For the last several weeks we’ve talked about B2B organizations with varying levels of marketing sophistication when it comes to gaining customer insights, understanding and responding to these customers.
With three levels introduced so far, this week we profile the most sophisticated of the four different types of organizations plotted on the Digital Marketing Roadmap. This is the Connected marketer, a company that has built a strong connection with its customers in terms of both understanding them and responding to their needs and interests effectively.
Connected Marketers have tapped into a number of marketing realities that give them a direct line to their customers. Like Aligned Marketers, Connected organizations can coordinate their marketing insights and messaging across channels. But, these organizations now view marketing as the core driver of growth. Because of this mentality, Connected organizations use a variety of data-driven testing tools to enrich their insights for the entire buying experience.
Marketing Growth Strategies for the Connected Marketer
Specifically, Connected organizations are able to integrate their customer insights with data-rich tools like e-commerce marketing, predictive and sales analytics tools. This means they understand what they are considering and or buying and moving them through an appropriate purchase channel.
At the same time, Connected organizations use their deep pool of insights about each customer to make the buying experience not only seamless, but also empowering. With e-commerce marketing, organizations can build loyalty from customers and build demand for additional products.
Another source of customer insights for Connected marketers is predictive analytics or predictive marketing. According to CRM platform Salesforce, predictive marketing uses data science to accurately predict which marketing actions and strategies are the most likely to succeed. These organizations effectively know what their customers are going to buy. And they have integrated these customer predictions into the organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and operational systems.
The predictive solutions and insights come from techniques and platforms providing statistics, modeling, and artificial intelligence about customers that are able to analyze current data to make predictions about what customers will do in the future. In this way, customer insights, combined with predictions about buyer behaviors, are able to drive proactive strategy decisions for the organization. Operating budgets are correlated with demand creation, based on the data from predictive analytics.
Connected organizations use a number of operational tools to keep the buying experience aligned with customers. Sales automation enablement and intelligence, for example, can keep the buying experience seamless for customers. And data science shows these organizations where there is room for improvement.
What’s next for the Connected Marketer? Going forward, the Connected marketer must always be prepared to respond to the new customer realities that inevitably arise, and that will eventually change many of the company’s original assumptions about its customers and their buying behaviors.
For more details on the complete Digital Marketing Roadmap and the marketing growth strategies and skills marketers need to advance, contact us.