Where do you get fresh campaign ideas? Today marketing is tricky. Conventional universal manuals and textbooks seem useless while there is too many valuable content on the web to read it all, not to mention that you can also stumble upon many medium-quality, unoriginal and useless pieces. For all of you who search for some inspiration, we listed 6 best practices recommended by marketing experts in 2015. Read and feel the cool breeze of inspiration!
1. Streamline lead generation and nurturing
Although lead generation and nurturing should be at the core of your marketing actions, they’re also the most tedious and mundane if not automated. For many specialists, these operations consume too much time.
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It can be streamlined. Landing page creation, contact forms and nurturing drip campaigns – most of these can be streamlined using the right software.
As Robert Sofia argues, choosing and implementing marketing technology tool is essential. Marketing Automation market is so wide that each business can find a perfect software.
2. Balance the Art, the Heart, and the Science
Contemporary marketing combines various disciplines, from Big Data analytics to visual arts. Hence, marketers must juggle with diverse competencies and avoid taking sides. If you focus on creating rules of automation only, or dedicate all your energy to creative work, such actions will probably backfire. We have a lot of tools, but marketing technology is a blessing and a curse: it helps us work more efficiently, but for some it became not a mean to an end, but and an end itself. So they can’t see anything behind analytics and keep on setting new automated processes without thinking about real customers.
Katie Martell says that marketing consists of 3 key components: art, heart and head, or creativity, empathy, and science.
3. Tell Stories
Storytelling is a bit of a well-worn term, so we won’t give you general tips, but share one moving example. Patagonia helps travelers and artists produce their films. Below you can watch a history of an unusual friendship and passion for exploring, narrated by a very special dog.
Elle Ossello, who praised that campaign, says: “Patagonia enables artists pursuing their fiery passions to be heard, to advocate positive social and environmental messaging and to do it in a beautiful way. People trust these motives and are moved by them. Ipso facto, they trust Patagonia as a company and believe in the product”.
Joy Howard, the new Vice President of Global Marketing for Patagonia as of 2013 is a lady making a real difference in brand identity. Her sketched-out mantra: fewer ideas make a greater impact.
4. Keep it simple
Brandon Lewin tells an inspiring story of his client, leather journals, and accessories craftsman. He wanted to grow his email list, but couldn’t find a way. After many futile attempts, they decided to send a message to existing customers asking to promote free journal offer to their friends and family– at it worked! It also raised customer engagement in the brand.
As Lewin points out, marketers tend to over-complicate their actions and try to build sophisticated campaigns, while simpler solutions tend to be more effective.
5. Design Referal Program
That history teaches us how powerful customer recommendations are. You can benefit from your existing customers and use them as a base for your further marketing actions
As 2014, study shows, 85% of small business get new customers through the word of mouth. Now it’s easy to create referral program, for example using Referral Rock.
6. Go Visual
When it comes to content consumption, consumers prefer visual materials: images, infographic, and video.
According to CMO Council survey, 2/3 of American marketers claim that visual content is essential in their communication. They also stressed the role of video. In Ascend2 survey from May, 50% of respondents declared that video drives the best results but is also the most difficult to produce.
Data + emotions
In this year, experts paid attention to the ability to use marketing technology to engage consumers in emotional dialogue. Simplicity still wins.
And which campaign made the biggest impression on you?
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