Marketing leaders dream of having perfectly optimized solutions and workflows that easily address all of their team's needs. The reality, however, is that finding that perfect combination of solutions is a challenge — one that can deter organizations from making small, steady improvements in their technology and processes. Oftentimes, marketing and creative teams get stuck in a stage of wondering, where their workflows, processes, and strategies become stagnant. While the goal of a perfect MarTech stack isn’t always tangible, incremental change can be just as powerful as big change for many companies.
Finances and talent can often get in the way of making leaps within your MarTech solutions, but that doesn’t mean you should make no change at all. In this piece, we will help to identify small but impactful changes in strategy that can be taken to improve your workflows and technology utilization at little to no additional cost.
These are four of our top “quick wins” for marketing and creative workflow management. From re-tapping into internal resources to even eliminating solutions that have overlap or are no longer effective for your team's current needs, there is an effective change for every team and technology stack.
Get a better handle of your entire team's usage of your MarTech solutions in order to establish what specific areas require attention or improvements. A thorough review of your workflows and how your team engages with your available technology can provide valuable insight into solutions that are insufficient and can be eliminated — saving you money and potentially improving efficiency. Taking a step back and auditing your platforms and systems when issues arise can save you money, but at the end of the day, the most useful solution is the one that works for your team. Sometimes a simple upgrade can save you time and money in the long run.
Tap into the many existing resources around you to help overcome utilization challenges and new solution onboarding. During times of transition, looking inward for talent and fresh perspectives can significantly improve workflow. Plus, there is a chance that one of your internal users utilizes a solution regularly enough that they may have insight into additional features or use cases, and can help you strategize how to effectively incorporate them into your workflow. Bringing in new voices means diversity in thought-strategy, which can help you come to an answer faster.
Today’s customers expect brands to know them and their interests. In fact, 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. Thankfully, modern marketing automation platforms have easy-to-use personalization tools built-in. An easy example of this improved content tactic is the usage of dynamic information such as inserting the customer’s first name into the greeting of an email rather than a generic version of that same greeting.
Customer’s reliance on personalized, ready-to-use information also presents the opportunity of gating content throughout your website. This means placing a piece of content — a whitepaper, e-book, or guide — behind a data wall. To gain access, customers must input personal information. While a simple solution, there are some tricks to making it effective. Overcrowding your form with fields is a guaranteed way to turn your customer away. Think about what information is necessary in order to follow up with this customer and ask for only that information. Gated content gives insight into target audience and allows for more leads ready to continue through the sales funnel. Marketing automation platforms often have all of the tools you’ll need to create landing pages, forms, and automated replies or “thank you” messages, allowing you to not only easily offer valuable, informative content to your audience, but also gain leads and potential customer information.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with your content strategy in order to make better use of your current tools. Luckily, the content management or marketing automation solution you currently have in place may already have the features needed to make this shift in strategy — it’s just a matter of utilizing them in a way that directly aids your team. When you take a step back and rethink your content strategy, you’re able to evaluate how your team is operating and engaging with your technology solutions, allowing you to not only utilize your current marketing technology solutions to the fullest extent, but also implement the latest industry trends and best practices into your strategy with ease.
The beauty of many current MarTech solutions is that they offer features that will do the work for you and eliminate manual tasks. For example, after your team has done the hard work of attracting leads through social media, emails, or blogs, the specialized features within your customer relationship management (CRM) can help you manage these leads and determine how to best follow up.
With this strategy, you can utilize the power of your CRM tool to tag leads as they come in based on where they came from — Google, Facebook, or another website, among other sources. This data will allow you to see where you’re most successful and will aid in future decision making, and even help determine which areas might warrant additional time or investment. It will also give you a leg up when nurturing your leads and engaging with customers down the line.
CRM solutions have become more and more robust over the past few years and now offer numerous automations, opportunities for customization, and integrations. With so many available features, there’s a good chance your current workflows aren’t optimized to utilize them all, and there may even be features that your team isn’t even aware of. Regularly engaging with your CRM provider to check for product updates and new features, as well as re-aligning your strategies to work with your current solution can yield great results, without costing your organization a lot of time or money.
Marketing workflow management within your MarTech stack can directly impact your operations and help your teams reach new heights. Even small, incremental changes can make a major difference in productivity. To learn more, get in touch with the experts at IO Integration.