather user’s comments and messages, especially if they reveal their pain points and concerns. Then, use this data to improve customer experience. For example, if users continually have questions about your product guarantee, your website copy may be unclear and confusing and warrant a revision. Revising the copy can remove the friction in that sales process and result in increased sales.

Use your live chat messaging data to improve your users’ experience with your brand and products to increase conversions.  

8. Optimise Web Forms

Around 81% of people abandon forms after starting to fill them out.  Why? Well, web forms are notoriously frowned upon by internet users who don’t have enough patience to complete them.

Form abandonment is rampant, but with a little optimisation, you can increase form conversion rates. Using web optimisation tactics on our forms, we enjoyed a 743% increase in conversions.

You may have thought about reducing the form fields to combat user overwhelm, but this is not always the best practice. You may need all of the fields to capture essential information from your user. Also, whoever fills out the form (and takes the time to fill out all of the fields) is likely a more qualified lead who will eventually express interest in your product. So removing the fields may increase form signups, but reduce your ability to generate qualified leads.

So to optimise your lengthy web forms, instead of reducing the form fields, use conditional logic with multi-step forms to personalise the experience. So, for example, instead of users filling out the entire form on one page, they might fill out one or a few fields on one page before they get directed to the next page. This format and layout do not scare users away.

With this multi-step format, you can also personalise each step based on the user’s information from the previous step, which increases conversions. You are essentially tailoring your form (in real-time) to your users’ needs and interests.  

Use Leadformly  to optimise your web forms and get detailed analytics on user behaviour.



9. Personalise Landing Pages

In keeping with the theme of personalisation to increase conversions, optimise your landing pages to make them more relevant. We are not talking about merely A/B testing a button or font colour. To fully optimise your pages, you also need to consider where your users came from before they landed on your page.

What was their intent?What were they searching or?Has your landing page continued the conversation and created a logical next step for users?

While you can’t serve up a relevant landing page for every user’s keyword search in Google, you can categorise search intent into campaigns, and serve up relevant landing pages to each one.

So, for example, let’s say you want to promote your language-learning app, and two users that match your ideal targets search Google with different keywords.

User #1 searches Google with the keywords “language learning app”



User #2 searches Google with the keyword “language learning app rosetta stone”

For user #1, you might serve up a landing page that uses general language to entice people to download the application.

But, for user #2, you might want to serve up a landing page that details why your app is better than Rosetta Stone.

The search intent of these two users is slightly different. If you had served up your general landing page to user #2, it’s likely you would not receive the same number of leads because the landing page was not 100% aligned with the search intent.

Social Marketing Tactics

Similar to content marketing, social marketing can feel like a wasted effort that doesn’t reward you enough. If you want to supercharge your social campaigns so you can realise your ROI, try these three tactics.

10. Help First; Sell Second

The goal of any marketing strategy is to generate an ROI, and social media is no different. For this reason, marketers use social media as an extension of their leads and sales campaigns and measure success based on their sales numbers.

The problem is that social media platforms aren’t inherently sales-focused, but rather places where your targets engage, communicate, read news and relevant content, and interact with friends. Excessively selling on social media platforms can backfire if you disrupt the delicate line of promotional to non-promotional content.

While every brand will have a different strategy for selling on social media, to combat social users’ misconceptions about your brand, engage in helping them and adopt a “giving back” mentality to balance the selling.

This concept may seem elementary, but it isn’t as common as you might think. The misconception is that not being aggressive enough with promotional content can stall sales. But engaging with your social audience in a non-promotional way creates bonds with your audience, which indirectly does the selling for you. People buy with emotions, not their wallets. If you can establish emotional connections with users, when it comes time to purchase, these users will line up to buy from your brand.

How can you adopt a more “user first” mentality?

For one, when people ask for advice related to your brand’s offering, instead of making a product recommendation, provide education to help the user solve the problem. In a sea of brands who are just looking for sales, your advice will stand out and compel users (now and in the future) to seek you out. The goal is to make your brand (not just your product) appear as the problem-solver. This is how loyal customers are born.

11. Repurpose, Re-use and Cross-post Content

Churning out enough social content to keep up with your competition and increase brand awareness can feel like an uphill battle. It doesn’t have to be that difficult, though. For one, it’s OK to repost high-performing content on your social media channels. Doing so can also save your marketing budget and make each piece of content work harder for you.

Just look at what you can do with one video interview. Let’s say you are interviewing (via video) Seth Godin with hopes of running the interview on your blog. Repurpose that interview into an audio podcast, a written blog post, several social media graphics, carousels and snippet videos. Then, after some time, re-post all of this content to promote the video interview again.

Here are some ways to save money and repurpose content:

Repurpose blog post content into social memes and Instagram carousel images If you have a podcast, take audio snippets from your podcast and create short videos that have the text as captions and display an image of the person talking. You can get several videos from just one podcast.   Create educational quote images from blogs, interviews, podcasts, videos and more. Simply take the notable quotes and add them to a branded image to post on social media.



Source



Turn your podcast into a blog post. Summarise the podcast into a written piece for users who would rather read than listen to audio, and then promote it on social media.



12. Go Live

We talked about transparency in an earlier tactic related to content marketing. Transparency in social content is just as important, if not more important, as social users are more focused on engagement, and don’t want to be sold to. They want to see that you are real and human, not just a business looking to take their money. Putting a face to the brand can help them feel more comfortable buying from you.

One way to show your humanness is to enable your target audience to peer behind the curtains of your brand by conducting live videos via Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.

Live videos are more impromptu and unscripted, so they appear more genuine to viewers. They also don’t have to be as professional-looking and are often shot with camera phones. So they don’t require a lot of resources to run.

Share day-to-day moments behind the scenes of your business, your interaction with team members, events, happenings and anything that would connect to your audience.  

Influencer/Referral Marketing

Whether you are looking for influencers or contributors to boost your brand awareness of new products, or increase sales, use these tactics to attract the right people to join your influencer and referral campaigns.

13. Share-for-Share Exchanges

Influencers are looking for exposure as much as you are, especially those who are selling their own products. Instead of offering money or free products, offer a share exchange—you share the influencer’s content in exchange for them sharing yours.

When looking for influencers, keep these tips in mind:

Choose influencers with a similar-sized audience. Otherwise, the exchange won’t benefit them.Choose influencers who have an interest in your products, which means their audience likely will as well.Choose influencers who are not competitors, but have complementary interests. So, for example, if you are promoting your CMS for startups, you may not reach out to Hubspot.  But you might connect with companies who educate startups, VCs, or complementary software companies.  



14. Exclusive Invite-Only Beta Programs

Invite-only beta programs can spread awareness of your software tool or app long before you launch it. Recruiting beta users also allows you to improve your product before you launch to the public, using feedback from real users.

Keep the beta as invite-only and vet each applicant to ensure they match your target audience. Once you are ready to launch, reward beta users who share the launch with free membership privileges or another incentive.

We are in the midst of an invite-only beta test of TrueNorth, our new marketing collaboration tool. Apply here to join our beta program.

15. Tap into Influencers’ Networks

If you’ve been working with influencers for some time, instead of reaching out to new people, tap into your influencers’ networks first.

Keeping your programs restricted to invite-only contributors makes them more exclusive, and participants will feel the weight of the invitation if they are accepted, and take it more seriously. You will find recruits to be high quality and contribute more to your brand than if you recruited them yourself.   

When reaching out to influencers, thank and congratulate them for being a valued member of your team, and kindly ask them for referrals. If you have a trusted collaboration with influencers, they will be more than happy to invite others to join your network.

Conclusion

Whatever marketing tactic you execute, ensure it is part of an overarching marketing strategy. Otherwise, you will waste time and money throwing random tactics against a wall and hoping one will stick. This is not the way to run a robust, ROI-driven marketing campaign.

We understand how difficult it can be to plan and organise ROI-boosting marketing campaigns without wasting hordes of money testing things out. This is why we created TrueNorth, a marketing management system to help marketing teams plan and prioritise campaigns with ease. With TrueNorth, you can test which marketing campaigns will work before you even launch them. If you are interested in learning more, apply here to join our Beta program.

The post 15 Marketing Tactics That Work (And How to Plan Them) appeared first on Venture Harbour.

51 Critical Marketing Metrics (And How to Use Them)

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

That adage, incorrectly attributed to revolutionary management mind Peter Drucker, is a guiding principle for successful marketers.

In today’s competitive business landscape, it’s critical to make your marketing budget count.

That means experimenting with campaigns, identifying your high performers and optimising them for maximum ROI.

But how do you identify high-performing campaigns? And how do you improve them for the biggest benefit?

It all starts with measurement, and this guide has that covered with 51 critical marketing metrics:

3 Sales & Revenue Metrics12 Lead Generation Metrics10 Content Consumption Metrics4 Organic Search & SEO Metrics4 Social Media Marketing Metrics8 Email Marketing Metrics6 Customer Retention Metrics2 Brand Awareness Metrics

Before we dive deep into the full list, let’s take a surface-level look at the two main types of marketing metrics.

2 Main Types of Marketing Metrics

There’s a ton of overlap between the many marketing metrics your company can track, but they can be grouped into two general categories:

Channel metricsPerformance metrics



1. Channel metrics

Channel metrics refer to the platform or medium you’re measuring and can be broken down with varying degrees of granularity. Thinking most broadly, here are some examples of common marketing channels with examples of more specific sub-channels:

Website: Organic search, PPC search, referrals and directSocial Media: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and TikTokPaid Advertising: Social media ads, influencer marketing, PPC search, banner ads and retargetingEmail: Weekly newsletters, exit-intent coupon sequences and abandoned cart sequencesTraditional (Offline): Direct mail, TV and radio ads, billboards and general word-of-mouth

If you ask 10 different marketers how they organise the wide range of marketing channels, you’ll probably get 10 different answers.

That’s because there’s no single best way to do it.

Think about PPC search traffic. That’s a specific sub-channel of website traffic, right? Or does it belong with social media and banner ads in the larger Paid Advertising bucket?

Both answers are correct. The way you think about your marketing channels is specific to your business, and you don’t even need to categorise PPC search in just one place.

2. Performance metrics

Performance metrics refer to the results you’re achieving. Common types of performance metrics include the following with a few examples of each:

Content Production: Number of articles published and number of social media postsContent Consumption: Website traffic volume and average time on pageEngagement: Comments and shares on Facebook postsLead Generation: Marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL)Conversion: Landing page conversion rate, search clickthrough rate (CTR) and form completion rateSales & Revenue: Total revenue, number of sales and customer lifetime value (CLTV)Customer Retention: Newsletter unsubscribe rateBrand Awareness: Branded organic search volume

Each of these performance metrics is vital to understanding the success of your marketing efforts, but they’re just vanity metrics when used on their own.

“We had 55,000 organic search visitors.”“Our hashtag #RandomCompanyRocks was used 27 times.”“Our landing page converted 2.5% of its traffic into sales.”

Reading those stats alone, I’m not sure whether to fire or promote you. That’s because they need a little context.

Make Your Metrics Actionable With Context

You don’t track a whole bunch of marketing metrics just to create busy, colourful dashboards to wow your coworkers. You track them because you want to use that data to grow your business.

Marketers who invest in measuring and managing performance create more value, achieving 5% better returns on marketing investments and over 7% higher levels of growth performance.

Source: 2017 Forbes Marketing Accountability Report

There are two key actions in that sentence:

MeasuringManaging

Measuring performance is the primary focus of this guide, but measuring alone is useless if you aren’t also managing performance.

And to manage performance, you need to contextualise your metrics and pair them with goals.

Contextualise your metrics with time, market and industry

You’re out for lunch with a colleague who works for a company that sells tiny top hats for dogs. Apparently, it’s the latest craze, and the tiny top hat industry is booming.

Your colleague is responsible for designing and optimising his company’s landing page. You ask how work is going and he replies, “Well, the landing page has a 2.5% conversion rate.”

Umm…good work?

Without additional context, it’s virtually impossible to derive anything meaningful from that 2.5% conversion rate.

Let’s add meaning with these three forms of context:

TimeMarket & CompetitionIndustry



1. Time

Your business’s performance can be evaluated in three time periods, and each answers a different business question.

Let’s revisit your colleague’s landing page and add some context:

Past: “Our landing page converted at 2.0% last year.”Present: “Our landing page conversion rate is 2.5% this year, a 25% increase compared to last year.”Future: “We forecast our landing page to convert at 3.0% next year.”

Now you have a better idea of how he’s doing, but it still isn’t crystal clear because you lack two additional pieces of context.

2. Market & Competition

Businesses don’t exist in silos. Your company probably has competitors, and those competitors are trying to beat you. That’s why comparing your performance to your competitors’ performance is crucial.

Unfortunately, knowing how well your competitors are performing can be challenging. Some metrics are readily available (Facebook page likes), others can be estimated using online tools and databases (organic search traffic), and a frustrating many are kept private (conversion rates).

But even if you aren’t privy to your competitors’ metrics, sometimes you can estimate them to provide a little extra context.

In your colleague’s instance, he can estimate his competitors’ landing page conversion rates by understanding the relationship between conversion rate and available page performance data like bounce rate.

His improved reply: “Our landing page is converting at 2.5% this year compared to last year. Our top competitor’s landing page has a higher bounce rate, so I think their conversion rate is around 2.2%.”

But there’s still one last piece of context missing.

3. Industry

Beyond your market and competition, you can also look at industry-wide benchmarks to contextualise your performance.

For things like landing pages, there are tons of benchmarking studies and reports for you to compare your performance against. And if your company sells a product or service to a specific geographic region, you can compare yourself against companies from the same industry in other geographic areas.

Let’s improve your colleague’s reply with this final piece of context: “Our landing page is converting at 2.5% this year compared to last year. Our top competitor’s landing page has a higher bounce rate, so I think their conversion rate is around 2.2%. The industry average conversion rate is 3.0%, so I still have some work to do.”

Now, that’s a highly contextualised reply you can immediately understand.

Pair Your Marketing Metrics with SMART Goals

You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before. If not, here’s your crash course.

SMART is an acronym to help you remember the five key criteria of an effective goal.

Specific: Be detailed and clear about what you want to achieve.Measurable: Identify the metric(s) you’ll use to evaluate success.Attainable: Make sure the goal is realistic.Relevant: Align the goal with identified business objectives.Time-Bound: Give yourself a defined window in which to achieve the goal.

If you pick any single marketing metric from this list, you can easily check off S, M, A and T. Let’s use a commonly-measured marketing metric: social media following.

Specific: We want to increase our Facebook page’s likes by 20%.Measurable: We’re going to measure our Facebook page’s likes using Facebook’s Insights tools.Attainable: We’ve seen similar brands achieve similar results.Time-Bound: We want to achieve our goal in three months.

That all sounds good, but it’s missing one key element: the “why.”

Why do you want to increase your Facebook page’s likes? How does that connect to your business’s marketing plan? Why are Facebook page likes relevant?

Tie metrics to business objectives to make them relevant

One of the most common traps marketers fall into is focusing on descriptive vanity metrics that aren’t tied to tangible business objectives (the results you’re trying to achieve).

A 20% increase in Facebook page likes over the next three months is great, but you still need to articulate why that will help your business grow by tying it to an identified business objective.

Let’s bring back your colleague’s company that makes tiny top hats for dogs. One of their identified business objectives is to increase sales volume by 50% over the next year. Their product sales come through a landing page, and one of their tactics to drive traffic to that landing page is by referring their Facebook followers. By increasing their Facebook page’s likes, they have access to a larger audience they can drive to that landing page to convert into sales.

Let’s complete the SMART goal above to include this identified business objective:

Specific: We want to increase our Facebook page’s likes by 20%.Measurable: We’re going to measure our Facebook page’s likes using Facebook’s Insights tools.Attainable: We’ve seen similar brands achieve similar results.Relevant: We want to increase product sales by 50% in the next 12 months. Sales are generated from our landing page, and Facebook is one of our top channels driving traffic to that page.Time-Bound: We want to achieve our goal of increasing Facebook page likes in three months.

*Oh, and we should create another SMART goal for what “post shareable content more regularly” actually means.

51 Critical Marketing Metrics

The specific marketing metrics you track are highly dependent upon your company’s product, business model, industry and a host of other factors. Whether you’re an established brand with a few go-to metrics already identified or a startup with a clean slate, you’re sure to find something useful on this list of 51 crucial marketing metrics.

Sales & Revenue Metrics

The primary objective of most businesses is to increase sales and revenue. These are the top-level metrics you’ll need to track your performance.

1. Incremental Sales

Incremental sales measure the efficacy of your marketing efforts by tracking the net change in sales volume over a period of time. It requires knowing two things:

Sales volume during the period you’re measuringSales volume during a baseline period

Let’s look at two use cases.

Use Case 1

You want to evaluate the impact of a layout change for a holiday marketing email you send to your subscribers each year.

Last year you sent your email to 5,000 subscribers and generated 50 sales. This year your list is still at 5,000. You send your revised annual email, generate 75 sales and put “get more email subscribers” on your to-do list. The net change is 25 incremental sales (75 – 50) generated from the same 5,000 sent emails. You feel confident your layout change worked.

Use Case 2

In addition to measuring the success of a specific campaign, you can also use incremental sales to measure the success of all marketing efforts in the aggregate. Let’s use the same business from Use Case 1.

Your business sold 1,000 units of product in Q4 last year. Your goal is to increase your sales volume by 25% year-over-year using several tactics, including your revised holiday email and by creating your business’s first social media account. That 25% growth equates to 250 incremental sales over Q4 last year (1,000 x 25%), which is your baseline period.

We already know your revised holiday email generated 25 incremental sales. You also observed your social media efforts lead to 275 sales, all of which are incremental because your baseline period (Q4 last year) was zero.

Combining those two campaigns, you generated 300 incremental sales (25 + 275), which is more than your target of 250. Excellent work, marketing guru.

2. Incremental Revenue

Just like incremental sales, you can also measure incremental revenue. The approach is the same, but incremental revenue is a more bottom-line metric because it focuses on actual dollars.

Using the example above, let’s say your company sells its product for $100. Your holiday email redesign generated 50 incremental sales at $100 per sale, generating $5,000 in incremental revenue. You hired a designer for $1,000 to make your email more eye-catching, and that $1,000 investment led to $5,000 of incremental revenue.

But what if you didn’t change your email’s design and instead raised your price from $100 to $125? You send the email to those 5,000 people and generate 45 sales, which is $5,625 of total revenue and $625 of incremental revenue compared to last year ($5,625 – $5,000) despite -4 incremental sales.

(Yes, incremental totals can be negative.)

3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

CLTV tells you how much value the average customer generates for your business.

But “value” is an intentionally vague word because you can measure CLTV with either gross revenue or net revenue after expenses (not including marketing). Including expenses gives you a better idea of value and business performance but is more complex.

Speaking of complex, there are a lot of factors that impact your CLTV:

Payment model (one-time vs subscription)Product price point(s)Purchase frequencyUpsell offersReturns and refundsCost of goods sold (COGS)Other operational expenses (not including marketing)

The easiest way to calculate your business’s customer lifetime value is to begin with a narrower scope, such as customer annual value, and then multiply the annual value by the number of years you expect to retain your average customer, also called your average customer lifespan (ACL).

Lead Generation Metrics

Leads are the lifeblood of your business. They can be found through any channel, and the exact ways you measure lead generation will vary by channel. Still, these are the most critical, high-level lead generation metrics to track with paid advertising efforts included.

4. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

CTR tells you the rate at which users click on links, buttons or any other on-page elements. It’s measured as (Number of Clicks) / (Number of Impressions) and is a widespread metric used pretty much everywhere in marketing to measure various conversion rates:

PPC & Organic Search: Click rate on search resultsSocial Media: Click rate on video thumbnails in YouTube search resultsEmail Marketing: Click rate on links in emails

Though CTR could be categorised in numerous other places in this guide, it winds up in the Lead Generation section because you measure it to increase the number of people you lead to a target outcome.

Of the many available marketing metrics, CTR is one of the most important to compare to industry benchmarks. A lot of research exists on optimising CTR, because clicks lead to conversions regardless of whether you’re talking about PPC or email.

5. Conversion Rate

Like CTR, conversion rate is another ubiquitous marketing metric. At its simplest, conversion rate measures the rate at which users complete an action. Here are some common examples of conversion rates marketers measure:

Sales Funnels: Users moving through subsequent stagesEmail Marketing: Website traffic subscribing to an email listLanding Pages: Landing page traffic purchasing a product

Conversion rate is such a fundamentally important metric because it can make or break a business.

Take PPC ad campaigns, for example. They can be great ways to drive targeted traffic to specific product or landing pages. You pay for each click to your page and now that traffic is yours to convert.

Imagine you have two landing pages promoting the same offer that you’re A/B testing to see which converts better: Landing Page A and Landing Page B. Your PPC ad campaign costs $1 per click, and you drive 1,000 clicks to each landing page promoting a $100 product with a $35 margin.

Landing Page A has a 2.5% conversion rate and generates 25 sales ($875 margin)Landing Page B has a 3.5% conversion rate and generates 35 sales ($1,225 margin)

It costs the same to drive 1,000 clicks to each page ($1,000) and both pages promote the same $100 product with a $35 margin, but Landing Page A lost money (-12.5% ROI) while Landing Page B made money (22.5% ROI).

Many marketers focus on increasing sales, revenue, email subscriptions and other metrics by investing in more traffic when a more affordable (and sometimes more effective) strategy is to optimise the traffic you already have.

Or, you know, do both.

6. Qualified Leads

A qualified lead is someone who could become a potential customer. There are three types of qualified leads, which are categorised based on the information they’ve provided or how they’ve interacted with your sales funnel:

Information Qualified Lead (IQL): Early in the funnel and have only given basic information like their name or email address.Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Middle of the funnel and have continued to express interest or interact with your content.Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Bottom of the funnel and have expressed interest in purchasing.

IQLs are cold leads, MQLs are warm leads and SQLs are hot leads. Many marketers keep an eye on the ratio of these three types of leads and the conversion rates between them (how many MQLs become SQLs, for example).

7. Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC is the amount you pay for each click on an element, usually a link, and is commonly found in PPC ad campaigns. However, you can also measure CPC for things like email marketing campaigns.

Let’s say it costs $500 each month to communicate with your email list. You send a weekly email to your 2,000 subscribers for a total of 8,000 sent emails each month, which generates 500 total clicks on links in those emails. It costs you $500 to generate those 500 clicks for a $1 CPC. If you can improve your open rate or your clickthrough rate, you can get more clicks for your $500 spend and drive your CPC down.

8. Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)

CPM is similar to CPC but uses impressions instead of clicks in the denominator. It’s commonly used for display ads where you pay a set rate for every 1,000 impressions (views) of your display ad.

9. Cost Per Lead (CPL)

CPL assesses how effectively your marketing campaign turns dollars into leads and is measured by (Campaign Spend) / (Number of Leads). Leads can be measured in either IQL, MQL or SQL depending on your business needs, but SQL are the most qualified, ready-to-buy leads and will correlate strongest with incremental sales and revenue.

10. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC takes CPL one step further by looking at how much it costs to generate one new paying customer. It’s measured in the same way, except the denominator has changed: (Campaign Spend) / (Number of New Customers).

Above, we looked at Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), which is the total value a customer is expected to generate for your business. Keep an eye on you CAC and CLTV, especially the ratio between the two, to make sure it isn’t costing more to acquire new customers than they’ll generate for your business. For this comparison, make sure you calculate CLTV including all expenses except marketing costs.

11. Lead Generation Rate

The rate at which you convert traffic into leads. It’s a form of conversion rate where the conversion you’re measuring is new leads instead of something like email sign-ups.

12. Lead-to-Customer Ratio

The rate at which you convert leads into customers. It’s also a form of conversion rate calculated as (New Customers) / (Number of Leads). You can use any of IQL, MQL or SQL in the denominator.

13. Lead Score

A numeric value assigned to each lead based on information they provide, such as their age, sex, geographic location, online behaviours or interests. Your exact scoring method should be unique to your business with values tied to known indicators of lead quality. It’s a great way to quickly identify high-value leads and monitor the overall quality of your lead pool over time.

14. Time to Conversion

How long it takes for leads to convert. Conversions may be sales, email sign-ups or anything else of value for your business.

15. Abandonment Rate

The rate at which users begin an action and abandon before completion. It’s frequently seen with shopping carts and forms. High abandonment rates signal poorly-designed elements in need of attention.

Content Consumption Metrics

Content consumption includes content on any channel, running the gamut from blog posts to YouTube videos. For the most part, the metrics in this section are website-focused with channel-specific metrics in subsequent sections.

Note: All of these content consumption metrics can (and should) be evaluated by channel so you can measure the performance of organic search, PPC search, social media, referral and other traffic sources to determine which channel sends the highest-quality traffic.

16. Website Users

There are three types of volume metrics for website traffic:

Users: Unique people who visit your siteSessions: Total number of visits to your site including repeat sessions by visitorsPageviews: Total number of pages viewed on your site across all sessions

Users is an important metric to track because it’s the number of unique people consuming your website’s content. It’s especially important because you can segment it into new and returning users, giving you insight into how both types of users interact with your site and allowing you to optimise for your business objectives.

17. Website Sessions

Sessions counts every visit to your website, including repeat visits. It’s great to use as a denominator in many of your conversion rate metrics when evaluating how effective your website is at converting your traffic into product sales, demo requests or email sign-ups.

In general, more sessions means more opportunities to generate conversions, whether that’s product sales, demos, email sign-ups or something else, but sessions alone can be misleading. Unless you’re monetising your traffic with display ads, traffic itself is worthless. It’s the actions that traffic takes that have value.

Let’s say your company developed an innovative marketing campaign management tool like TrueNorth. You’re using a content marketing campaign to generate leads with a demo request CTA at the bottom of each page. Consider two articles you published six months ago:

Article A is a roundup of 10 helpful Internet resources for marketing campaign managers. It drives 1,000 sessions per month and generates 40 demo requests.Article B is an in-depth tutorial showing your product’s functionality. It drives 200 sessions per month and generates 80 demo requests.

Article A drove five times as many sessions, but Article B generated twice as many qualified leads. Which has more value for your business?

18. Website Pageviews

Pageviews is the total number of pages across all sessions and frequently is reported as pageviews per session, which is an important metric to evaluate website engagement.

But remember to keep your content’s purpose in mind. While a high pageview per session metric can indicate high engagement, it can also indicate your users are struggling to find what they’re looking for. That’s why you should always evaluate page-level performance in the context of the following additional metrics.

19. Time on Page

Time on page measures the length of time visitors spend on a single page before leaving that page. While more time on page generally is good, evaluate it in the context of that page’s purpose and other metrics in this section.

If your 5,000-word, in-depth guide has an average time on page of just 25 seconds, there’s probably something wrong with the page. If the content is great, experiment with different formats.

Dwell time is a related metric to time on page with a narrower focus: It only looks at pages where a user clicked on a search result, visited your page, and then went back to the search results

Time on page is more inclusive and looks at how long a user spent on a page regardless of where they came from or where they went after.

20. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visited your site and left without taking an action. High bounce rates are universally bad in theory. What’s the value of someone finding your site and leaving without doing anything? The problem is the way bounce rate is measured by tools like Google Analytics.

By default, Google Analytics records a 100% bounce rate for any session that doesn’t result in a click to another page, but what if the goal of your content is something other than getting the user to visit more pages? If you want your user to play a video or interact with the page in some other way, you’ll need to configure event tracking to capture that interaction.

Page-level bounce rate, in combination with time on page, can help you identify your best and worst-performing content.

21. Exit Rate

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors to a page who exited your site from that page after having been referred from another page on your site. Put another way:

Bounce: Visitor enters the page from an external source and leaves without visiting any other pages or interacting with the page in a way you’ve defined.Exit: Visitor enters the page from another page on your site and then leaves.

Exit rate is best evaluated at the page level with high exit rates usually signaling content that needs to be improved.

However, that isn’t always the case. Pages that say “thanks for subscribing” or “enjoy your purchase” often are meant to be exited, so consider a page’s purpose when evaluating its performance.

22. Average Session Duration

The average amount of time users spend consuming content on your site during a single session.

23. Scroll Depth

Scroll depth is available for Google Analytics as a plugin and allows you to track how frequently users scroll to various depths on your page: 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. If you have a CTA at the bottom of your page but no one scrolls that far, consider moving the CTA to the top or make other content/design changes to encourage more interaction.

24. Article Comments

We often think of engagement as a social media metric, but tracking article comment counts can be a useful website way to evaluate how well your content resonates with your audience. Plus, more comments gives your content more perceived authority and value.

25. Article Likes & Shares

Similarly, you can embed social media buttons on your content to encourage likes and shares, which is great for increasing your content’s perceived authority and reach.

Organic Search & SEO Marketing Metrics

Frequently, organic search is one of the most valuable channels for your business. Track your business’s content marketing efforts with these critical organic search and SEO marketing metrics.

26. SERP Impressions

The Google Search Console is a goldmine of valuable data. One such metric is the number of impressions your pages have in the search engine results pages (SERPs). SERP impressions are important because no one can click on your pages if they don’t see them, which takes us to the next SEO marketing metric.

27. SERP Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Also available in the Google Search Console is the SERP clickthrough rate for your pages. The Search Console lets you view your site’s performance by page or by query, so you can see how often people are clicking on your search results. This is an excellent way to identify pages with meta titles, descriptions and other SERP features in need of improvement.

28. Keyword Rankings

A third metric available in Search Console is your pages’ average rankings in the SERPs. It’s a great way to track how your content is performing for your target keywords over time as well as identify new keywords to optimise your pages for.

You can also track your site’s rankings for specific search phrases using keyword tracking tools like Ahrefs.

29. Featured Snippets

Google is always adding new SERP features to improve their user experience and achieve their own business objectives. One such feature is the featured snippet, which is a styled, top-ranking result containing an excerpt from one of the search results.

Not every query result returns a featured snippet, but it can be important to track those that do because users interact differently with search results pages depending upon whether a featured snippet is present:

No snippet: 26% of clicks go to the first resultSnippet present: 8.6% of clicks go to the featured snippet and 19.6% go to the first result below the snippet

Pages selected for the snippet used to double-dip with both the snippet and a standard top 10 search ranking, but Google changed that in January 2020 by pushing pages featured in the snippet to page two.

While grabbing the featured snippet likely means a lower SERP CTR compared to having a top-three ranking position, it’s better than being in positions 4-10.

Social Media Marketing Metrics

Platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok and others represent great marketing opportunities for most businesses, but the specific platforms you use and how you leverage them varies. Regardless of whether you’re publishing instructional YouTube videos or shareable Facebook posts, these are the critical social media marketing metrics to track.

30. Audience Growth Rate

If social media is an important channel for your business, the size of your audience is a critical metric because a larger audience means more organic reach. Larger followings also lend social proof, which can have an indirect positive effect on your business.

But remember that “Facebook page likes” is a vanity metric that doesn’t tell you anything meaningful. It needs to be tied to other metrics (like the ones below) that connect your Facebook audience size with identified business objectives.

31. Post Reach

The definition of reach varies by platform but, generally, it’s either the number of unique people who see your content or the number of unique people who interact with it in some way. It is not the total number of times your content is seen (those are impressions, described below).

Reach also can be segmented into organic reach and paid reach.

Organic reach correlates with the size of your audience. The larger your audience, the more people that content will reach, though organic reach is falling.Paid reach is a form of paid advertising and gives you instant access to a target audience without having an audience of your own.

Like audience size, post reach is an oft-cited vanity metric that doesn’t tie directly to a business objective. Increasing your post reach is an important way to drive social media traffic to your business, but you need to be able to connect the dots from post reach to website visits to conversions.

32. Post Impressions

Impressions are the total number of times your content is seen. Impression counts are less valuable if you’re tracking how many conversions your posts generate because they don’t focus on unique users. However, impressions are very important for paid social campaigns because campaign cost usually is determined by how many impressions your ad has.

33. Engagement Rate

Engagement rate measures the frequency with which people actively consume your social media content. It varies by network but frequently includes the following actions:

Likes and dislikesCommentsSharesVideo viewsAccount likes, follows and subscriptions

Engagement rate is calculated as (Number of Interactions) / (Total Reach or Impressions). Both the numerator and denominator vary by network, but higher is always better.

Engagement rate offers a great opportunity to compare your performance against network-specific and niche-specific engagement benchmarks.

Source



34. Amplification Rate

The ratio of a post’s shares to your total number of followers. It’s a great way to understand how often your audience is actively promoting your content for organic, viral growth.

35. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

The rate at which your social media content drives clicks to your target page, usually measured as either (Number of Clicks) / (Reach) or (Number of Clicks) / (Number of Engagements).

Email Marketing Metrics

Email marketing is capable of generating insane ROIs with some studies putting average returns at 38x. Maximise your business’s email campaigns by tracking these critical email marketing metrics.

36. List Growth Rate

Many marketers view growing their email list as a mission-critical objective. That makes both measuring your list’s growth over time and setting SMART goals for subscriber counts important activities.

37. Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of sent emails which are opened by their recipients. It’s one of two critical rate metrics (along with the CTR) that can make or break your email campaign’s ROI. After all, you can’t get people to click on links if they don’t even open your emails.

Low open rates mean you may need to make your subject lines more irresistible or work on providing better value to your subscribers so they look forward to seeing your emails.

Email open rate can be a misleading metric, though. Whether an email is marked as “opened” depends on whether the tracking pixel in the email was loaded. Unfortunately, some email clients block images and thus don’t load the pixel even if the email was opened. That makes open rate better as a comparative metric as you look to improve your open rates from campaign to campaign.

38. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Once opened, your goal is to get your subscribers to click on your links (if applicable). As seen elsewhere, CTR measures link click frequency and can be either the number of unique recipients who clicked on a specific link or the number of unique recipients who clicked on any link (if there’s more than one).

CTR is the most important email marketing performance metric and is crucial to track if you’re serious about your email list. It’s also a simple but great way to split test email copy.

39. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that could not be delivered successfully and there are two types of bounces:

Hard Bounces: Couldn’t be delivered due to a permanent issue, such as a non-existent email addressSoft Bounces: Couldn’t be delivered due to a temporary issue, such as a full inbox

Bounce rate doesn’t have a negative business-level impact unless you have a bunch of invalid email addresses on your list driving up your list maintenance costs. However, high bounce rates can get your email address flagged as spam, and that can hurt your deliverability rates across the board.

40. Conversion Rate

The rate at which your emails turn into conversions. It skips the middleman metrics (opens and clicks) and is calculated as (Conversions) / (Total Emails Sent).

41. Forward Rate

The rate at which email recipients forward the emails they receive.

42. Spam Complaints

The number of email recipients who flag your email as spam. This can hurt deliverability.

43. List Unsubscribe Rate

The rate at which people unsubscribe from your email list. High unsubscribe rates may indicate you aren’t matching your email content to your subscribers’ needs and/or your email list is full of low-quality targets.

Customer Retention Metrics

Acquiring a new customer is up to 25x more expensive than retaining an existing one, which makes it especially important for you to track these customer retention metrics.

44. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS measures customer loyalty by asking your customers one question: On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?

Respondents are grouped into one of three categories based on their reply:

Promoters (9-10)Passives (7-8)Detractors (0-6)

NPS doesn’t directly measure retention, but it does measure brand sentiment to give you an idea of whether your customers would do business with you again.

45. New vs Returning Visitors

New vs returning visitors is a traffic segment available in reporting tools like Google Analytics. It lets you look at how many visitors return to your site during a specified time.

46. Average Customer Lifespan (ACL)

ACL is the average amount of time between the first and last purchase your customers make. It’s a key component of measuring your customer lifetime value (CLTV) and indicates how much staying power your brand has with customers, including how successful your email marketing efforts are at nurturing repeat sales.

47. Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR)

RPR is the percentage of customers who return to purchase from your business again. It’s a great indicator of customer loyalty because it’s simple, easy to understand and directly ties to common business objectives like increased sales and revenue. When combined with customer demographics and the channel through which they first found you, RPR lets you make several key insights into your business.

48. Product Return Rate

Product return rate is the percentage of ordered products which are returned. You’ll never be able to eliminate product returns entirely, but excessive returns signal a problem either in the sales funnel or with the product itself.

49. Customer Attrition Rate

Customer attrition rate is the rate at which customers cease doing business with you. Every business experiences some degree of customer attrition, but it’s important to monitor your attrition to make sure you aren’t losing existing customers faster than you’re acquiring new ones.

Also called customer churn rate, it’s calculated over a defined period of time as (Number of Customers Lost) / (Total Customers at End of Period).

For some businesses, knowing the number of customers lost is simple. If you sell a subscription, it’s easy to see when people cancel their subscription.

But for most businesses, knowing the number of customers lost is more challenging or even impossible. If you sell a physical product like a book or a chair, how do you know when you lost a previous customer?

For these businesses, a modified version of customer attrition rate can be used that measures the net change to your customer base over time: [(Customers in Current Period) – (Customers in Prior Period)] / (Customers in Prior Period).

An example: Last month you sold your product to 50 unique customers. This month you sold your product to 60 unique customers. Your attrition rate is (50 – 60) / 50 = -20%.

Yes, because you gained customers this month, your attrition rate is negative.

Also note that “unique customers” means unique during each time period. If Dan made two transactions in the current month, he’s only counted once for that month. If Dan makes one transaction in both periods, he’s counted in both.

Brand Awareness Metrics

Measuring and ascribing ROI to brand awareness campaigns can be challenging, but there are a few key ways you can track your performance.

50. Social Media Brand & Hashtag Mentions

Tracking mentions of your brand on social media is an easy way to gauge awareness. Branded hashtag campaigns like #RandomCompanyRocks are a great way to build awareness and you can measure uses of those hashtags by other accounts over time.

51. Branded Search Volume

When your brand really begins building awareness and momentum, you may begin to see people searching for your brand directly in search engines like Google. The first place this search interest shows up is in your Google Search Console, which allows for reporting over different time periods.

You may even begin to see tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush estimate monthly search volumes for brand-related keywords, though their estimates are merely that. Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Trends are other straight-from-the-source places to track branded search volume.

Using Marketing Metrics in Your Business

Do you know the return you’re getting on your marketing spend?

Make the most of every dollar you invest by understanding and measuring the core marketing metrics that drive your business’s success. Armed with this actionable data, you can manage your business in real-time and direct future spend where it will have the biggest impact.

Tools like TrueNorth, a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans and prioritise campaigns, are invaluable for businesses trying to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.

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Target Audience: The Art & Science of Finding Your Ideal Buyers

More money, more customers, more popularity. When it comes to business growth, startups want bigger profits and bigger exposure.

But all business is not good business. When it comes to building an audience, a larger audience does not always equate to revenue increases. Targeting people who do not fit your ideal customer profile will drain your bank account and prevent you from building a loyal customer base.

In this guide, we will discuss how to research and gather data to find your target audience and go through the steps to help you hone in on your ideal customers.

What’s in This Guide?

This guide covers the steps to finding your target audience, why it’s beneficial, and what pitfalls can ensue when you target too broad a market. You will learn:

The drawbacks of marketing without a target audienceHow to define your brand identityHow to define your productsHow to research your marketHow to find your target audienceThe basics of quantitative and qualitative researchHow to run surveys to get feedback from your customersThe groups to target your research whether or not you already have customers



The Drawbacks of Marketing Without a Target Audience

Marketers who are not 100% aligned with their targets waste money on excessive advertising because they are more focused on reaching people rather than reaching their ideal customer. Acquiring a healthy marketing ROI without a target audience will feel like an uphill battle. Instead of pre-knowing how your ads will perform, you may waste time and resources “testing” markets instead of focusing on ROI.     

If you haven’t defined your target audience, your tone and messaging may also not connect with your audience, even if your product appeals to your demographic.

For example, let’s say you’re targeting entrepreneurs from ages 25 to 40 with your budgeting software because this demographic broadly defines your market. Within that demographic, however, exist many subsets that have different desires, behaviours, and reasons for purchasing (or not purchasing) your product.

Some entrepreneurs may prefer using traditional spreadsheets instead of clunky software. Others might be opposed to using software and instead choose to hand it off to a professional. Still, others might prefer to spend their tight budgets on advertising instead of a tool that seems insignificant to them at the stage of business they are in. These people are technically all “entrepreneurs” and could potentially be your customers, but you still have not yet defined your ideal customers.

Generalised campaigns fall flat. Targeted messaging that appeals to your audience’s preferences, interests, and behaviours will convert better because it connects with people and triggers their need to purchase, eliciting an emotional response. Emotional connections lead to sales. People buy with their hearts, not with their wallets.

Relying on guesswork to randomly choose customer characteristics will also set you up for failure. The key is to find your target audience by consulting real data, not relying on hunches and assumptions.

1. Define Your Brand

Why does your business exist? What keeps you motivated to pursue success at all costs? Before you can define your target audience, you need to define your brand and its message, vision, and purpose. If you don’t know who you are, it will be difficult to fully understand the people you want to help and serve.

Have you defined your brand? If not, answer the following questions.

What is your brand personality and attributes?What is your vision for the future of your brand?What story are you telling your audience?What are your values?Why are you in business? What is the purpose behind what you do?

When you have a tight grasp on your brand identity, you can easily identify the people who will naturally have an affinity for your brand, and target them accordingly. Your targets can align with your purpose, which will attract them to your brand. The people who are aligned with your brand will choose you over a competitor (even if you charge more) as 64% of consumers care more about the customer experience than price. Loyal customer connections can influence decisions more than money.  

2. Know Your Products

Before you can fully define your target audience, you also must have a firm grasp on your product and how it fulfils your target’s needs.

We can sum up the entirety of targeted marketing in one short sentence: People buy what makes them happy. Your product is really just a problem-solver and a happiness-maker in disguise.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a nail gun, a cup of coffee, or a sophisticated piece of software. Happiness sells. And it’s your job to figure out why your product will make your customers happy.

Follow the steps below to define your product:

Briefly describe your product (My product automates budgeting for entrepreneurs)What problem does your product solve? (My influencer marketing platform enables businesses to locate targeted influencers without scouring the internet and wasting time finding, engaging, and validating potential influencers)List your product’s features and benefits. How do these attributes enrich people’s lives? (My app tracks users’ steps so they can follow their progress, making it easy to get fit and healthier.)

Once you have a firm grasp on your product and the problems it solves, you will be ready to adequately research your target audience because you know what questions they have.

3. Define Your Target Market

The first and critical step to defining your target audience is market research. Every decision you make as it relates to your target audience should involve data.

It’s critical that you conduct research, or else you will rely on assumptions and guesses, which will steer you in the wrong direction. The data should be the only entity that speaks and informs your marketing strategy.

Before you start target audience research, ensure you have thoroughly researched your target market. Target audience research involves narrowing down your broad audience to specific groups of people. However, if you start narrowing your audience without understanding your broader market, you may unknowingly focus on the wrong segments.

Let’s say you identified a customer segment for your walking/running app: males who want to train for marathons.

You haven’t considered your broad market, but you know this segment would benefit from using your app. Targeting this segment could prove successful, but the approach is not rock solid. Why? Without knowing your broader market, you may unknowingly abandon other segments that may or may not perform better.

What if males who want to gain endurance or lose weight want to use your app also? When you step back and get a broader sense of your potential market, when it comes time to focus and narrow it down, you will have a higher vantage point from which to segment your customers.

True North CTA

4. Defining Your Target Audience (The Who, What, and How)

Once you define your target market, the broader group of consumers your product targets, it’s time to focus in on your target audience. In this section, we will outline what and how to research your customers, non-customers, and your competition.

What to Research

Before you conduct research, you need to know what you are researching. This information will come in handy when you survey or interview customers as part of your target audience research.

At a minimum, uncover your customers’ basic demographics such as:

AgeGenderLocationEmploymentFamily statusEducation levelIncome

Demographic data is beneficial, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Dig deeper to uncover psychographic data on your target audience. Psychographics define a target’s interests, values, and activities. Defining these traits can help you understand the emotional triggers that make your targets behave the way they do.

Here are some questions to answer when digging into customer psychographics:

Where do they hang out online and offline?What social media profiles do they engage on?What are their interests outside of work?What media do they consume daily?What do they like to do in their free time?What are their passions?







Behavioural and Technographic Data

Behavioural data details why your customers purchase from you and what the trigger is for them to do so. The answers to the below questions will help you identify your target’s behaviours.

What are their online buying behaviours?Where do they spend their money?How do they purchase products? Online? Brick and mortar?Do they typically join loyalty programs?Do they engage with brands on social media?Are they repeat buyers?Do they analyse a lot before making a purchase?

You can also research technographic data if it applies to your audience. Technographics refers to a target customer’s technology usage and devices.

What if my customers fall into more than one target segment? This is normal. You can target more than one segment. The key is to define those segments, so you can tailor your marketing strategy to appease those prospects with stronger, more direct messaging.

How to Research Your Audience

Once you know what data you are looking to collect, it’s time to fire your research cannons.

To keep it simple, we will discuss two types of research: quantitative and qualitative. Marketers can conduct qualitative and quantitative research for many reasons, but in this article, we will focus on research relating to understanding your target audience.

Quantitative research compiles the hard numbers from data sources. It’s the mathematical, more analytical side of market research. The method of analysis is relatively simple because it only requires a look at the numbers and doesn’t leave an inch of room for bias to skew the results. If the numbers are talking, they cannot lie.

When researching your target audience, look at metrics that reveal what ideas, topics and products your audience deems vital. Your quantitative research may involve looking at the following data:

Website traffic to specific pages (products, blog posts)Blog shares and engagementSocial content shares and engagementSERPs (Search engine ranked pages?) clicksAd clicksBounce rateTime on siteLead conversionsSales conversions

While quantitative research is valuable, it doesn’t give us the full picture of our target audience. In fact, it can even lead us astray. For example, from our research, we may discover that a specific demographic engages with a type of content we post on Instagram. But, this gives us only one layer of data. If we don’t know WHY the prospect interacts with a particular piece of content, we can’t truly understand what makes them make purchasing decisions. You need to dig deeper into the data to create the right messaging and increase conversions.

Enter qualitative research.

Quantitative research answers the question, “how much,” while qualitative research answers the question, “why.” Successful qualitative research focuses on people’s emotions and perceptions, and reveals their opinions and why they make decisions. Focus groups, interviews, and surveys are typically the primary drivers of qualitative research.

Surveys

Conduct surveys to poll customers and non-customers about their buying preferences, behaviours, interests and demographics. Surveys reveal what motivates your customers yo buy and will provide data that will help you better define your target audience.

A few tips on sending surveys:

Don’t send surveys to everyone.

While the purpose of the survey is to target a broad enough audience so you can get valuable feedback, you shouldn’t send it to people who would never purchase your product. If you have a general idea of your market, start there. So, for example, let’s say you know you are targeting small business owners who generate at least $5 million in annual revenue with your software app. Instead of sending a survey to all small business owners, send to a more focused market without getting too narrow. Your survey answers will help you narrow down your market.  

Offer incentives

Offer participants an incentive to complete your survey. Ensure the incentive is related to your product. If it is a random gift such as a gift card, people will fill out the survey just to get the incentive so you may not get honest answers. If the incentive relates to your product (free coaching, a free month of software usage, product discount), the people it will appeal to are the ones you want taking your survey.   

Include demographic, behavioural, and psychographic questions so you can get a well-rounded perspective of your audience.

Keep the survey short and ask more close-ended questions

Don’t overwhelm participants with long surveys or open-ended questions. Open-ended questions require longer answers and will tire your survey participants. Close-ended questions (yes/no, multiple-choice) allow for quick answers and makes for a more painless process for participants. Below is an example of closed- vs open-ended questions:

Interviews and focus groups

In addition to surveys, interviews and focus groups are two other research techniques to help you know your audience and get valuable feedback. Focus groups are somewhat expensive but highly beneficial. Interviews allow you to focus on specific subjects and get a little deeper with participants because you can ask questions based on real-time feedback. A handful of great interviews can provide a lot more value, even more than an extensive survey.

Whom to Research

We’ve covered what to research and how to start the process with quantitative and qualitative research. But, before we can really dive in, we need to know whom to study.

Existing customers

What drives your customers to purchase? Why do they buy from you instead of a competitor? Your customer base can provide a goldmine of data. They visited your website, likely engaged with you on social media and purchased your product. Quantitative research allows you to analyse their behaviour on your online properties and discover what resonates with them. Qualitative research will enable you to match customers’ online behaviour with the emotional drivers that fueled that behaviour.  

So, for example, in your research, you may have discovered that your customers purchased but do not leave reviews or recommend your product to others. They buy but never become loyal customers. In your surveys or interviews, ask direct questions that can elicit an answer as to why this may be happening. The insight can help you improve your offerings and also understand your target audience better.

Non-customers

Potential customers can also provide treasure troves of data. It’s just as important to understand why customers did NOT buy from you, as it is to know why they purchased. Understanding their decision drivers can help you better understand your target audience.

Gather a sample of people who may have engaged with your brand but never purchased. Send them surveys or request interviews. These people may fall into categories such as:

Qualified leads People who abandoned your cartLeads who took a free trial of your software but never purchasedLeads who frequently visit your pricing page and engage on live chat but never purchase

The data you glean from talking to non-customers will not only help you improve your product and messaging, but it also can help you define your target. For example, maybe you described your ideal customer as a male CEO of a small business, but your research shows that this demographic is not purchasing. You may not be targeting the right crowd and/or your messaging to this segment may not be aligned.

Competition

Who are your competitors targeting? Who are their ideal customers? Learning about your competitors’ target audience can inform your own marketing strategy and provide insight into customer characteristics you may not have noticed before. Here is some information you can research on competitors:

Their position in the marketTheir marketing strategyTheir pricing strategyTheir unique value proposition and theirWhat their customers are saying in online reviews and social mediaWhere they advertise and what types of ads convert

As you dig into competitive research, jot down information that can help you identify your targets (consumer characteristics, behaviours, preferences). Use this information also to develop creative ways to outperform your competition and solidify your position in your market.

“I Don’t Have Any Customers Yet”

If you just started your business and you don’t yet have sales, finding your target audience is a little more complicated since you don’t have current data to consult. You can still perform research, but instead of surveying your customers, survey potential customers instead. Invite a segment of these people to participate in a survey or interview them directly.

You can also conduct secondary research which entails sorting through third-party information such as chambers of commerce, trade associations, statistics, analyst reports, and competitors. Also, review your social media profiles and email stats and notice who engages with you the most, opens and clicks through your emails. These engagers may be prime candidates for interviews and/or surveys.

Data gleaned from secondary sources is not as forthcoming as customer data, but it can still be valuable. As you gain customers, your data will become more sophisticated, which will allow you to adjust your audience and strategy going forward.

Target Audience Research Never Stops

You will be researching your target audience for as long as you are in business. Your audience will change, your market may expand, your competition will adjust, and you may introduce new products to the market. Your industry will shift and adapt, and your strategy should keep up with it.

Continue to monitor your campaigns and your customers’ behaviours. To simplify your marketing campaigns, True North is a marketing collaboration platform that allows you to identify how campaigns will perform before you launch them. Start, stop and accelerate your campaigns without wasting your budget. Get early access to True North right here and sign up for our beta program.

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Marketing Teams: How to Structure & Manage Them Effectively

Even the most successful marketing teams can feel like they’re always playing catch-up. Consumer habits are constantly changing while evolving technology fuels further change – not only in the habits of your target customers but also the channels, tools and strategies at your disposal.

We talk about concepts like agility and adaptation in marketing all the time and the success of teams often comes down to reacting to changes with speed and insight.

Whether it’s spotting new opportunities, reacting to emerging trends or innovating new ways to use existing channels, you need a team that’s able to maintain consistent results and adapt to new changes.

The anatomy of a successful marketing team

Successful marketing teams become more dynamic every year as technology advances and new trends reshape the customer journey.

It wasn’t that long ago that the mobile web didn’t even exist and social media marketing was in its infancy. Now, we have an ever-growing list of channels and new technologies like voice search and augmented reality creating introducing new ways for brands to engage with prospects.

The exact structure of your marketing team will vary on the nature and size of your business. For example, major corporations may have a vice president of marketing and/or chief marketing officer (CMO) while smaller businesses may have a head of marketing leading the department.

If we try to break down the differences between roles like CMO and VP of marketing for every business type, this article will never end. So, instead, let’s take a step back and look at the broader structure of every successful marketing team.

Broadly speaking, there are seven tiers to a successful marketing team and these can be filled with a variety of roles, depending on the size of your team and its objectives:

Decision-makers: Top-level marketing roles, including the people with authority to sign off campaigns and authorise marketing spend.Strategists: These are the people in charge of creating key strategies and presenting them to the decision-makers for approval.Managers: The people who manage individual departments/teams (eg: SEO, social media, etc.) and accounts for clients.Campaigners: Responsible for managing individual marketing campaigns to ensure goals are being hit and maximise performance.Specialists: The experts who put the substance into your marketing strategies and campaigns – designers, developers, writers and more.Analysts: The data linguists who track performance and find new opportunities.The super-subs: The freelancers and contractors who cover the gaps of your in-house team.

Here’s a graphic showing the hierarchy of this team structure with some example roles you might have in each tier, depending on the size of your business.

At the top of this marketing team structure, you have the decision-makers who have the power to approve strategies and campaigns but, crucially, have the authority to approve marketing spend.

For example, if you need to hire six new freelance writers for an upcoming content marketing campaign (at a cost of $50/hr per writer), this is where approval comes from.

Essentially, they are the top-level marketers who dictate the movement of your entire team (or lack of).

Speaking of freelancers, the “super-subs” section in the graphic above is one of the most important parts of your marketing team. These are the specialists you can call upon, as and when you need, providing a great deal of flexibility. If you’re short of a web designer for any reason, you can call in a freelancer to fill in. Or, if you need some professional photography from time-to-time, you can rely on freelancers instead of hiring someone full-time.

More importantly, if you see a new opportunity (eg: product review videos are performing especially well), you can hire a freelance video editor to adapt your content marketing strategy and seize the opportunity while it’s hot.

If the opportunity turns out to have longevity, you can simply continue working with the freelancer or hire them on a full-term basis.

These super-subs provide the flexibility modern marketing teams need to respond to emerging trends, bring in new talent as it’s needed and change the size of individual teams quickly, without risk.

Agility: The key trait every marketing team needs

As explained in this article on the monday.com blog, the best structure for highly effective marketing teams is an agile one.

“Your marketing team’s focus will sometimes need to quickly shift from month to month. They might spend one month conducting interviews, research, and analysis for a shift in messaging, then need to pivot to publishing daily written and visual content for the messaging’s launch. They might quickly shift from one marketing channel to another, requiring adjustments in both strategy and collateral.”

If you’re going to deal with these monthly shifts, you have to have a team that’s ready to react to changes, as they happen. You can’t wait until next week to start putting plans in action because you’ll already be so far behind more agile competitors that you’ll be chasing scraps by the time you catch up.

At the same time, industry changes and the evolution of technology mean that the structure of marketing teams is also constantly adapting. This phenomenon is highlighted in another article published by Simple, entitled The Changing Structure of Marketing Departments in the Age of Disruption.

“New influences on the marketing team structure are emerging. In some cases, marketing technologists are being appointed to bridge the gap between marketing and IT. In many instances, a chief digital officer is driving digital innovation and change. In others, the customer experience is paramount, with marketing reporting to a chief customer or customer experience officer. In still others, the chief marketing officer takes in all those roles.”

For example, in today’s data-driven environment, marketing teams need data scientists not only capable of dealing with data themselves but also building AI and machine learning algorithms to manage and process data on a wider scale.

Only a few years ago, this kind of technology was reserved for the likes of Google and Silicon Valley tech giants but, now, any business with the right tools and know-how can leverage big data.

So what does agile really mean when we’re talking about a marketing team?

The answer is actually quite simple: speed. An agile team is ready to respond to changes instantaneously and capitalise on new opportunities before everyone else is clambering for their share. It could be reacting to new industry trends, adopting new technology early or innovating new strategies that give you the edge.

Here at Venture Harbour, this has been crucial to our most successful products. We started using multi-step forms while everyone else was over-optimising traditional form designs. We then built Leadformly to help other businesses create multi-step forms without writing any code and, now, multi-step designs are the norm.

Since then, we’ve innovated our own productivity platform called Serene that helps remote workers remain focused. By being an agile team ourselves we experienced the challenges of working remotely and actively moved to solve these problems.

And, now, we’re releasing TrueNorth, which is a growth marketing tool to help teams put marketing strategies in action faster.

Without having an agile marketing team here at Venture Harbour, none of these products would have made it to market. Or, if they had, they wouldn’t have been as successful because other teams would have already come up with the same ideas and put their own solutions forward.

Agility is all about speed and there are two key components to this:

Identifying opportunities: Whether it’s a marketing strategy, industry trend or product idea, being first to identify new opportunities is crucial.Deployment: Seeing the opportunity and coming up with a killer idea means nothing if you’re unable to deploy it quickly.

For agile marketing teams, deployment means sending campaigns live while the opportunity is greatest in order to maximise the positive impact. Once again, it all comes down to speed so that you can react first and this requires you to remove barriers standing in the way of deployment – for example, delays in getting campaigns approved.

How to build an agile marketing team

The key to building an agile marketing team brings us back to the structure we looked at earlier. The top two tiers are your full-time, permanent team members who take care of the most important, day-to-day marketing actions.

In the top tier, you have the decision-makers, strategists and managers who are in charge of ensuring targets are hit. In the second tier, you have the people running your campaigns, the specialists producing the goods you need and the analysts in charge of tracking performance.

The second tier of your team makes the magic happen while the top tier steers them in the right direction. The other crucial role of the top tier is to create an environment in which the second tier can operate in the most efficient manner.

Agility starts from the top

The leaders of your marketing team need to make sure everyone has the tools they need to get the job done. They also need to remove productivity barriers and identify issues that routinely get in the way of progress, preventing your team from being as agile as it could.

A common mistake marketing leaders fall into is focusing all of their efforts on managing the second tier of a team when they should also be looking at themselves. The best marketing teams are led by decision-makers, strategists and managers who access their own processes and constantly look for improvements.

For example, how can decision-makers with the authority to approve marketing spend and reduce the time it takes for purchases to be signed off? How can the strategists improve their data processes to deliver insights faster and greater accuracy? Or how can team managers get campaign ideas out of the conceptual stage and ready for approval sooner?

Marketing agility needs to start from the top and this requires some self-reflection from leaders.

Bringing in help from outside

With your core team set up, you can maximise agility by adding a third tier of “super-subs” in the form of freelancers and contractors.

These are the professionals you don’t need on a permanent basis who provide key services, as and when you need them. So, let’s say you have a new content marketing campaign to get up and running and need a bunch of new content created over the next two months.

You can call in the writers, designers, video editors and whoever else you need to get this campaign running. When the work is done, your super-subs go about their business and you can call on them again later, as needed.

This gives you the flexibility you need to react to new opportunities and deploy campaigns as soon as possible – or at the ideal moment.

Another great way of using your third tier of super-subs is to trial new strategies without committing to full-time staff. For example, your strategy team may identify product review videos as an opportunity for lead generation.

The data may suggest that you need to produce regular video reviews to increase traffic and capture more leads on a monthly basis. But, instead of setting up a video production team, you can bring in freelancers to put this data to the test and check that your new video marketing strategy has genuine potential.

If all goes well and you need a full-time team of product reviewers, you can always bring these freelancers into your core team. But there’s no pressure to do so and your team of super-subs gives you complete flexibility to test and scale strategies.

How to manage an agile marketing team

We’ve explored the benefits of an agile marketing team and the structure required to establish one. However, it’s also important to understand that managing an agile team requires a different approach to the more static, traditional methodology.

Essentially, you have to adopt an agile management philosophy.

There are six key areas you’ll need to address with managing an agile marketing team:

Team culture: You have to create an agile culture within your team, starting from the top.Data-driven mentality: Data science is the brain of an effective marketing team, revealing opportunities, risks and targets – as well as proving your successes.Remote working: Even if your core team works in-house, you need to master remote working to get the best out of freelancers and maximise agility.Collaboration: The more agile you become, the more important and challenging collaboration is – especially when core team members and freelancers need to work together.Automation: To maximise the efficiency of an agile team, you should automate every task that doesn’t need human input.Testing: As with any data-driven philosophy, you need to test and verify new ideas while constantly optimising existing practises for the best performance.

Above all, if you’re going to take this agile approach to team structure, you have to install a working culture that supports it, from top to bottom. Remote working and digital collaboration can be tricky to implement, especially if your core team is working in-house.

You may decide to adopt a more agile culture within the office and allow people to work from home more often. Or you may have been forced to adopt remote working by a certain global pandemic.

Either way, you have to adapt the way your team leaders think about day-to-day working.

One challenge you’ll quickly come across is productivity when your team is constantly connected. While tools like Slack are excellent communication tools, they can also be infuriatingly disruptive when notifications are constantly sounding off.

Luckily, there are tools you can use to cancel Slack interruptions while keeping all of the benefits of the platform – and we’ll explore this more in the next section.

Another challenge you’ll face is switching off after work, which is listed as the biggest struggle of working remotely.

As your team becomes more agile and working hours become more flexible, it’s difficult for team members to feel like they’re ever not working. Stress, fatigue and all kinds of morale killers can quickly set in so it’s crucial that the key figures in your business take steps to mitigate this problem.

Either set specific working hours or allow remote workers to set their own so that it’s known when they’re available and respected when they’re not.

We address this problem in more detail and many of the other challenges you’ll face with modern marketing teams in our 10 Common Remote Work Challenges (+ Solutions) article.

While the article is specific to remote working, agile marketing teams will experience all of the same challenges, to some extent:

Challenges for remote teams:



Managing projectsRemote collaborationTracking tasks and productivityWorking from different locations, time zones, etc.Dealing with language and cultural differencesBuilding/maintaining trust



Challenges for remote workers:



Maximising productivityOvercoming distractionsStaying motivatedUnplugging after work

We’ve also published a guide to managing remote teams, which is filled with info that will help you get the best out of team members – both in-house and elsewhere.

If you’re new to remote working, it will take time to adapt but this is simply another example of why agile marketing teams are more successful. As long as the experimental culture starts from the top, you’ll test and find the right processes that work for your team and adapt to new challenges, as they emerge.

Give your team the tools they need

At the heart of every marketing team is the tech stack that helps them complete tasks in the most efficient way. In general, the more agile a team is, the more tools they need to maintain flexibility while also maximising productivity.

One of the key barriers standing in the way of marketing team performance is the time it takes to launch new campaigns. Getting strategies out of the conceptual stage and launched quickly can make the difference between seizing an opportunity first and playing catch-up along with everyone else.

We’ve run into this problem plenty here at Venture Harbour and felt the frustration of campaign ideas not being materialised quickly enough. As we often do, we built our own tool to solve this problem – a free Slack app called SignOff that allows us to get campaign ideas signed off and ready to send live much faster.

By closing the gap between our strategists and our decision-makers, campaigns are now signed off sooner and our campaign managers can get things moving without delay.

We’ve also published an article looking at the 30 Best Slack Apps, Integrations & Bots to Try if you want to turn Slack into a more powerful productivity tool.

We also touched on the distraction communication tools like Slack can become – a common issue raised by digital teams.

A problem we ran into quite quickly here at Venture Harbour was realising that the more tools we used, the more distracted we became. While most of the tools allowed us to complete individual tasks faster, the constant notifications and distractions made us less productive overall.

So, as we usually do, we built our own tool to solve this problem for us.

We talked about Serene a little earlier and this the tool that tames our other tools and stops them killing our productivity. Its built-in app and website blocker stop unwanted distractions and you can set 20-90 minute power sessions to crack on with tasks, distraction-free.

You can even integrate with Slack, using this technique, to automatically update your Slack status when you’re busy.

The point is, giving your team the tools they need is crucial but you don’t want to overload yourselves with tech. Constantly switching between apps or dealing with notifications are major productivity killers so automate mundane tasks with a tool like Zapier to spend less time moving between different apps.

Also, take a look at our 19 Productivity Hacks to Get More Done in 2020 article for more ideas on how to maximise team efficiency.

Automation has been one of our biggest assets and we’ve previously listed 53 business automation tools that skyrocketed our growth by 330%. Knowing which tools to use (and which ones not to use) can require time and patience – it took us years to find the right CRM platform for us!

With software prices being so competitive now and plenty of free tools on the market, it’s worth investing some time to test out some options and build the tech stack that truly meets your needs.

Put the agile in your marketing team

The key theme throughout this article is that modern marketing teams have to be agile and ready to adapt quickly. The team structure we’ve looked at today gives you the basis you need to scale your team, as and when necessary, so that you’ve always got the resources at hand to meet your objectives as they change.

With this team structure, an agile working culture and the right set of tools, your team will be ready to respond to new opportunities as they emerge.

The post Marketing Teams: How to Structure & Manage Them Effectively appeared first on Venture Harbour.