5 Tips to Improve Marketing Performance

Were you able to decompress over the holidays to refresh and recharge for the new year? As Scott Rayden, chief revenue officer for 3Q Digital, recently said, “The marketing world we live in today is fast paced and complex. It’s easy for us to get caught up in the details and day-to-day of our work and forget to come up for air to focus on our team’s growth and our own individual growth.”

Over the break, I spent time reading how marketers can continue to grow. These articles provide five tips CMOs can use to improve marketing performance and achieve greater success in the year ahead.

Stop Chasing Bad Data

“Decisions based on data-driven insights result in 23 times greater likelihood of customer acquisition, six times greater likelihood of customer retention, and 19 times greater likelihood of profitability, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. ‘With numbers like those, how can CMOs not invest in orchestrating the right group of people and implement technologies that, together, will transform their organization into a data-driven enterprise?’ said open-source software maker Talend’s CMO Ashley Stirrup, who advises appointing an individual to oversee marketing data efforts.” – CMO

Implement Sophisticated Data Analysis Tools

“In 2016, Business Intelligence (BI) tools will come to maturity, and more will be developed that both aggregate and analyze the data available. This will lift a weight off many businesses and marketers who need just the essential information about their customers to make real-time decisions about their marketing strategies. These more sophisticated tools will give marketers all the details they need to quickly customize their marketing for different target audiences.” – Entrepreneur

Use Technology for Customer-Centricity

“Many companies collect and store vast amounts of customer data, but it’s fragmented—stored in discrete, application-specific silos that prevent a full understanding of each customer. By freeing this data—and merging it with additional data from external sources—to better understand and appeal to customers at the individual level, companies are able to deliver more personalized service.” – Business2Community

Turn Insights into a Competitive Advantage

“How well do you truly know your digital customers? Are you using new tools, digital datasets and technologies to learn more? Are you able to incorporate data sets from the heart of your core business into how you understand your consumers and assess your marketing investments? Facebook runs a program where they throttle their office internet speed on Tuesdays so that their engineers can better appreciate what consumers in developing markets have to deal with. Are you radical enough in how you’re learning about your customers the way Facebook is?” – Ad Age

Be Change Agents

“Despite changes and challenges, it was universal that the marketers that were diving head-first into a Marketing First mindset were the ones who were seeing the best results and making the most waves. This won’t happen for all us overnight — it takes a lot of hard work and planning — but if we invest now, and if we commit to drive just one of these lessons in 2016, the results will be worth it.” – Marketing Land

Read more:

• Urgent Changes to Improve Your Marketing Today