The marketing department relevance within the organization is evolving and growing with the digital era in many positive ways. The image of the marketing department has not been the best in many organizations, for example, how many times different functions of the organization have mentioned phrases like, marketing expenses are excessive, they can not measure the return on investment, there are no metrics or results that are tangible to see the effect of what they are doing, nobody really knows what they do in marketing or the marketing team only has fun. However that has dramatically changed in the past years, due to the amount of new technologies and software, that has allow marketing managers to have more information, do more analysis, have more control and more numbers regarding where exactly customers are coming from and being engaged in any part of the funnel or journey, what they are experiencing and more importantly for every company in every industry, the bigger influence and impact on sales, growth and consumer retention currently being created for the organization.
Today there are marketing automation tools that provide the marketing department with the right tools to have the ability to track any piece of communication or campaign and measure the reach, impact, engage, clicks, leads and sales to then have the ROI from that action, how many sales are being generated from that visual, article, blog or piece of communication. Moreover, if we are able to track where consumers are coming from and store that data, with that information we are able to understand the personal preference of that consumer, level of engagement they have with your organization, what is it that they are consuming in our web, products, service, doubts, questions or any interaction that might have had during consumers life cycle.
If we take a look at how the funnel or consumer journey has changed or potentially could be manage today from marketing we can see something like the following picture.
The evolution has many positive impacts in the organization and specially for entrepreneurs. To start consumers are already 70% informed and committed of what they want, before setting a foot on any store. However, there is a business model evolution or a small business design, that is required for this to be successful. To start, the new organization could be centralizing messages based on what consumers are looking for on the web, develop messages that answer their doubts or information required by consumers and once you understand the needs you can develop pieces of communication fast enough, instead of having many people delivering different messages as they believe is the right way, minimizing training, turnover impact and up to date to the requirements in real time. Moreover, this allow the products or brands to create a better positioning in the consumers mind, deliver the information that consumers are looking for and having personalized campaigns. If you add the mobile tools available today, you can have a small business owner or entrepreneurs answering immediately to consumers questions they might have on their web site, do modifications to the site and leverage sales and service in real time and avoid competitors to steal your consumers.
There are many tools available for small business, mid size organizations and big corporations where the marketing responsible can develop journeys and allow the system or software do most of the work. Take a look at the following example, where you can see how someone in marketing will be creating a workflow of activities depending the inflow and actions of consumers for each activity and be able to measure them to take actions. For example, if your consumer found you on Google, click on your website, look at 3 pages, you can make a pop up for further information, ask for their personal data to send email. If they do you can set the system to wait for 3hrs, 3 days or you set the time to send the email, evaluate the open ratio, click through, what activity they do and if they do not to anything also be able to send them more information or additional activity like re-marketing, social media or any other action that is important for your customer.
If you are able to do all the activities mention above and many more, and have a daily evaluation and measure the impact of each of your establish actions, can you imagine the impact you can have at your fingertips or your computer?. If you are a small business owner, you can look like a big corporation and have faster response than many organizations. But the key question is how many managers are open to challenge the business model they have in their organizations and prepare for the future before is too late.
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