Marketing - a fractured landscape with ROI challenges

Today’s marketing landscape is anything but unified. As a result, brands face a variety of critical marketing challenges.

1. The multi-channel challenge

Brands must get the attention of customers that are becoming increasingly fickle, and increasingly harder to pinpoint. To educate themselves on their next purchases, customers use multiple channels, including online search, various social channels, chat, and mobile (among others). As a result, brands need to have multi-channel coverage to meet their customers where they live.

Covering multiple channels is easier said than done. Deploying multi-channel marketing programs at scale, for audiences of thousands, if not millions, is impossible to manage manually. Marketers are turning to larger-scale process automation to orchestrate multi-channel campaigns. Modern automation platforms can unite marketing software tools among email, social, chat, mobile, and other channels for this exact purpose. While the challenge is steep, the value is proven: engagement and purchase rates have been shown to increase 250% with a multi-channel marketing strategy.

Marketers using 3+ channels drive 250% higher engagement and purchase rates. Image courtesy ClickZ.

Learn how to drive multi-channel marketing with the power of automation:

• BLOG: How to automate the multi-channel message platform Iterable
• ON-DEMAND WEBINAR: The Future of Marketing Automation

2. The context challenge: personalization

Conventional wisdom suggests that marketing and advertising of any kind aren’t welcome for most buyers. Research indicates that 41% of users find digital ads to be too aggressive, and 71% find them to be too intrusive. So why do 80% of users prefer those “intrusive” ads to be tailored to their location?

The not-so-secret fact is that buyers don't necessarily mind marketing messages, as long as they are relevant. As a result, leading brands are investing in the power of personalization. It's why 65% of business buyers (and 50% of online shoppers) will switch brands if they don't receive a personalized experience. However, personalizing messaging at scale for thousands, if not millions of prospects, is impossible to handle manually. Smart marketers are turning to automation to hyper-personalize their marketing messages to multiple audience segments at various buying stages and in various roles for different personas.

65% of business buyers will switch brands if vendors don’t personalize communications. Image courtesy Salesforce State of Marketing.

Learn more about how to hyper-personalize marketing with automation:

• BLOG: Personalize emails with the Google search terms used to find you
• CUSTOMER STORY: Cloud leader DigitalOcean hyper-personalizes marketing
• CUSTOMER STORY: New Relic drives higher engagement with personalization
• ON-DEMAND DEMO VIDEO: Create a hyper-personalized email platform
• WEBINAR: Learn how to hyper-personalize messaging at scale

3. The ROI challenge

While the face of marketing continually changes, marketers must continually evolve, change tactics, and experiment with new strategies, campaigns, and technology. In plain English, this means that marketers need to continue to spend, spend, spend. And the highest expense for any marketing team is its technology, with MarTech clocking in at 29% of total marketing budgets. However, overall marketing budgets have been contracting for years. Now, marketers are under increasing pressure to justify their budgets.

Successfully justifying marketing spend arguably comes down to two primary needs. First, marketers need clear visibility into the performance of their campaigns with metrics for every channel (and analytics to visualize total performance). Second, they need to ensure they have a strategy that maximizes their return on investment (ROI). The best place to start is their biggest-ticket item: the list of software applications in their MarTech stack.

Marketing budgets as a percentage of total company revenue continue to contract. Image courtesy Gartner.

Learn more about how to get performance visibility and justify your marketing budget:

• BLOG: How to automate marketing analytics
• IN-DEPTH BLUEPRINT: Automate your marketing metrics in 4 simple steps
• BLOG: How to justify your marketing budget with automation
• WORKSHEET: Make a business case to add automation to your MarTech stack
• GUIDE: How to automate marketing metrics + analytics

4. Show me automation for marketing in action!

If you’re ready to see how automation can help marketers grow engagement and drive ROI, join a weekly group demo every Thursday at 10am PT. These demos cover specific, actionable use cases that revenue and operations professionals use every day. Learn how to drive more leads and revenue, take full ownership of their data, save hundreds of hours per year, and eliminate manual errors. Register now.