The Complete Marketer’s Guide to 2018

Introduction

2017 saw the video explode as a staple of personal and corporate content. Thanks to Snapchat, ephemeral content in the form of “stories” dominated every social network.

The approaching GDPR deadline in the UK and changes in net neutrality in the US are set to disrupt how all digital marketers can communicate with their audiences.

And, on an exciting note, companies are beginning to truly explore technology that were once only buzzwords; Facebook, Apple, and Google are investing in augmented reality kits, and machine-learning technology will begin to power an automated customer-service revolution.

If these changes continue on the pace they have been, we know that 2018 will urge marketers to explore new platforms, think more strategically and efficiently, and be able to act and react quicker than they’ve needed to before.

We predict that in 2018, marketing will be fast, image- and video-driven, data-backed, and creative.

This guide presents five strategies you’ll need to deploy next year to be able to not only prepare for, but maximize all the changes 2018 will have in store.

In this guide, we’ll explore:

• creating data-driven marketing strategies
• owning customer experience
• proving and improving ROI
• utilizing qualitative insights, and
• reacting quickly with real-time marketing

1. Create data-driven marketing strategies

Marketers—especially all content planners and creators—constantly juggle between the planning and creating process, or the science and the art of connecting with potential customers.

Too often, the main time marketers look at data is in regular reporting, and the real science that fuels successful marketing falls flat.

Marketers still tend to depend heavily on intuition and experience to influence decision-making. About 59% of decision-making executives rely primarily on human judgment.

From where customers tend to click on your website to how they talk about your industry online, your marketing stack is likely full of useful information that can shape ad campaigns, influence copy, and help understand the success of activities.

The first step to a data-backed 2018 is to do an audit of your team’s resources. Social media and online data, owned website analytics, sales and your marketing automation service are all goldmines of information about the people you hope to engage.

Your teammates and colleagues can also be helpful resources. According to Google and Econsultancy, 75% of marketers view lack of knowledge about data analytics as the biggest barrier to using data more.

By understanding the skills and processes of your data-savvy or more technical coworkers, you can get a head start to developing tactics that can apply directly to your work, even if you’re not the most comfortable with data.

Finally, there are several tools created for marketers to shorten the time-to-insights.

Google Trends (for keywords and theme research), Quick Search (for persona and customer research), and BuzzSumo (for digital content ideation and analysis), are tools that were built to get answers in seconds, but can revolutionize how you plan, measure, and improve your work.

As marketing technology gets more and more sophisticated and data more and more available in 2018, companies will no longer succeed by going with their gut with their marketing spend.

Brands will invest in ensuring that down to every last email, marketing activities are optimized. So, in order for every person on your marketing team to feel confident in their work, they’ll need to be able to support their ideas with evidence.

Quick tips to building data-driven strategy:

• Start asking more questions. Identify three questions that you could answer with the data in your toolkit that could directly influence your job, and devote a week to finding those answers with the tools at your disposal.
• Make it easy for you. Build custom dashboards you can refer to in the relevant tools in your martech stack, or use tools like Quick Search to expedite your access to the specific insights that would influence your job.
• Look to other data-driven teams. Look to other teams outside of marketing that utilize sales, CRM, or online data for inspiration behind building testable strategies.

2. Own your brand’s customer experience

In our most recent guide to benchmarking customer experience, we call customer experience “the sum of all the moments and interactions a customer has with a brand… [which] collectively… helps build the entire story a brand tells its customer.”

This means that customer experience (CX) is affected by literally every part of the business.

Everything from ads, to customer service service, to how products are casually discussed helps collectively build the entire story a brand gives its customer.

While the components CX is by no means a new concept, the philosophy that every part of your business affects the experience a customer has with your brand is just beginning to have real changes on entire business directions.

This is especially true for marketers, and is on track to only increase in 2018. Both CMOs and their marketing teams want to better prioritize and incorporate CX into their work.

While many sources should be used to get a 360-view of your customers, social media data is both the largest and most diverse unstructured data pool for unfiltered opinions about a topic, which makes social listening the perfect tool to begin understanding CX.

The best CX benchmarking spans the entire customer journey. So in order to benchmark CX, start with mapping your customer journey and finding the right metrics that matter to at least three important customer touch points:

1. Engagement – How people feel about and react to your brand, your messaging, and your marketing.
2. Usage – How customers feel when they use your product or services.
3. Retention and Customer Service – When and why your customer’s issues arise, and what triggers them to want to leave.

While you likely won’t need to use or benchmark all of the stages of the customer journey for every marketing activity you do, use this framework to consider how your work influences the experience your potential customers have.

Does it convey your brand promise? Does it make your customer or prospective customer happy? Is it helpful?

CX will be the primary differentiator for brands next year. Be intentional with the message your marketing activities are giving your customers, and use your marketing assets to influence the emotions your customers have.

Quick tips to owning CX:

• Go beyond share of voice reporting. Incorporate customer experience metrics like sentiment and emotions when benchmarking your online presence against your competitors to get a more complete picture.
• Actively control customer emotions. Use customer data to analyze the positive emotions associated with your brand, and align your marketing activities to complement them.
• Explore multi-channel customer service. Arm your customer service or crisis comms team with custom social media alerts, and explore chat-bots and automated messaging, to ensure no issue goes unnoticed.

3. Improve your marketing ROI

According to Forrester’s B2C Marketing Council, one of the top challenges of 2017 for B2C companies was demonstrating marketing ROI.

This difficulty likely arises from a fundamental misunderstanding people have with measuring marketing ROI.

In the past, when creating marketing or advertising content, we were limited to broad generalizations about our audiences, so the way to analyze the return of an investment (be it time, energy, resources for a project, or money) is to wait until after the event has happened.

This line of thinking is a “spray-and-pray” technique, with the following order of operations: 1. do the activity, 2. analyze the results, 3. based on the results, do or don’t do activity again.

Now, marketers have the ability to build more meaningful segmentation of real people, which gives the opportunity to improve ROI before your copywriter gets a pen on paper.

With marketing data, we can build more meaningful segmentation of real people in the real world.

For example, Twitter’s ability to upload CRM and web traffic data lets us retarget customers and site visitors with precision, splitting our message according to their previous interaction with our brand.

It’s now possible to tailor our content according to behavior, past conversations and an unlimited array of interests based on people’s diverse online engagement.

If the first time you’re thinking about the return of a marketing investment is reporting afterwards, you’re already too late.

Quick tips to proving and improving ROI:

• Trim the fat. Use a social media audience analyzer to create your target audience for paid social ads, and search bio keywords to build an audience list that includes only the people, industries, or job titles you’re interested in.
• Utilize the right influencers at the right time. Advertising will never go away. However to reduce ad spend, use freemium tools like BuzzSumo to find thought-leaders, celebrities, and social media influencers who could help your campaign.
• Really take the time (or get someone else to). The more energy your team spends in the planning process of activities, the better you’ll be able to predict the results. Take the time in the beginning, or utilize the skills, people, and tools around you to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel.

4. Utilize qualitative insights

If we haven’t made it clear in our first three sections, data must play a vital role in marketing plans for 2018, from ideation to benchmarking.

However, it’s important to remember that marketing is as much an art as a science, and that customers are more than numbers, but humans.

While ROI can be understood as a numbers-heavy, cost-benefit analysis, some of the most useful and tangible insights for marketers in 2018 will be qualitative.

Qualitative data is the information that represents words, narratives, feelings or concepts. And from the millions various photos shared online images to the thousands of emotive Twitter posts by the President of the United States, 2017 was defined by qualitative data.

Among qualitative information that marketers will need to have a handle on in 2018 are insights derived from images. Ogilvy predicts that 2018 will bring an end to typing, and voice search and image recognition will reign supreme.

Additionally, understanding more complex customer sentiment and emotions will also be easier than ever in 2018. With this data, marketers should be able to achieve a desired emotional response, measure that response and then reporting on that response comes with challenges.

In our recent report written in partnership with Ditch the Label, quantitative and qualitative insights worked side by side to communicate findings from analyzing 13 million conversations on mental health.

Using qualitative data to improve marketing efforts not only helps your team go deeper into marketing impact, but can arm your team with more actionable insights than numbers alone can give.

Learn the differences between simply showing data and telling stories with it.

Quick tips to using qualitative insights:

• Find the human. Data about the emotions your customers feel or the images they share are more descriptive than numbers. Keep these qualitative data sources qualitative, and use the data to paint a persona of your audience or to tell a story.
• Get the right data. While qualitative insights are fundamental to understanding who your customers are, be sure the data you use is still representative. Incomplete data can paint an incorrect picture. Vet your data sources.
• Get the voice-of-the-customer in their own words. Hearing your customers verbatim helps remind you they are human. Use social listening to learn the words your customers are using, the language they use, and the emotions they express. Keep these mentions at the front of mind on a command center or dashboard.

5. React faster to opportunities with real-time marketing

One of the clearest takeaways from 2017 was the extreme impact of customer preferences and expectations on marketers.

In everything from the food we eat to our feelings about our phone batteries, our expectations change and increase more and more rapidly. This means businesses must put their money where their mouth is with real-time marketing (RTM).

In our recent guide to real-time marketing, we define RTM as the actions needed “to meaningfully connect with customers at the right moment in time.”

As you can see, this doesn’t mean that marketers need to be “always-on,” ready to have their perfect Twitter post during a black out in the Superbowl.

In reality, RTM is much more routine than a one-off Twitter post.

In order to be able to succeed at those meaningful connections, you’ll need to look at each stage of the customer journey and point out the activities that will best serve the needs of your customers at that time.

Can you start offering discount codes to visitors to your website at the right stage of the funnel? For example, if a user abandons their cart 3 times or more, serve them a pop-up with a 10% discount code.

If you want to drive awareness, look to large-scale planned events. Get personal with location-based or brand event-based initiatives.

How you choose to integrate RTM into your marketing strategy will depend on your objectives and resources. Consider real-time customer journey marketing if you have the data and technology to leverage.

Moving beyond the Oreo moment. Take steps to providing real value to your customers at the right time.

Quick tips to real-time marketing:

• Have your finger on the pulse. Having a marketing command center is an ideal way to keep all important data streams visible to the right stakeholders. Know when trending topics emerge, or when your audience sentiment changes abruptly.
• Be prepared to be prepared. We won’t lie. For big events like the Superbowl or Oscars, a well-timed blog or social post can be as influential as a 30-second advertisement. Having content creators ready to comment on big events can put you right in the middle of very visible conversations.
• Have RTM fuel other parts of your business. One of the most successful packaged food companies saw a 12% increase in sales revenue from turning a marketing crisis into a product opportunity. If your team has tools to stay abreast of trends, be sure that appropriate other business units get that info too.

Closing notes

We predict marketers of 2018 will need to be more analytical with their processes, without straying too far from the creative, the qualitative, and the emotional.

The marketing specialist will make way for the jacks- and jills-of-all-trades, with customer data playing a crucial role in the planning, creation, reporting, and benchmarking of all marketing activities and job functions.

But don’t just take it from us. Watch our webinar with Forrester to get more insights on the challenges of 2018, and everything you need to know.