Today’s on-demand economy has brands bending over backward to deliver products, support, and services to consumers at lightning speeds.
As consumers, this world is fun to play in — we get what we want when we want it. As marketers, however, keeping up with consumers in real-time and adapting on the fly often feels impossible. How do you deliver more, faster without burning you and your team out? How do you stay one step ahead of your audience in a way that still delivers high quality, effective results?
To deliver on consumer needs and meet today’s increasingly high consumer expectations, you need to work smarter, not harder.
And while marketing automation tools can offer huge productivity gains, And marketing automation tools, which offer huge productivity gains, can certainly help. Below, 15 marketing experts share their secrets for maximizing their marketing productivity, strategies, and technology stack without working 24/7 so you can do the same.
As the former Chief Growth Officer for marketing automation powerhouse, Marketo, Jill Rowley has plenty of insight into how marketers can maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns and streamline operations. Today, she maintains a successful career as a GTM advisor, focused on the changing B2B buying environment and what revenue teams need to do to evolve their culture, skills, processes, data, and tools.
What’s Jill’s marketing productivity secret? Collaboration.
“We just need to work together. Nothing, no acronym or fad, will work in a silo.
“Instead of just randomly serving the world, you need to be very strategic about serving a certain set of accounts. ‘You’ means sales and marketing and even customer success. Yes, and also your executive team.”
Read more from Jill with her article: Drunk on Inbound, and the Hangover Is Severe
What’s Jenn’s marketing productivity secret? Always set an objective first.
“Figure out what you want to report on before setting up your programs. Planning ahead adds extra time to the front of your campaign process, but it’s well worth it when your CEO comes to you at the end of a quarter asking for a report on ‘how marketing is doing’ and you can actually present him/her with data.”
What’s Joe’s marketing productivity secret? Automated list management.
“In Marketing Automation, you need to be able to manage your deliverability rates for your marketing emails. Luckily, you can set up an operational program in Marketo that manages bounces, and will mark them as invalid/suspended records in your instance so you don’t keep sending emails to the twisting nether.”
What’s Caitlin’s marketing productivity secret? Get the right integrations.
“Quality marketing automation takes work, and it’s well worth your effort in the end. It’s easy to assume marketing automation is ‘easy’ since you can auto-schedule your content for the future, but quality automation isn’t finished once you send it. You don’t have the ability to sit back and relax because marketing automation is only a small piece of a much larger strategy. How you use your MA software is dependent on the holistic integrations of your multi-channel customer experience.”
What’s Jenna’s marketing productivity secret? Automate RSS emails.
“FeedOtter takes out the manual work of creating blog digests and RSS emails. Simply tell FeedOtter when to send your RSS email, schedule a daily, weekly, or monthly digest or send blog posts and content to subscribers as they are published in real-time. They even have a library of responsive, visually appealing templates to make your RSS email look great or you can choose to upload you own.”
What’s Josh’s marketing productivity secret? Assess and optimize your martech stack.
“A successful martech stack allows you to automate marketing and sales business processes in a way that you can efficiently report on the funnel and make future decisions on budget allocation. To evaluate if your stack needs help, you need to ask the right questions, add/remove the right tools, and involve the right teams.”
What’s Meagan’s marketing productivity secret? Prioritize tactics with attribution.
“Marketers that use marketing technology and attribution see a 2.8x ROI. Marketing attribution allows you to see what’s working and what’s not.”
What’s Steve’s marketing productivity secret? Strategy sets you up for success.
“Before getting started with marketing automation, it is important to have a great content strategy already in place. Automation will help you deliver content faster and more efficiently to the right people. That’s awesome if you have great content. If your content sucks, marketing automation will also expose it to more people, more quickly.”
What’s Jon’s marketing productivity secret? Maximize your return with a targeted account-based marketing strategy.
“Just like mapping out your road trip, your journey to a successful account-based strategy depends on your ability to map out your list of target accounts correctly. After all, the whole point of account-based marketing is to focus your efforts on high-value accounts that have the greatest revenue potential. Get this right, and you’ll maximize your return. Get it wrong, and you’ll either miss major opportunities, waste resources on the wrong account, or both.”
What’s Ian’s marketing productivity secret? Take advantage of Facebook custom audiences.
“Find a tool that supports automatic creation of Facebook custom audiences that you can target. Imagine if you could automatically create an audience of people who visited your checkout page but didn’t buy so you can target them with the right advertisements.”
What’s Chad’s marketing productivity secret? Artificial intelligence.
“Marketers can breakthrough the glutton of noise online by using the latest AI technology to scale amplification across all of the appropriate native and social channels.”
What’s Ned’s marketing productivity secret? Model your current customers.
“Generating quality leads isn’t easy. It’s hard. Yet, there are proven lead gen methodologies that work better than others and are worthy of your time. One of these is modeling your best customers. The premise behind this lead gen strategy is simple; your best leads will look like your best customers. Put another way, those most likely to buy your product in the future look like those who currently buy your product in the present. And the way to identify those leads is to model your current customers.”
What’s Oli’s marketing productivity secret? Use persuasive design.
“In a perfect world, conversions would flow like fresh spring water. But in real life, you need to guide your visitors toward a single call to action with a combination of persuasive design and psychological triggers. Using the principles of Conversion-Centered Design (CCD), you can create create — and optimize for — delightful, high-converting marketing campaigns.”
What’s Stewart’s marketing productivity secret? Nurture your leads.
“Lead nurturing is a powerful tool that is relevant and necessary for every type of contact made via your lead generation efforts. If you send the right type of information to the right segments of contacts – regularly, consistently and with brand continuity – lead nurturing can be the difference between making your targets and falling well short of the mark.”
What’s Chad’s marketing productivity secret? Don’t become a campaign workhorse.
“Email marketers send a lot of campaigns. It can seem like that’s the job of an email marketer: to send campaigns and maximize their value. However, looking at it this way can cause us to send campaigns that decrease response in the future and to avoid sending campaigns that increase response in the future.”
Marketing productivity isn’t strictly about increasing volume (i.e. producing more campaigns in less time).
Productivity is about generating greater results using the same amount of time, effort, and resources. From leveraging the right tools to carefully thinking over your approach, the 15 marketing productivity secrets in this article can help you optimize your approach and keep up with your audience in today’s rapidly changing landscape.
