It’s no secret that understanding exactly who your customers are, including how and when they interact with your brand, is the most critical aspect of your business. Being present during the crucial touchpoints of a customer experience is rapidly becoming table stakes to acquiring and engaging your target market.

Having the necessary data at your fingertips to know exactly when to be present during your customer’s experience can be a bit of a mystery.

What remains elusive to many organizations is how to actually go about connecting data from one customer interaction, as recorded by individual platforms, to one another. Whether B2B or B2C, capturing and integrating customer touchpoint data from content management systems, customer relationship management systems (CRM), enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data management platforms, customer data platforms, marketing automation platforms, email, web analytics, mobile apps, loyalty programs, order management systems – the list goes on and on – can be downright daunting.

Customer data integration isn’t just critical now. According to a McKinsey study, integrating legacy systems with new marketing technology in a cost-effective way, while simultaneously developing a comprehensive and holistic view of the customer, will be one of the most challenging tasks companies will face.

Interestingly, we’re seeing a general reluctance to undertake this seemingly massive effort by much of the market, largely out of anxiety over the perceived scale, scope, and cost. Many organizations create an artificial delay in their digital transformation as a result of their struggle to understand how to begin this process.

In this post, we’ll offer a bit of a different approach for those organizations without the significant budget and resources required to tackle a time-consuming and expensive holistic data integration. It flows right along with our Perficient Digital motto of “Think Big. Start Small. Act Fast.” When appropriate, instead of attempting to architect a completely new data model, we encourage some of our clients to consider a different approach. Some examples of this perspective include:

Business Prioritization

We highly encourage our clients to use a business-outcome lens to evaluate each use-case. Every potential integration point should be evaluated by specific business cases and the greatest likely business impact given the least relative effort.

For example, after understanding your top customer conversion point is via email, and realizing you need additional account information to segment and feed your email platform, integrating your CRM with your email/marketing automation platform might be the best place to start.

A mobile app that isn’t doing so well? Maybe move that integration to lower on the list.

Biting off key integration points, while keeping one eye on the total customer journey, is a great place to start.
Most importantly, this approach keeps the focus on how the customer’s interaction is actually impacting the business, followed by the actual data integration needed to make it happen, not the other way around.

Actionable Data

Why connect data points without a clear plan for how to use said data? Whenever possible, there should be a single source of actionable data, and a customer data platform (CDP) or data management platform (DMP) are really good options. You don’t have to have everything connected right away, but getting a solid CDP stood up allows you to start funneling key data into a single source, which is solely designed to help you start making customer-impactful use of the data.

Once you have a data hub that is generating action, it’s also much easier to keep prioritizing future integration points.
This is becoming increasingly critical as a post-GDPR world continues to highlight the need for actual first-party, first-person data.

Constant Measurement

It might seem obvious that integrating data points is all about measuring the success of various customer touchpoints, however, we espouse measuring the measuring when it comes to data integration. Each new data integration provides a more holistic and comprehensive view of the customer, and each addition adds to the amount and type of usable data. Establishing baselines for current measurement, as well as future state objectives, is key prior to any kind of data integration to monitor multi-stage customer interaction and validate/adjust previous measurement models for each platform.

For example, a previous baseline/success for top-of-funnel media might be drastically different if a CDP is integrated with Adobe Marketing Cloud or another ad server. Suddenly geo-targeting and look-alike campaigns based on transactional data completely up-end your previous brand awareness and consideration metrics.

Make sure you have created measurement plans for each priority business case prior to data integration.

Data integration might seem like a massive effort, and for many organizations it can be. But there are alternatives to a complete overhaul. Prioritizing business cases, focusing on actionable data, and measuring everything as you go are valuable possibilities to get you started.

Your most valuable customers are the ones who keep coming back. How can you keep customers engaged enough to choose you again? How easily can your customers reorder or get practical information and education (guidelines) about products? Do you have dedicated client applications aimed at keeping them updated with useful information such as shipping status and new product updates? Make the following considerations about your B2B customer retention efforts.

Don’t hand customers off to sales and walk away

You’ve put in the work, won some new business and watched that first sale come through. Time to pass everything along to sales and customer service, right? Wrong. Don’t think that marketing’s role is done after the first sale – you’ll be missing out on targeting an already captive audience.

Don’t reduce attention to customers once they’ve purchased

It’s commonplace to think that once you acquire and convert a customer, you can spend less time worrying about them. Don’t let up on the gas just because someone purchased. Not focusing even more attention on your top customers will mean massive missed revenue opportunities.

Do integrate marketing and content with sales to meet customer needs

B2B customer retention starts with seamless data integration. Your email service provider and campaign management platform needs to be integrated with your enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, content management system – the works. If your entire team, including marketing, sales, customer service, and executives can’t see what’s actually happening at every stage of the customer journey, no one is going to know who’s responsible, or where and when value is being driven. Do make sure that marketing and sales stay connected at the hip long after the initial transaction, so they can continue to provide value and imbue trust – ultimately turning your customer into a brand advocate and repeat purchaser.

Do put more effort into current customers than the leads you don’t know or haven’t sold to

The best customer is the one who’s already purchased from you. The old adage, “Spend 80% of your time on the top 20% of your customers,” is true for a reason. The amount of data and experience you have with a current customer is typically much more detailed than with an unknown user. Learn from what worked, cater to the known customer needs, and do everything you can to “land and expand” by building trust, loyalty, and ever-maturing personalized experiences. You’ll gain more revenue and future business focusing on B2B customer retention than you ever will from new leads.
For more do’s and don’ts for interacting with your B2B customers, download our free guide, The Do’s and Don’ts of B2B Customer Engagement.

The work is far from over once you have someone on your site. Now is the time to provide a seamless ordering experience that keeps them coming back.
Can they configure products online? How easily can they get a quote? Is the content you’re serving up helping them when they need it while moving them closer to the sale? For B2B engagement marketing, consider the tips shared below.

Don’t lump all customers into a few generic buckets for conversion

We often see B2B clients create their primary calls to action in relation to the products or services they want to sell. But unfortunately, they don’t take into consideration the specific needs and conversion influencers of the actual customer. Don’t think that all your customers, regardless of need, will eventually funnel down through a few calls to action.

Don’t ignore the ordering process and user experience

Many times, all the effort to win a new customer goes into initial engagement and acquisition. Makes sense, right? Spend the time and money to win new business. However, the number one killer of repeat business is a clunky or awkward ordering process. Customers feel that if you didn’t take the time to create a decent ordering process, you aren’t invested in them, and they are going to react negatively. Do not ignore one of the most critical pieces of transacting with your customers.

Do develop a 360-degree view of the customer

Having a holistic view of your customer cannot be stressed enough. If you’ve already laid the groundwork for creating detailed personas, customer journey maps, and optimized customer touchpoints, then you’re already ahead of the curve. Do take that approach and apply it to all channel and transactional data for a single, complete view of how your customer is acquired and engaged from all relevant data sources. Don’t forget any loyalty programs, CRM data, acquisition cost, email interaction, or website visits. This 360-degree view will allow you to provide hyper-targeted, personalized content to significantly optimize conversion.

Do create a prioritized personalization strategy

Do prioritize your top opportunities for personalized content. Segmentation of B2B customer engagement provides the perfect opportunity for personalized product catalogs, pricing, promotions, and content. Rules-based or automated personalization is an amazing-but-intensive journey to deliver ideal content to users who are coming to expect it more and more. Instead of trying to serve up the goods to all inbound folks, (which is more B2C), focus on the personas and customer profiles that you know are most likely to adopt and convert first. Then balance that volume with frequently ordered (top-grossing) products and services for your initial personalization efforts.
For more do’s and don’ts for interacting with your B2B customers, download our free guide, The Do’s and Don’ts of B2B Customer Engagement.

This is where it all begins – the first interactions with your customer. B2B customer acquisition isn’t just about getting that first sale; it’s where you start building a relationship. That means a solid, consistent brand presence has to shine through.
Consumers are doing more research prior to purchase, so your content has to be better than the competition’s. And, your sales teams must be armed with information to do more consultative selling and anticipate customer needs.

Don’t ignore the specific consumer in the initial stages of awareness and consideration

It isn’t just tempting; it’s flat-out easier to think of your target audience – those who aren’t customers yet – in terms of only a few large audience types. For B2B lead generation, don’t create generic content and ads or you will end up spending time and money delivering irrelevant content to the wrong audience.

Don’t blast emails and hope they’re going to convert

Understanding your specific user and creating focused segmentation takes a ton of work. But creating one or two emails and thinking they will get you anywhere with your audience is a big no-no. Don’t try to save time by creating a one-size-fits-all approach to B2B customer segmentation.

Do create customer personas and journey maps

Creating personas and understanding each customer journey is key. But even more important is identifying the specific touchpoints for each customer. Knowing where and how customers are engaging with your brand and content allows you to not only be present at the right time with the right content, but also to begin creating new touchpoints for ideal engagement. This is particularly vital early in the buying process. Recent studies indicate that 67% of purchases involve the brand’s presence at the very beginning of the consideration phase. Do make sure you are engaging early in the consideration phase. Otherwise, you significantly reduce the likelihood of winning the business.

Do identify which channels work best (right time, right place, right message)

Once you’ve identified the “who,” “where,” and “what” (persona, touchpoint, content), you need to calculate the “how.” Certain marketing efforts are better suited for various stages of the buyer journey, and not all channels are equally effective from one organization or industry to the next. Do have a clear understanding of which channels work best in which scenarios, a clear measurement plan in place to gauge success, and a cross-channel strategy to seamlessly engage the customer during their journey.
For more do’s and don’ts of B2B customer acquisition, download our free guide, The Do’s and Don’ts of B2B Customer Engagement.

If your company is like most, you’re probably spending a hefty sum each year trying to earn new business and engage your customers. You definitely understand how important it is to have systems in place, like budgets, calendars, and reporting tools, that will help you get the most bang for your marketing buck.
Hopefully you also belong to the 51% of companies that have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy in place. If not, I highly recommend making that a priority for your executives and marketing team. Creating and maintaining a digital marketing strategy is crucial to ensuring your marketing efforts and dollars are reaching their full potential.

So, what should your digital marketing strategy do?

In order to guide your marketing efforts effectively and maximize the return on your time and investment, your digital marketing strategy should:
1. Drive your campaigns
Don’t spend a dime on a marketing campaign unless it ties directly back to a business goal and is measurable.
2. Connect your business goals to tactical initiatives
Hyper-target the right people with the right message at the right time, and bridge these tactics to specific goals such as “Increase check-out conversion by 15% for our top spending customers.”
3. Serve as the hub for all direct marketing channels
Channels should never operate in a silo; effectively use cross-channel, multi-channel, and omni-channel approaches.
4. Give purpose behind channel choices
Digital marketing channels help you with either acquisition, engagement, or retention, and your strategy should explain the goals for each of these channels.
5. Explain how acquisition, engagement, and retention work throughout the customer journey
When you understand where and how to interact with the right people at the right time with the right content, you can begin anticipating and exceeding their needs to solidify customer loyalty.
For more information about digital marketing strategies, why your business needs one, and how to create it, take a look at our free guide.

A digital marketing strategy is not something that you build once and then execute. In fact, it’s important to view your strategy as something to develop while things are already in motion.
You cannot shut down your website when developing a strategy because customers still need information, products/services, and support. You also can’t afford to stop spending money on acquisition efforts or time on automated marketing to retain or re-engage existing customers. You have to build your digital marketing strategy while existing digital marketing efforts continue to hum along.
The question is: how can you see the finished puzzle while still putting the pieces together?
An iterative process can make all the difference in bridging the gap between where you are today and where you want to go. By creating your strategy and implementing it iteratively, this process is not only easier but also adds value along the way.
How does iteration begin? Identify the quick wins before doing your deep data dive. You can use iterative data to continuously refine and grow your plan. Apply a process iteratively to individual channels first and then use data to optimize.
You need to know when and how to apply iteration to adjust your strategy or tactics. For example. when a campaign isn’t producing results, or you discover that one of your business goals is unattainable due to over-inflated KPIs or a saturated market.

Start with Data

Data is the “why” behind the “what.” It will inform your business goals and strategy as well as validate growth. If you have historical sales and marketing data, that’s a good starting point. And if you’re not collecting data, start now. You want to make sure that every action, engagement, and event derived from your marketing dollars is directly associated with a measurement plan and captures the necessary data to align with your business goals.
Data should be used to answer or validate an already existing KPI, assertion or question. Start with the questions, not with the data.
To get your data, you can use Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or other quantitative measurement platform. But remember, while these quantitative metrics are certainly valuable in telling us what visitors are doing, they don’t tell us too much about the “why” or “why not.” To get the full story, pair your quantitative analytics with qualitative insight to understand real users’ behavior. Use polls, surveys, heat maps, and user recordings to understand how the user how the user behaves on the site and how that behavior ties into the metrics.

Test to Inform Next Steps

Testing goes beyond A/B testing of an email campaign or performance of a landing page. It helps inform your strategy. Everything hinges on the ideal customer journey, and in order to understand what that looks like, you need to have carefully crafted personas and specific experiences for each. Inspect the elements or touchpoints along your customer journeys. Analyze the the tactics around these touch points so you understand which have worked well and why.
You want to understand conversion and engagement data to improve the user experience, and be able to manipulate calls to action and conversion opportunities in a way that will continue to increase conversion rates on your site.
The goal of all testing is to improve the customer experience. But more than anything it is to improve user conversion. The whole purpose of your site is to create an experience that enables the user to easily do exactly what they want – which is exactly the thing you want them to do.

Define Your Channel Attribution Models

In a perfect world, you would have insight into each customer journey, fully understanding why someone converted and what influenced them the most. But, at least today, that’s just not possible.
What we can do, however, is set up an attribution model, tracking as much of the journey as we can and assigning weights to the interactions we think are most important. This allows you to identify and optimize your most successful channels and, more importantly, tells you where to invest your marketing budget.
Creating an attribution model isn’t easy. It’s one of the more challenging aspects when creating a digital marketing strategy. You’ll likely need to pull in a partner experienced with defining attribution models and creating specific channel mixes.
Here are a few types of attribution models to consider:

• Last Interaction – The last direct touchpoint receives 100% of the credit for the sale.
• Last Non-Direct – 100% of the credit goes to the last channel that the customer clicked through before converting.
• First Interaction – The first touchpoint receives 100% of the credit.
• Linear – Each touchpoint in the conversion path shares equal credit.
• Time Decay – The touchpoints closest in time to the conversion get most of the credit.
• Position Based – 40% credit is assigned to both the first and last interactions, and the remaining 20% is distributed evenly to the middle interactions.

Putting All the Pieces Together

After gathering your data, testing, and creating your attribution model, it’s time to see what the completed puzzle looks like, prioritize business and marketing goals, and unite your organization behind them. Bring together stakeholders and business units to answer the following questions:

• Are the necessary tools and resources available to execute your marketing tactics?
• Do these tactics align with the mission and vision?
• How are these goals weighted against each other?

If your business has multiple product lines and business units, then you will have a significant number of goals. Identify the ones that are most important to your business and that can be achieved with available budget and current or newly acquired resources with the least relative effort.
Once your goals are identified, create next steps on how to achieve them, with corresponding KPIs to measure, necessary channels to fulfill these goals, and the strategy that will drive campaigns to fulfill your goals. Take this information and “sketch it out” over a road map based on priority per channel. Then, get to work!
Remember, creating your digital marketing strategy isn’t a task you can just check off of your to-do list and forget about. It is crucial that you and your company are regularly revisiting your strategy and goals, identifying successes and failures, and making adjustments where needed.
For more information about creating an effective digital marketing strategy, take a look at our free guide.

A great mission, smart leadership, a viable market, and great products or services – these are all essential pieces of the puzzle that must be in place to create a successful business. But there’s a key piece of the puzzle that you may be missing.
To build your business, you also need a big-picture plan that will help you grow market share, entice people to purchase, and engage potential and existing customers across the right channels. How do you do this? With a digital marketing strategy.
A digital marketing strategy translates your business goals into marketing goals, and then into individual channel efforts. This strategy allows you to build campaigns and execute tactics while ensuring that every marketing dollar spent ties back directly to your business goals.
Unfortunately, many organizations, regardless of size, lack a well-built digital marketing strategy and are using marketing tactics that are only loosely connected to actual business goals and KPIs. In fact, 47% of businesses employ digital marketing tactics without a defined strategy.
But why is developing a digital marketing strategy so hard? If it is vital to growth and success, then why doesn’t it exist in so many organizations? Here are a few of the challenges that stand in the way of many businesses, and maybe even yours:

Organizational Issues

Departmental and budgetary silos and a status quo mentality are among the most common obstacles on the business side.
Even when working from a consolidated marketing budget, there are often product owners or business units competing for their “share” of the larger marketing pie. In this scenario, it’s difficult to deliver against business priorities for the most effective use of marketing dollars.
Then comes the status quo. When businesses are used to operating a certain way, it’s difficult to break out of the comfort zone without a fresh perspective or different leadership. And, when leadership expects different results from the same efforts, especially from the marketing mix perspective, innovation is slower and results far less likely.

Undefined or Lack of Prioritized Business Goals

Most businesses have a general idea of what they want to accomplish, but their goals are either undefined or lack any priority. And when goals are in place, they are usually top-of-funnel, focused on driving awareness and customer acquisition.
Since these goals are focused purely on getting foot traffic into a store or eyeballs to a website, they consume the majority of the marketing budget without respect for the business impact ‒ such as driving engagement, conversions, or revenue ‒ and are typically not prioritized to consider greatest business impact versus least relative effort.
When more reasonably defined goals do exist, they are often still ambiguous (e.g. grow revenue 10 percent each year). This ambiguity affects the ability to track KPIs, let alone create focused marketing campaigns, which typically leads businesses to track largely irrelevant metrics such as increasing site visitors year-over-year.

Bad Data

When marketing or sales data is either missing, not validated, or inaccurate, it’s increasingly difficult to prioritize business goals. Or, businesses do not consider using data at all to make decisions on business goal priorities.
On the other end of the spectrum, some businesses suffer from analysis paralysis. This is when they collect all data for every interaction without understanding what information can be derived from it. Instead of focusing on specific data that tracks to a goal or can provide insights, the business is drowning in data without gaining any actionable information.

Tactical Shortcomings

Channels
Many business leaders attempt to grow their business by maximizing different digital marketing channels without respect for the overall marketing mix or a marketing strategy. Attribution models that optimize channels for the best growth are typically not discussed. When organizations lack a digital marketing strategy and are not evaluating channels strategically, then the one or more marketing channels in play do not typically contribute to the right mix. Moreover, these channels tend to operate in a silo without respect for overall marketing effort.
Campaign Creation
Campaigns created in a vacuum and executed in isolation are not linked to marketing or business goals. For example, some eCommerce businesses are guilty of creating a huge campaign around a holiday to promote sales for a particular category but fail to think through how this might affect what the marketing team is trying to accomplish, let alone specific business goals.
Project Roadmap
When digital marketing strategies are non-existent, the project road map is missing as well. This means no cohesion or consistency in marketing efforts over time and no forward-thinking insight into the business goals, resources, and tools for execution.
Are any of these challenges sounding a little too familiar? If your business is struggling to meet goals and you feel like your efforts are lacking direction, it is probably time to take a good hard look at your marketing and get a new digital marketing strategy up and running.
For more information and tips on how to do this, take a look at our free guide.

Reaching your ideal client with just the right information at just the right time is a perpetual challenge. Even with solid business objectives, a great team, and maybe a fancy new implementation of Adobe Experience Manager, understanding who to target, when, and how is pretty much the triumvirate of marketing challenges.
You likely have some well-conceived business goals and have assembled a great team to market to your clients on a daily basis. But what mechanisms have you created to translate those business goals into marketing goals and a related strategy? And with that, how are campaigns and tactical initiatives being formed from marketing strategy to ensure that every dollar spent and every marketing effort is directly connected to your business goals?
Those mechanisms are the machine that powers success. Without a properly built digital marketing strategy machine, tactics are implemented with only the loosest of connections to actually fulfill business goals and KPIs.
So why is it so hard to build a digital marketing machine?

The Typical Challenge of Building the Digital Marketing Strategy Machine

We typically break down digital marketing strategy for our clients into a spectrum consisting of three separate sections:

1. Business Goals and Strategy
2. Marketing Strategy
3. Cross/Omni-channel Tactical Initiatives and Measurement

On one end of the spectrum, most of our clients, as they well should, have established pretty solid business goals. These goals are derived from an understanding of their target market, various internal inputs/product lines/stakeholders, mission and vision, and objectives as an organization. Often, we’ll even see vision planning or KPI benchmarks for the organization over the next one or several years.
Most of these same clients also have a whole slew of intelligent, talented individuals on the opposite end of the spectrum. These smart folks are charged with implementing the tools and tactics to grow the business. This typically consists of various acquisition, engagement, and sometimes retention practices across whichever channels they have determined most successful.
What we don’t see from most of our clients is anything in the middle – any clearly defined marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy is the machine that runs the entire spectrum. It’s the mechanism responsible for connecting each and every tactical initiative directly back to a specific business goal. In short, marketing strategy provides the reason and justification for any and all marketing efforts.
Unfortunately, the common approach to building the digital marketing strategy machine, while thorough and detailed, is one that involves taking a giant step backwards, evaluating every single variable throughout the entire spectrum, and painstakingly creating the perfect machine by which to execute tactical initiatives that perfectly fulfill business goals.
We’ve seen larger organizations take nine months to a year or more to build their digital marketing strategy.
And that’s the wrong approach.
Why?
Because as a delightful adaptation of a quote from Voltaire points out, “perfection is the enemy of done.”
An effort to understand every input and variable needed to create the ideal strategic machine, make connections between business goals and tactical initiatives, and get everything in place before executing, will result in a massive loss of growth opportunity. Too much time and effort will be used to connect all the dots, and, as a result, be taken from making prioritized, business-impactful, and iterative changes.

That’s Why Iterative Growth is So Powerful

Put simply, the power of iterative growth comes from using data-driven “loops” to prioritize and execute on quick wins.
First and foremost, iterative growth is data-driven. Using historical data to create a baseline and benchmarks, each iterative loop will focus channel efforts on maximizing lift to target personas which tie back to business goals. For example, if your annual revenue growth goal is 20%, that revenue dollar amount is broken down by quarter and month, and again by channel. Each channel can then be measured for attributed and assisted revenue, and adjusted quickly to meet milestones and maximize return.
Second, utilizing iterative loops means not missing out on quick wins or revenue and engagement opportunities. One of the most critical aspects of each iterative loop is prioritizing business goals and KPIs. This continuous prioritization balances each quick-win for greatest business impact with the least relative work and effort. This approach keeps the focus on maximizing effort and growth while spending the time and investment on the personas and respective channels that yield the greatest return.
Third, the strategy machine still gets built – and usually in less time. Each iterative loop informs and adds to the previous work, producing iterative growth to the entire spectrum. As each previous loop is implemented, more relevant, useful data emerges which allows for agile course correction along the way, and the ability to more accurately target acquisition, engagement, and retention efforts.
Additionally, each iteration focuses on additional elements of the overall marketing strategy. For example, on the business goal side, let’s assume the target market and perhaps even personas and customer journey mapping have been ascertained. By using the data from each iterative loop, those personas can not only be further refined, but the actual behaviors, revenue, acquisition costs, and lifetime values associated with each persona across channels could reveal that one persona might very well be outperforming what was previously considered to be the ideal customer. As such, focus can be kept on acquisition through those top-performing channels but to the new persona for greater returns.
The beauty of this iterative process is that each loop continues to inform marketing strategy for future targeted campaigns and initiatives. As we’re all well aware, customer experience and engagement is key to growth. Coupled with a continuous stream of data and success measured against benchmarked KPIs over time, a comprehensive marketing strategy machine begins to unfold.
It all comes back to how you build your machine. Which is the better way – with hundreds of parts laid out on the floor and a 1,000-page manual, or with an interactive guide handing you each up-to-date part in the order you need it? Working smarter with a focus on the big connected picture and iterative growth is going to save you the time and earn you the revenue you need to make your efforts worth it.