The Informed Marketer, as we covered last week, already has a solid grasp of their customers. And if they realize what’s to gain by learning more about their customer journey using accelerated business results, they’re likely to advance to the next stage of marketing sophistication: the Aligned Marketer.
This type of organization, represented in the third milepost of the Digital Marketing Roadmap, has a better handle on how to integrate its marketing tools with specific groups of customers and is able to deliver a consistent and relevant message to each group of customers across all the channels the marketer uses.
For example, should a customer visit with a rep or come to a store location but not make a purchase, the company records that information along with the customer’s contact details. Then the organization can promptly reach out to that customer with a promotional email offer, asking the customer about their concerns. In this way the marketer is able to coordinate marketing insights and messaging across channels, as they use data analytics and visualization tools, such as Tableau.
The marketing insights that aligned marketers gain from these tactics are weighty: They can be used to support Account Based Marketing (ABM), Inbound Marketing and customer relationship management tools. This provides a natural progression for these organizations to use marketing automation tools to distribute relevant content seamlessly. Aligned marketers also use highly personalized marketing messaging and integrate content across channels. And marketing content performance is tracked dynamically, with analytics used to make improvements.
In many ways, the rest of the organization has aligned itself with these efforts too. Sales and marketing teams are on the same page when it comes to managing leads, and customer insights are used to help develop operations budgets.
Once these goals are accomplished, a next logical step for the informed marketer is focusing on differentiated high value content and more technology infrastructure to inform and improve outcomes. This will help them to get closer with customers, and to continue finding and telling success stories about how they’re unique in the marketplace.
Marketing Resources for the Aligned Marketer
When it comes to technology tools, two specific resources that come to mind for Aligned marketers are e-commerce and the martech stack.
The Marketing Technology Stack. Often depicted as a funnel-shaped diagram, the marketing technology stack is a way for marketers to organize and integrate the martech and salestech tools they’re using to manage customer interactions, customer insights, and sales management tasks. The idea is to select a range of marketing tools that can be “stacked,” so that data from one tool effectively informs processes in another.
James Thomas, CMO of marketing tech startup firm Allocadia, describes the marketing stack to Ad Age as “a number of different technologies from a number of different companies that’s meant to attract and retain customers in the most efficient way possible.”
E-commerce. Another frontier for aligned marketers is the strategy and implementation of e-commerce (electronic commerce) tools, which will allow them to conduct business electronically, over the internet. Having these capabilities may help them to reduce sales and distribution costs while also meeting the needs of an increasing number of customers who prefer to make their purchases this way, in contrast to more traditional modes of B2B buying.
While the aligned marketer certainly is sophisticated as marketers go, there’s one additional group of organizations that are firing on all cylinders when it comes to collecting and using customer insights. These Connected Marketers as we call them, will be profiled in next week’s blog.
Until then, for more on valuable tools like the marketing technology stack and how to build one, don’t hesitate to reach out.