Are you looking for ways to incorporate technology into your business to increase your bottom line? There’s never a wrong time to invest in data-driven technology solutions to achieve better marketing insights. You can unlock better marketing results by creating a culture obsessed with data and building the right technology to use that data. Here are some examples.
Invest in the right resources
You may encounter limitations with off-the-shelf solutions if you want to continuously change your marketing to achieve better insights. Typically, robust third-party software platforms are trying to serve hundreds of industries. As a result, they likely won’t scale at the fast pace you need, and their strategic objectives won’t always match yours. Your unique parameters may require custom tailoring to unlock a level of targeting that surpasses your partners’ capabilities.
You’ll want to invest some of your dollars in an in-house tech staff to achieve better results. Gradually migrating to custom solutions and focusing on your organization’s most critical needs will help show progress and justify shifting more spending toward future tech stack builds.
Understand the impact of small wins
Whether your processes are primarily paper-driven, or you own and run a fully functional marketing suite with third-party solutions like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo, finding new ways to connect and use your data can accelerate if your team is flexible and can quickly adapt to change.
Change can start small, for example, by adding new customer data fields into your marketing contact records. These seemingly small tasks have the potential to unlock more successful campaigns and can reinvigorate your employees once they experience a data investment in the form of results. The mentality can shift from, “Let me work with what’s comfortable,” to “What new insights can we unlock?”
Test with larger audiences
Traditional marketing takes a small sample to test before rolling out changes to larger groups, an approach that networks well when dealing with small-scale marketing activities. However, if you’re running multiple locations across the state or country with different campaigns, the impact of new data can cause differences in performance.
Rolling out your changes to larger audiences can allow you to quickly learn and not spend time in an endless cycle of misleading results. More significant tests mean shorter paths to a working solution that can serve your many business needs.
Learn and adapt at a faster pace
If you decide to test at scale, you need a clear and established system of iteration and an excellent way to filter critical feedback that pushes you forward.
Identifying clear KPIs and long-term goals that the entire organization agrees on can help decide whether to act on a particular piece of feedback. In addition, it can give you something to point to when you explain your decisions to your team. By proactively setting this system up early, you can help avoid scrambling once feedback starts to trickle in.
You can gradually overhaul your organization’s marketing technology mix to create a custom solution that powers a new era of data-driven marketing, ultimately unlocking better results.
By putting faith in your team, starting small and testing big, you’ll see a shift in culture and a clear return on investment. ●
Jeff Beck is chief growth officer at Leaf Home
