We were chatting with one of our clients the other day. We were getting very excited about some processes and customer journeys we had been working on,
when it dawned on us just how marketing in South Africa is changing. Mind you, its probably also the whole world, but the point is that today’s marketing has shifted in two noticeable directions…
DOWNLOAD OUR FREE EBOOK ON MARKETING STRATEGY AND INBOUND MARKETING
1. The marketer needs to work with numbers.
I mean really put up with plenty of marketing matrixes, conversion ratios, calculate return on investment and all sorts of numbers.I will be the first to put my hand up and say that I chose marketing because it was about as far away from math’s and science as I could get. The more I ran away, the more the numbers chased me. You see, I struggled a bit with understanding bounce ratio and marketing return on investment at first. I also struggled with reporting on awesome marketing results without using numbers.
Over time, a whole world of extra special marketing words slid into the lexicon of my vocabulary. This event was eye-popping, that website jaw dropping. Then I learnt that nothing says eye-popping or jaw dropping like a 200% return on investment. For every R50 000 you gave me for marketing, I gave you R100 000 worth of sales.
2. Process mapping is king.
(It’s more a case of something I think should change.)
I borrowed it from the world of Six Sigma training, Industrial engineering and similar efficiency professions.Business process mappingis simply writing down all the steps required to get an activity done. It identifies the role players (who), the actions (what) and the order (when) in which things happen. Simple enough. Been around since the 1930’s, but you know what ? Process mapping is the most useful tool for digital marketing.
Talking with with the client, their salespeople and mapping the process of making a sale made so much marketing sense. We have found that as we sit and map a process, we uncover nuggets of marketing gold, like how we can re-market to the cold leads which we normally would have thrown on the leads junk pile. With that particular client, we also learned faster ways to get a website visitor to leave the website happy.
Before you go, imagine for a moment how powerful your reporting numbers would look if you could start to quantify how many potential sales are sitting in the different parts of your sales process… and that based on past measurements you know that 22% will result in a sale after 4weeks and that you are currently delivering a marketing return on investment (MROI) of 200% after 6months? Eye-popping, Jaw dropping numbers in your marketing reports? Absolutely! It can be done. Learn more about how the theory and software used to pull this off by downloading this ebook:
