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Your database is only as good as your email marketing strategy. Your email list may be cluttered with irrelevant contacts who aren’t interested in your offer.

Incorrect, incomplete, invalid, out-of-date, inconsistent, or otherwise unusable information may plague your email list. Here’s how to assess your list, with common problems and solutions.

Evaluating Email List Hygiene

Here is a list of indicators to help you assess your email list’s hygiene:

• A high hard bounce rate indicates invalid email addresses. They aren’t delivered, whether they came from a vendor or were manually entered. Bounce rates of 3% or more are considered a sign that your email list needs cleaning.
• If you notice reduced customer/prospect engagement with your emails despite targeting the right audience, your contact information may be incorrect.
• This should be done at least once a year to check for unsubscribers if you haven’t done it recently.
• Is your contact list full of junk or blank fields? Cleaning your list horizontally is as important as vertically.
• Validation controls for each data field on your lead/contact forms.
• If your email marketing team’s cost-to-return ratio is too low, it’s time to review your lists.

Common Problems and Solutions

Here are some common email list issues and how to fix them.

1. Find Duplicate Contacts

Perhaps the most critical aspect of email list cleaning. The same person usually has multiple contact records. You can have separate contacts for their work and personal emails, or you can create new contacts rather than update old ones.

Use data matching to fix it. You can use an obvious unique identifier in your email list to match contacts, but this is rare. Teams buy data matching tools that use phonetic, numeric, fuzzy, or other proprietary algorithms. Once matched, you can choose to merge contacts or purge them from your email database.

2. Look for application inconsistencies

Companies commonly use CRM, marketing automation, and webforms. Multi-end data generation and storage causes inconsistencies. Because no single database is used throughout the organization, you doubt the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Fixing it: Dump the cleaned email list somewhere centrally accessible to all departments. Also, use standardized fields and validation controls when creating contacts. This will ensure that all contacts are validated consistently.

3. Look for inexact, incomplete, or invalid data

Observe the following cases to find these issues:

• A lot of empty fields
• Numerous typos and misspellings
• Data fields that don’t match the pattern

Fixing it: Begin by profiling your list. This will highlight issues and possible solutions. A data profile should show you how many records have blank fields and how many fields in a column do not match the pattern. Pattern matching is important for detecting invalid email addresses or phone numbers. Having a data profile for your email list will help you plan your cleaning tasks.

Effects of Bad Email List Hygiene

Unclean email lists can cause serious issues for an organization, such as:

• With duplicate records, your email marketing team will send the same contact twice, affecting brand reputation. Duplicating marketing efforts wastes time and resources.
• Sending emails to invalid addresses will cause ISPs to block the sender’s domain, preventing your content from reaching your audience.
• An unclean contact database may not comply with GDPR, CCPA, etc.
• Affected business intelligence processes, such as extracting actionable insights.

Data cleansing is vital to successful email marketing campaigns. While it can be done manually, it is best to use a tool that can profile, standardize, match, and purge data. Less time spent cleaning your list means more time reaching the right audience.

Growth is not easy. Find a profitable niche, target demographic, and have something valuable to sell them. Getting the word out about your goods, services, or ideas has become increasingly difficult. Profiting and staying afloat are nearly impossible without the right marketing strategies.

Make use of social media

You can’t ignore it. That’s where the magic happens. Some businesses have grown solely from social media. At first, it’s intimidating. Sure. Posting on social media will become easier as you gain momentum.

If you have money to burn, you could hire a social media manager. If not, just be yourself. Be genuine. Post your ideas. You can even post your wares. Post anything that you think will help your audience learn more about you, your business, or the industry you’re in.

Use direct messages on Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter to connect with other successful businesses and potential customers. This is great marketing.

Make videos tutorials

Making video tutorials is a great way to promote your business. Teach them something. Show them. Hold hands. Tutorials are hot right now. The more value you provide, the faster you can increase your visibility and, ultimately, your sales.

YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google. They go there to learn something visually. You’ve probably done it a thousand times. So, ask yourself, what could you teach in your business to help consumers? Why did you start your business?

Worst part? Hearing and even seeing your own voice. You no longer need to be seen on camera, but you will need to be heard. You get used to it. But you can’t ignore YouTube’s visibility and reach, so start making authentic and useful videos right now.

Tap into influencers

Want to get the word out and increase your social media visibility quickly? Then use influencers. Finding the right influencer is crucial. You don’t have to use mega-influencers. Or choose micro-influencers with tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand fans.

The con? Find the right influencer in your niche to target. Spreading your message is not enough. It’s about reaching the right demographic. If you do it correctly, you can reach a large audience for a relatively low cost.

This makes sense if your sales systems and products are ready. This marketing strategy is likely right for you right now if you have a clearly converting offer and want more visibility. Assess the situation and reach out to influencers. Test small, then scale.

Use retargeting Facebook ads

Facebook ads are one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. With Facebook, you can easily target a specific demographic. There are many ways to target people based on their interests.

The key to great results isn’t just click-traffic. You must focus on conversions and pixel retargeting. If you don’t know how to install the Facebook Pixel on your site, you must learn now. Ads on Facebook aren’t the only way to build an audience.

Use LinkedIn correctly

Has your LinkedIn profile a video? Did you know you can add one easily? Introduce yourself and your business. Add it to your profile. This is a simple way to passively market your business with surprising results.

If you have lots of LinkedIn connections but aren’t posting, start now. Your posts can go viral and reach a large audience. Here you can convey the entrepreneurial journey. Share your struggles and stories. The more effective your stories, the bigger your viral potential.

On LinkedIn, you can connect with other businesses and entrepreneurs. Too many people overlook it as a great business resource.

Snapchat has more than 530 million active users and is a fun marketing tool that should be included in your strategy. To improve ROI, you need to use Snapchat properly to reach new customers and target audiences.

Some helpful Snapchat Marketing Tips To Reach New Audiences:

Find Content Creators

Find content creators who can help promote your brand. Many vloggers, celebrities, and actors use Snapchat to share their daily lives with others via videos, photos, and stories.

If your brand is relevant to pop culture, find relevant Snapchat accounts and ask them to do a snap for your brand.

Make Your Users Find You

Add the Snapchat geo-filter to every event you host on the app. Taking this simple step now will help your brand and target audience connect in person later.

During high traffic events or campaigns, always use a location-based filter on top of the snap for more impressions. Also, use the same username as your brand domain.

Offer Sneak Peeks into Your World

Snap is all about sharing meaningful moments with a caring audience. Your fans want behind-the-scenes access, backstage tours, and more. Consider what content you can provide to give your users a ‘behind the green curtain’ look.

Try Out Different Engagement Formats

From snaps to videos to carousels and geofilters, Snapchat allows users to express themselves visually. If you’re not sure how to tell your brand’s story in these different formats, experiment and see what works best.

Unique Snapchat Content

If your audience can find it elsewhere online (blogs, Facebook, Instagram), don’t share it on Snapchat. It’s vital to keep creating something unique.

Instead, use the app to share things you couldn’t share elsewhere, like behind-the-scenes videos from your team or photos from an industry event. This personalizes your content and encourages your audience to follow you on Snapchat rather than other social media sites.

Start a Conversation by Questioning

Ask questions that encourage followers to respond with a snap or video. They could play “Would you rather…” games using the platform’s multiple-choice options and snapping back and forth within the story.

This is a new marketing strategy that many consumer brands are using to increase ROI and customer acquisition.

Gain Social Media Followers by Live Streaming

Live streaming is one of the latest updates. Events on Snapchat allow users to broadcast themselves in real-time via photos and videos for up to 24 hours.

This could help you connect with your audience who wants to know more about the events and campaigns you attend.

Get Close with Snapchat Spectacles

There’s no need to spend a fortune on Snapchat Spectacles to improve your digital marketing strategy. Still, the new technology may be worth investing in just to bring back immediacy, literally and figuratively.

Create a buzz with Snapchat contests

Organize frequent contests where followers can win free products or gift cards from your company.

Post the latest contest results on your Story or in a video, and reply to any messages left for you.

Write Reviews-Inspired Stories

Whenever you receive positive feedback from customers, use Snapchat to encourage them to share it with their friends on social media.

It’s also worth writing a story that encourages people to review their service, since happy customers are 10x more likely to do so.

Embed a Snapcode on Your Website Banners

Everyone knows how to use their phone to scan a code, even if they have never used Snapchat. If you have a custom-branded Snapchat filter or sticker, as shown in the image above, website visitors should have no problem accessing your Snapcode and going directly to your profile.

Organize and maintain your content

Snapchat is all about the experience. Consistent themes and designs build trust with users, while varied content keeps them engaged. Enhance the app’s functionality by adding calls-to-action and links to other pages.

Be Specific About Your Target Market

To improve results, use filters based on the target audience’s age, gender, or location. Geo-filters add more depth and meaning to photos than text ever could, making it easy to discover new business strategies.

Consumers have historically preferred familiar CPG brands over “store brand” products. But in 2020, panic buying and pantry stocking caused many popular CPG brand products to disappear from store shelves and online. So shoppers turned to private label products for their lower prices.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, nearly 40% of US consumers tried new products or brands, and nearly 20% bought more private label products, according to a McKinsey consumer survey. This has given retailers a chance to retain customers who switched during the pandemic, gain new ones, and build loyalty.

If you truly want to grow your private label brands, you must embrace empathetic marketing. This is especially true when creating a digital presence that fosters relationships and generates revenue. With the rise of ecommerce, you can no longer rely solely on shelf placement and pricing to drive private label sales.

Insights into Empathetic Marketing

Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share another’s feelings. Empathy is a critical marketing investment, especially for private label brands developing their first brand strategy and content plan.

Empathetic marketing is essential when you rely on product listing pages content, accessibility, and visibility rather than store interactions. But first, private label brands should lay some foundational groundwork.

Define your target audience. According to McKinsey, many private label brands exist to support retailer pricing strategies, not to serve a specific audience or consumer segment. Many private label brands lack a clear focus on who they serve and why their products are required. A clear target audience definition provides a north star for future decisions about online content, product listing pages, and optimizing for visibility and findability among target audience members.

Create audience personas to further define the target audience. This allows you to put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes and understand their needs. That means more valuable content for audiences and prospects, based on an understanding of their wants and needs.

Analyze their questions about a product or category, as well as the problems they’re trying to solve. Content should answer these questions and show how a brand or product can help. Those questions can be quickly identified by using Google’s “People Also Ask” feature on SERPS or keyword research tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

Content Creation and Marketing

You can create content that builds deep, genuine relationships between your customers and your private label brand once you have a solid understanding of their needs and challenges.

When creating online content for product listings and your webstore, you should focus on writing from the perspective of the customer and responding to their daily concerns. If they are a family with a large budget, content should highlight cost savings and any promotions or discounts. It is also critical to organize content according to the consumer’s information needs, avoiding distraction and backtracking. Instead of using product jargon, use words they use when searching for and discussing your product.

To comply with Google’s E-A-T guidelines and be considered a high-quality page, content should also demonstrate expertise, be authoritative, and trustworthy. While E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor, it’s important to improve your website’s perceived trustworthiness. It can help improve SEO as well as user experience, giving audiences more confidence in your brand and website.

In Conclusion

We will have to wait and see if consumers will stick with private label brands or return to pre-pandemic product loyalty. Any private label brand seeking to shed its “store brand” reputation and image must invest in compassionate marketing.

Why not work with an influencer to promote your company’s products or services? Influencer marketing can help grow your brand and raise awareness among a larger audience.

While influencer marketing appears simple, creating a successful campaign takes more time than most people realize. For the project to be successful, you must clearly define your objectives, outline a path to achieve them, and develop an integrated strategy to fully utilize your influencer campaign’s opportunities.

Campaign Ideas

A successful influencer campaign requires planning, organization, and follow-up. We’ve outlined some suggestions to help you maximize your campaign.

Preparation Ideas

Begin with a budget and a goal list. Determine your budget for influencers and outline your key goals and objectives for working with them. Are you trying to gain more followers or engagement? Do you need leads? Do you want to sell an item online?

Give influencers a detailed Influencer Instruction Guide that outlines the campaign’s goals, copy points, and posting expectations.

An Influencer Contract should be created to ensure that all campaign expectations and deliverables are defined and signed by both parties. We suggest you sign a legal contract that includes a photo and video release. Remember to own the images you save and credit the photographer with appropriate tags and photo attribution when you share them.

• Do market research and learn about your target demographic. The key to a successful influencer marketing collaboration is choosing someone with a large following in the market where your brand operates. If you want to expand your reach as a makeup brand, a beauty influencer could help. It makes sense for a home furnishings company to work with a home decor blogger to promote their products.
• Determine if the influencer is a good fit for your brand. Because influencers are human, it is impossible to change their personalities or opinions. The identity of the influencer you plan to work with, as well as their brand and tone, are critical factors.
• Prepare a list of key metrics in advance. Investigate an influencer’s reach and engagement before collaborating. This will give you an idea of the outcomes of the partnership. How big is their fan base? Influencers (followers of 10,000+) are distinct from micro-influencers (those with fewer than 10,000 followers). It’s important to note which organizations you’ll be collaborating with because their reach varies. Influencers can use tools like Instagram’s swipe-up feature to link directly to a company’s website.

During Campaign

• Integrate your campaign into your overall strategy.
• Promote the campaign on your company’s social media channels.
• Like, comment on, and share all campaign posts and blogs that appear on your influencer’s social media platforms.
• Make a backup of all of your images for future reference.

Recommendations Post-Campaign

• An influencer can provide you with campaign data such as reach, impressions, website visits, coupon downloads, and other metrics, allowing you to evaluate the campaign’s success. Examine the results to see if you met your strategic goals.
• Consider the benefits and drawbacks of working with an influencer while the campaign is still fresh. What did you learn from this experience, positive or negative, for your next influencer partnership?
• Include any missing talking points or information in your Influencer Instruction Guidelines, as well as any information you don’t want to use in the future.
• Stay in touch with influential people. Engage with them on social media and praise them on LinkedIn to show your support. Your company may be mentioned in a blog post in return!

Influencer marketing takes practice and patience to master. Unlike traditional marketing, businesses must be willing to work hard to build genuine relationships with their influencers. The results are often measured not in dollars and cents, but in new brand loyalists gained. It’s difficult to assess your success without a bank account statement.

While marketing itself takes time and personal attention, managing campaigns and influencer relationships does not have to be. Finding the right people to work with, tracking campaigns, and assessing success (or failure) are all important tasks. But that doesn’t mean they can make unreasonable demands on your time. That’s why we have software. Just as accounting software eliminates the need to count money, influencer marketing software eliminates time-sucking administrative tasks that can keep you from achieving your goals.

Brands can use influencer marketing software to better manage their influencer marketing campaigns. Before influencer marketing software, it could take a long time for brands to identify potential influencers, build relationships with them, and launch campaigns with them. Finding relevant influencers was difficult without prior industry knowledge. Influencer marketing software and specialized influencer search engines made this process much simpler. Brands benefited from additional services such as relationship management, campaign management, third-party analytics, influencer content amplification, and even the use of influencer marketplaces in some cases.

1. AspireIQ (formerly Revfluence)

Unlike the other platforms on this list, AspireIQ is more hands-off. It is a self-service platform that provides access to over 150,000 influencers across major social media platforms. Because of this, it is ideal for marketing agencies and brands who develop their own campaigns.

AspireIQ’s sophisticated machine-learning engine constantly updates its database of influencers’ social media activity. The software collects data on posts, content quality, engagement, and even the sentiment behind the comments. The data is parsed as the software matches them up, which helps agencies and brands find influencers who meet their criteria. AspireIQ’s interface makes it easy to pitch ideas to hundreds of influencers at once, while tracking and managing responses from a single platform.

For the platform to achieve its overall goal of being a one-stop shop, AspireIQ emphasizes content creation. The Creator Collaboration Toolkit streamlines the process of working with influencers. Roles and responsibilities can be assigned to individuals, and built-in tools help create and manage content. You can then track each campaign’s progress, including its reach and subsequent engagement with target audiences.

AspireIQ’s customers are typically SMBs and large corporations. Companies like Quest Nutrition, Birchbox, Dermalogica, and Scopely aren’t household names yet, but Refluence is helping them get there.

2. #paid

While #paid works similarly to other influencer marketplaces, it has two key differences. For starters, it enables Whitelisted Ads. You can use paid Facebook and Instagram ads by whitelisting specific creators and content. #paid works with Facebook Ads Manager to push these ads into timelines and feeds under the creator’s real name. This gives the posts a more genuine feel to the audience. No longer limited to those who follow your influencer’s social media accounts.

#paid gives you a Handraise for the second time. Influencers who are interested can “raise” their hands and wait for brands to contact them. Creators who use a Handraise send a message to the community explaining their campaign strategy and why they think they are a good fit. Each Handraise submitted to #paid is vetted by a team.

Because the creators set their rates in advance, there is no time wasted negotiating rates. Brands plan content for Instagram, such as two posts and two stories, and then execute. This allows them to easily track their funds.

#paid has elevated the fundamentals of a marketplace to a new level of significance. Their target market is large corporations with big marketing budgets.

3. CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ is an end-to-end solution with an elegant and efficient user interface. It has a comprehensive feature set that includes everything you need from an influencer marketing platform. CreatorIQ won the 2019 MarTech Awards for best influencer marketing platform.

It is clearly aimed at large agencies or corporations seeking a fully integrated solution. Despite not disclosing pricing, it is clear from the clients that CreatorIQ’s primary focus is on large corporations rather than small and medium-sized businesses. Disney, Tiffany & Co., Unilever, Dell, and Ralph Lauren are among the clients.

CreatorIQ uses social media APIs directly, but once you’ve chosen your favorite influencers, it has access to much more data than is publicly available. It provides a white-labeled, fully customizable portal for invited influencers to register and onboard before joining your team. By granting CreatorIQ access to their social media posts, influencers create highly detailed profiles on CreatorIQ.

Expanding your network creates your own private marketplace. Influencers visit CreatorIQ to see what your company is up to now, not to find new opportunities.

Create campaign briefs, send them out to your audience, move campaigns forward, approve or deny content, and make payments. It looks, feels, and acts like a private influencer marketplace. Campaign reports are accessed via the portal, which is also the primary method. Because these reports are dynamic, you can filter and sort the data however you want. Widgets allow you to customize your reports and display exactly what you want.

4. Tagger

Tagger began as a music recommendation engine and still is. It wasn’t long before it shifted focus to influencer marketing, leveraging existing software’s best features.
Tagger tracks over 9 billion social conversations linked to over 3.5 million influencer profiles, yielding an overwhelming amount of data. Tagger is a standalone digital marketing research tool.

It has all the features of an influencer marketplace plus more. The platform’s focus on psychographics sets it apart. It uses a social listening feature to analyze what people say to determine their interests and affinities. Brands and agencies can learn exactly what content works best to engage these audiences. Competitor research provides a wealth of data. This information not only gives you insight into their campaign, but also serves as inspiration for your own.

All previous content has been indexed, including sponsored content from 2013. You can sort, filter, and refine the results in many ways. Influencer searches include a variety of filters to help narrow your results. Tagger’s data analysis engines can “understand” an influencer’s followers to the point where they can find “lookalike” audiences.

Tagger has a robust reporting feature. You can review your campaign posts to see how it went.

Retailers have always valued sales periods. No exception this year, possibly the most significant in the UK and Europe since many services went online. In 2020, 87 percent of British consumers plan to shop online. This shows that e-commerce in the UK is not slowing down. Consumers need guidance in making purchases, whether in-store or online. E-commerce has become increasingly popular. That revenue in Europe is expected to reach 510.5 billion dollars by 2024. That said, companies must manage their digital customer relationships to increase sales. Let’s review some customer satisfaction and loyalty best practices.

Pay Attention to Your Customers

Several factors influence the effectiveness of customer service. Customers will rate the speed of resolution, agent knowledge, and wait time. It’s critical to understand your customers’ needs. Know the answers and try to improve them. This ensures that the organization’s perception is reality by collecting and acting on customer feedback.

Test response times and understand the customer’s perspective on the purchasing process. Using this data, you can optimize the customer journey.

Be accessible to customers

Contacting customer service is difficult for most customers. So making the process easier will benefit your business. Being available on more channels, but also on the channels that your customers use daily for personal and professional reasons, can help build brand loyalty and simplify their experience.

When customers are confused and need answers, agents’ availability is critical. They will contact agents if they cannot find an answer in the website’s FAQ section. If they don’t get the desired result, competitors will gladly provide it, especially during sales periods.

An omni-channel approach, for example, can adapt to customer preferences. If one of your channels is unavailable, customers can still contact you via other channels.

As part of that strategy, customers can send messages at any time and receive responses. Chatbots can also answer common questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Why do chatbots need a human touch?

Brands are using chatbots to instantly answer common questions. It works so well that a recent study found 80% of consumers enjoyed using a chatbot.

Using this cutting-edge technology can help reduce wait times, relieve pressure on agents, and improve overall customer satisfaction. In the last year, 60% of consumers used chatbots to get answers. A trend that will only grow.

Why not stand out by using conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce is redefining how customers interact with brands. They can interact with an agent, a chatbot, or a combination of the two in a personalized way.

This trend is especially relevant to messaging apps. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger help businesses adapt to their customers’ needs. They can thus exchange in real-time using messaging features like history, file sharing, and geolocation. During sales, these channels can inform customers of product availability and offer click and collect.

Conclusion

Customers’ shopping habits changed in 2020 and will continue to change in 2019. A growing trend is unified commerce, which provides a seamless customer experience across all channels. This evolution must be accompanied by a unified digital customer relationship management system that can respond to all customer contact points.

The field of inside sales is already thriving in pandemic, and it will continue to empower businesses’ sales processes in the coming years. It is, in essence, when a team of people sells a specific product or service while working from home. As a result, inside sales teams rely heavily on electronic means of communication such as emails, phone calls, and texts.

This generation is dominated by Millenials, with Generation Z trailing close behind. In this way, inside sales can prove to be a highly effective business strategy because it not only saves you time but also allows you to save money.

Customers nowadays prefer to communicate via phone calls or text messages rather than meeting in person. Because we are all working from home at the moment, an inside sales strategy is the most effective at this time.

Within high-growth companies, inside sales constitutes the primary sales strategy, compared to 27 percent who use field sales, 23 percent who use internet sales, and only 8 percent who use distribution channels as their primary sales strategy.

Isn’t that interesting? Inside sales is becoming more and more popular among businesses, and we’re here to share our thoughts on how it will continue to grow in the future.

What is Inside Sales and how does it work?

Inside sales, in its most basic definition, is the process of capturing, converting, and nurturing leads without physically visiting the customer’s location for a face-to-face conversation. A revolution has occurred in the creation of businesses that can be run entirely from home and do not require any on-the-ground work. That is one of the reasons why inside sales representatives are growing at a rate three times faster than outside sales representatives.

Inside sales is, in fact, one of the most popular sales models in the industry, owing to the fact that customers increasingly prefer to purchase online. Because it is simple to handle high-ticket sales from remote locations, it is the most preferred strategy for businesses.

Now that you have a better understanding of how inside sales affects a company, we have compiled a list of reasons why inside sales will continue to grow and assist more companies in increasing their revenue.

Unbroken teamwork

It’s difficult to manage communication when you’re in an office or on a field trip. Inside sales teams are experts at communicating without even meeting other team members; they can quickly resolve issues using digital methods.

With sales software, your inside sales team can easily collaborate on projects, share customer information, and assign leads.

For example, if a customer contacts you with a question, you can join a group chat, mention the person, and quickly resolve the issue. Each team member can see the entire sales process.

Digitized Sales (CRM)

“Those who master the virtual channel will excel.”

Inside sales teams benefit greatly from a digitized sales process. A cloud-based platform for inside sales management can help reduce manual paperwork and improve customer engagement.

By automating your sales process, you can focus on nurturing and delighting your customers.

A cloud-based sales CRM also helps you create centralized customer data for easy access, receive real-time notifications whenever a deal progresses, and send automated series of emails to nurture your customers.

Value-added content

Now that the business is digital, you can create content that engages your customers and visitors. To connect with the targeted audience, keep sharing valuable content on your website or social media platforms.

You can try out different online platforms where your target customers are. You can study your leads’ behavior and preferences to better understand their needs.

For example, if your target audience uses Twitter, you must create content that conveys your company’s value in a few words. So, when trying to sell to a Twitter audience, the first sentence or two counts.

Easy contact management

When working remotely, it’s critical to keep track of all contacts and data. Manually entering and updating contact information may result in a fragmented process and data loss.

Don’t worry about losing contact information with a centralized database. Using cloud-based software, you can also add or delete contacts from anywhere and at any time. This ensures that all client data is securely stored and accessible by all team members.

Boosts efficiency

Working remotely has its advantages. And one of them is work efficiency. Inside sales increases team productivity by working from home.

Outside sales reps also spend a lot of time on the road, which reduces their efficiency. It helps to capture more leads, engage with them regularly and close the deal to gain a long-term customer.

Inside sales reps only sell 33% of the time, leaving more time to focus on streamlining the sales process to close deals faster.

If you’re a marketer, you’re familiar with how things typically work. You conceptualize the campaign, execute it, and ultimately direct your audience to content. However, where does this content reside? Your campaigns require a destination in order to be effective. While this sounds great in theory, many marketers discover that implementing this strategy for each campaign is inconvenient, time-consuming, and frustrating. What, then, is a marketer to do? Here’s more information on what you need to do to create effective content destinations – without becoming overwhelmed in the process.

Agility is Required

Did you know that only one in every two marketing executives reports that their teams can create landing pages, blog posts, webpages, and other content experiences easily? That’s only 50%, which is pretty pitiful considering they’re all putting together campaigns. Thus, the first tip for creating content destinations is to be quick.

This is critical because spending hours upon hours delivering a single destination means that you will never complete any other tasks. Scalability requires a repeatable and rapid process. Additionally, circumstances change rapidly. If you’re creating content in response to current events or global issues, there’s a good chance the news will change more quickly than your landing page. You cannot afford to be without a rapid-fire method for creating and updating destinations.

Avoid Developer Interaction

Along with slowing campaign launches and reducing effectiveness, there is another reason that content destinations have historically been a pain: they eat up developer time. Because many marketing departments lack the skills necessary to make site changes or create new destinations, every requirement becomes a request to the development team. This is not scalable, and it also places additional strain on your developers, who are almost always overworked as it is.

Rather than that, you can create content destinations on your own using a Content Experience Platform (CEP). By enabling prospects to consume more content faster, this technology enables teams to easily collect leads, quickly create campaign destinations, and accelerate buyer journeys. With all of your content centralized and organized in one location, any member of your marketing team can slice and dice it in order to create engaging content destinations for any type of campaign. Additionally, each one will be consistently branded.

Effectively completing this task can actually save time

While it’s obvious that utilizing a CEP to create your own microsite or campaign destination saves your development team time, it may appear that you, the marketer, will be required to invest additional time. However, the opposite is true. Indeed, by implementing a CEP, the time required to build a destination can be reduced from days or weeks to minutes. Literally. You are not responsible for logistics or development; you simply pull it together quickly and push it out the door.

By utilizing a CEP, you can increase your agility, eliminate unnecessary requests from your development team, and save everyone a lot of time. You’ll work more efficiently, generate more leads, and free up time for strategic marketing work rather than purely execution. But perhaps the most important benefit is that you’ll earn your audience’s trust by providing them with the content they need when they need it and when they expect it. That is priceless in today’s purchasing environment.

Recent research shows that marketers are under increasing pressure to increase revenue.

The CMO Council found that marketers now account for 44% of company revenue, up from 10% in the early 2000s. Nine out of ten survey respondents expect revenue growth this year, and 63 percent say they and their marketing teams are under intense pressure to meet revenue targets.

Recent research shows that most marketers are still using marketing communication tactics to drive growth.

More than 80% of respondents to The CMO Survey in February 2020 said marketing plays a leading role in their organization in marketing communication activities like brand building, digital marketing, advertising and social media. But fewer than four out of ten respondents said marketing drives many other activities that impact revenue growth, such as market selection and entry strategies.

Why Marketing Expertise is Needed

Marketing communications are clearly important, but they aren’t enough to maximize revenue growth. Marketing leaders must develop deep market expertise to effectively identify and exploit all available growth opportunities.

Understanding the economic and competitive characteristics of the entire market in which a company operates, including segments not currently targeted, is market expertise. Thus, market expertise requires a thorough understanding of all potential buyers, including existing customers, targeted prospects, and non-customers.

Developing market expertise is critical whenever a company needs to identify and capitalize on new or previously unrecognized revenue growth opportunities. Identifying new growth opportunities is far less likely when marketing and other business leaders fail to view their market broadly.

Jack Welch’s Lesson

An example of this is Jack Welch. When Welch became GE’s CEO in 1981, he set out to make every GE business unit the market’s #1 or #2 player. “#1, #2, fix, close or sell,” Welch’s strategy became.

This strategy worked well for a while, but eventually had unintended consequences. In the 1990s, some younger GE executives questioned Welch’s strategy, claiming it hampered company growth. They claimed some business unit leaders defined their markets too narrowly to claim #1 or #2. The narrow market definition missed growth opportunities.

Concerned, Welch refined his strategy, requiring all business unit leaders to redefine their markets to under 10% market share. This forced business unit leaders to identify previously unnoticed or ignored revenue growth opportunities.

Always Look Past the Core

Marketers naturally focus on increasing revenue from their core markets – current customer types, current products/product configurations, current geographies, etc.

Some companies have a thriving core market with plenty of room for expansion, but many operate in markets with slower growth. Also, most markets mature from “growth stage” to “mature stage,” so even healthy growth can change quickly.

When a company’s core market(s) revenue growth slows, company leaders will likely consider business expansion. Expansions “beyond the core” require careful consideration.

Marketing, in my opinion, should lead the market expansion evaluation. Marketing leaders can (or should) assess the growth potential and risks of new markets or market segments. In fact, I believe marketing leaders should always be evaluating potential expansion moves to provide other senior company leaders with strategic growth options.