By Kirsten Newbold-Knipp
Gartner, Inc.
As a marketing leader, how often do you play mystery shopper on your own site? How often does your CEO? It’s often necessary to revisit key areas of your strategy and tactics to jumpstart your digital marketing engine. That doesn’t have to mean a lengthy strategic revamp. Sometimes small changes can have big impacts – that’s what I call a marketing hack.
Consider selecting three of the following hacks to implement immediately and shift the resulting cost or time savings to marketing activities with more demonstrable ROI.
1. Be Your Customer
Use tactics such as mystery shopping your brand, getting out to talk to customers and using customer advisory boards to derive new innovations from discoverable insights and customer intimacy.
2. Get Tag Management
What if you could test a new tactic (Facebook Retargeting, etc.) within days of market availability instead of weeks? Many marketers struggle with IT delays to implement tags for analytical insights. Speed up implementation of tags with a simple, scalable, self-service marketing solution – your IT team will thank you for it.
3. Implement Interview Projects
A standard interview isn’t the most effective tool to assess a candidate’s interest and skills for a position. Skip unqualified resume screens and get candidates to invest in the process and vet skill levels upfront by asking them to complete an interview project. Make it something real that they can implement and ramp up quickly if they get the job.
4. Cut SEM Bloat – Campaign Audit
When was the last time your SEM campaigns were pruned? With an average 11.6% of marketing budgets spent on search, marketers should assess whether growth targets have inflated SEM spend or outlier terms are truly worth a high cost. The solution is to become laser targeted and realize that getting customers at the edge of your sweet spot may yield negative ROI.
5. Fail Fests – Embrace Innovation & Failure
Marketing leaders: Remember to share your own failure stories and encourage experimentation in the organization. Remove fear from failure. Make it clear that an agreed experiment, if failed, is a great learning accelerant. Consider scheduling celebrations to recognize employee risks, even if they fail.
6. Optimize Email (List Hygiene & Improved Use of Transactional Emails)
Increase engagement per email sent by truly using every email that goes out the door including bills, shipping notices, etc. Remember that every email from every channel impacts your brand. Improve customer satisfaction by rationalizing email and sending only what matters — to them.
7. Steal (Ideas) from Other Industries or Disciplines
Get out of your comfort zone, department or industry and meet with peers to gather new ideas. Brainstorming with other disciplines can yield quick knowledge transfer and build intracompany rapport. One totally new idea or perspective could yield a eureka moment.
8. Clean Up Ad to Landing Page Messaging for Consistency
Review mismatched messaging and assess how much your conversion drops when ads and offer copy don't match. How many people or agencies have created ads and landing pages? Hire an intern or agency to do a campaign audit and check landing pages and ads to see if they are still relevant and consistent.
9. Plan Evergreen Content & Campaigns
Reduce, reuse and recycle content assets. Replace assets that are “one and done” with meatier assets or those that can be re-promoted over a long period of time. Remember that you may be bored of a specific asset, but it may be new to your customers and can improve your total ROI.
10. Capture Bouncing Visitors
Find out what percent of your paid traffic bounces. Try exit-intent offers and other techniques to help increase conversion and reduce bounce rates. Don’t want to do an offer? Consider surveys to mine nonconverting prospects for information on how to improve the experience.
When I presented these hacks at the recent Gartner Digital Marketing Conference, the audience voted on their top choices to put to use immediately. Two hacks tied for first place: Be your customer and implement interview projects. Two hacks tied for second place: Fail fests and steal ideas. Which hacks will you get started on right away?
Kirsten Newbold-Knipp is a research director at Gartner for Marketing Leaders. To learn more, watch the full session, 10 Hacks for High-Impact Digital Marketing Results.
