What's the difference between marketing and almost any other profession? Marketing is the only profession in the world where you can have a 98% failure rate and be considered successful. The old world of marketing is based on impressions. Impressions drive brand recognition, they drive sales and they drive revenues.
The world has dramatically changed with the entire digital marketing landscape. In the old days, you would have an ad campaign, an email campaign, then grow through organic SEO. The challenge today is that the $0.20 keyword now costs $10 and the competition for those keywords and SEO is fiercer than ever.
Every blog article you visit has a pop-up in your face asking for your email so they can add you to a useless drip marketing campaign to send you information that you weren't searching for exactly when you don't need it. Even worse are the email paywall white papers where are you are required to provide your email in exchange for their hopefully brilliant and riveting information.
And now the latest generation of pop ups attack your Facebook using sales Bots who instant message you with their brilliant call-to-action or with a dozen LinkedIn emails per day from strangers connecting to you in the hopes to sell you something.
The problem with all of these techniques is that every customer is jammed into a one-size-fits-all box. Marketers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to create an email campaign targeted for everyone or creating the chatbot disturbing you while you're trying to message with your friend.
I'm personally shocked by the number of cold emails that I get that have done 0 research on me or my company. It's just a new form of cold-calling, except that you don't have to pick up the phone.
Now that it's 2019 it's a new year and we need to market using next generation tools and technologies. The old generation of tools is getting more obsolete and ineffective in a world where it’s harder and harder to engage your customers.
Step One: True Customer Segmentation
Many marketers create a customer archetype to get a clear understanding of who their customer is, however, how many marketers slice and dice the attributes of that archetype and then match that up to their true customer demographics. Today it's easier than ever to get detailed insights about your customers whether you are a B2B or B2C company. True customer segmentation identifies the common attributes of converted customers and then identifies what attributes commonly predict conversion. if you knew that your customer archetype Julie was a married mother with two kids with an annual household income of over $60,000 and volunteered at church, and then you knew that 60% of your customers had the same demographics as Julie, you might market to Julie in a better and smarter way. With machine learning algorithms, it's easy to calculate and predict what customer attributes correlate to conversion. It's easier to identify better Facebook look-alike campaigns and it's easier to identify other non-traditional marketing campaigns that may have a better chance of success.
Step 2: Laser-Focused Intelligent Campaigns
We start with data with everything that we do. we have a list of over 64 million companies that we could potentially target, however, that’s not an amazing way to build a relationship. For the companies that we target, we source data from four different databases to perform in-depth intelligence about the company to ensure that we are a good fit. Since our solution Works across multiple Industries and multiple verticals and multiple departments our focus is to target the departments and companies that have a true need for our solution. We use the same technologies as everyone else to reach these customers including advertising, email campaigns, social media posts, and SEO targeted blog posts, but because of our focus on intelligence in our sales process, we can actually recommend the best solutions that help that company improve their marketing results based on their current infrastructure, current marketing focus, current marketing spend and competition in the marketplace. It's true that you have to purchase the data to become intelligent, however, the price for ignorance is too high to ignore and becoming increasingly burdensome for the small business.
Step 3: Semi-Customized Engagement
What if we acted like there wasn't a one-size-fits-all solution that addressed everyone's concerns who might be your potential customer. what if we understood our customer archetypes (and there's definitely more than one) and then understood their purchasing behavior and the information and engagement that they needed in order to make a buying decision.
What if with this data we could create highly targeted email campaigns, retargeting campaigns, and onboarding campaigns that addressed 90% of the objections for that archetype.
Most companies guess at this and every company has access to the data to know the answer but today it's just not easy to access that data, mine it for its wealth of knowledge and then integrate those insights into the entire sales funnel. What if you could detect that within the first 10 minutes using your app that they received in error and abandoned, never to return. What if you could detect that there were friction points during onboarding and that 40% of your customers abandoned during those points. What if you could detect upsell opportunities to specific demographic segments to increase top-line revenues and deepen the relationship. Every company has access to all of this information but 99% of companies choose never to look at it and act on it.
I'm shocked at the number of companies who asked me for feedback about their product or service and when I tell them it's terrible and I hate their product that I never hear from them again I'm sure the data is stored in the bowels of some email management campaign that no one ever looks at.
I think the problem is that historically good enough has been good enough but today we live in a new century and in a new time when competition is getting more and more fierce. Personalization is the way to reach through the clutter and noise of the the day-to-day world and get your message heard by the customers who need you.
Step 4: Next Generation Marketing Automation
Historically marketing automation has meant one or two things, the first an automated email campaign sent when you subscribe to a newsletter, sign up for a free trial, sign up for a white paper and then you are inserted into a choreographed email sequence designed to engage you and remind you of your new relationship. The second generation of marketing automation focused on workflow processes and different email campaigns if you happened to open and engage with the email. An email campaign is not marketing automation. In technology circles, it's not automation at all.
The true state of marketing automation is really end-to-end business automation and the tools that exist today are better than ever to create automated processes across all of your technology solutions and integrate seamlessly into your work flows.
The next generation of marketing automation starts what the lead management process. Creating lists of Highly targeted companies or customers or customer segments that can be identified and measured for cost per customer acquisition. The next generation of marketing automation creates semi personalized campaigns using data-driven analytics. The next generation of marketing automation engages with the customer the entire life cycle, not just the beginning. The next generation of marketing automation proactively answers customer issues without the customer needing to submit a support ticket.
We use robotic process automation (RPA) to create powerful Bots that assist our team through the entire customer journey. We have a BOT-first mentality when it comes to employees. The more Bots we create, the more scalable our company is. Bots can work 24×7 without complaining, without demanding overtime, they do exactly what we say, and are 100% productive. We integrate both data and artificial intelligence into our processes to enable our Bots to learn over time and make consistently good decisions.
We believe good marketing leverages artificial intelligence and data to analyze and understand customer behavior, target's the right customers, engages them with high-converting semi-custom campaigns designed for their persona, and automate these processes through the entire customer journey.
We aren't any bigger than most seed-stage startups but our robot army and intelligent campaigns make us competitive with companies 10X our size and funding. Our mission is to enable companies of any size to be able to leverage the next generation technologies to compete. Our platform is open source (also known as free) so that companies who want to invest and grow have the ability without hiring a six-figure data scientist and RPA developer.
We are bringing the Next Generation of AI-driven marketing analytics and automation to companies of any size. To sign up as A beta customer please visit us at https://askatlas.ai?utm_source=LI&utm_term
