Time to do everything seems to be in short supply, and we’re all exhausted. We’ve been adapting to working from home, dealing with the pandemic, facing economic uncertainty, and now absorbing and responding to the consequences of systemic racism shaking our assumptions loose.
But we still need to do our best work, and as always, that takes time. We still need to look at our results and take action.
Take the time to look at everything your automated marketing technology gives you. We marketers have more marketing tools than ever that help us “see” what our target audience is doing. Those marketing tools are a heavy, if necessary expense – and especially heavy if we aren’t looking carefully and we miss the depth of meaning in what we see. This happens all too often because the full potential of the tool is ignored. So, what is it we’re missing?
In three words, individual response data. Of course, marketers don’t need to know every single facet of the data, but the result of not paying attention to the detailed individual response is a loss of real value to your sales teams. This wastes half the money you spend on the marketing automation system.
Go beyond looking at just the open rate. Take the time to drill down to the individual data that sales would use. When you review the data relevant to your work, you can ask for the level of information that connects individual results to sales potential. It’s there, readily available, and the sales team can use it to good effect, one-on-one. If you don’t take the time for this, your marketing spend is lost – even if the monthly stats are good results for your team. Unless we help sales see into that data, they can’t turn the results into actionable items. The full potential of expensive technology is of next to no use.
Asking for that level of reporting gives two pictures from your expensive marketing automation system. The herd data—your interest—is only giving you half your money’s worth. If you stop there, rather than saving time, you are abandoning a huge portion of the individuals’ actionable data.
In her latest LinkedIn article, Amanda shares great examples of taking a deeper dive into certain tools’ data to recognize individual behavior rather than only examining the whole.
Make your data actionable. Make use of the tools you have to get a full picture of what your customers are doing as they make their way through the sales funnel.
