DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION & CLOSED LOOP MARKETING.....

Digital transformation is a minefield. One of the biggest mistakes many firms?making is falling for technology without taking the time to integrate it into their strategy. Marketers today have unprecedented access to their customers’ preferences and behaviours.

Social media platforms, in particular, have made information ripe for the picking. But knowing how to sort through it all, separating the noise from the best opportunities, can be challenging.

?

For instance, I cannot tell you the number of companies that decide to create an app or put together a viral campaign without a clear goal in mind. They’re digital fashionistas, because they go for technology as someone would approach trendy fashion.

You have to remember that the music isn’t in the violin; technology without strategy behind it is a plaything.

For doing Digital Transformation in house ,First, you need to create a digital memory — a repository of the efforts made across the company’s various departments — and measure that against expected outcomes. For instance, looking at the digital initiatives that have been carried across different countries: What resources went to these initiatives? What were the results? This can be done in a simple spreadsheet, and it significantly helps a company master new technologies.

Next, you need to acquire digital and social media analytics to have the ability to listen to how the customer and the public feel about your company’s efforts. This essentially shows you your e-reputation with the public. AccorHotels, for example, started to monitor online conversations about its hotels and competitors, and created weekly e-reputation scores for its employees based on customer feedback and conversations.

Finally, by integrating the above into your daily operations, you become digitally autonomous. You have the ability to track data about processes and customers and then to integrate it into your own operations and corporate culture. For example, a large manufacturer of athletic shoes inserted electronic chips in its shoes, which told the company where and when a runner would use the shoes. This gave the manufacturer tremendous insight into how its customers operated and allowed for continual product improvement based upon those insights.

Raw digital data, whether it’s online search or social media activity or even geo localization data, can produce valuable insights. But if companies take those insights to the next level — putting data to use by integrating consumer insights, comments, and criticisms into their products and services — they can generate a game-changing “value loop.”

Overall, it’s only by unpacking the mechanics of how people share information and how people are influenced that businesses will be able to communicate effectively on digital and social media. I like to say that the four Ps of marketing — product, price, promotion, place — have to be supplemented by the four Cs: culture, content, community, connect.

For many B2B companies, marketing and sales occur sequentially:

Marketing = generates awareness, interest, and leads.?

Sales = takeover these leads, and manage the relationship until they close into a won deal or are deemed to be lost.

That’s when the customer’s life cycle will begin. The challenge facing many B2B businesses these days is the value of a customer will accumulate over several months or years, as subscriptions continue or relationships grow.

Traditional analytics solutions deal with each of these processes; marketing, sales and customer lifecycle, in isolation. In reality, they all feed into the same system.

As such, most B2B companies employ a cost per lead metric in order to measure the impact of their marketing. Usually, it’s the easiest and most indicative measure of success they can access.

But a lead doesn’t finish its journey with the company there.?

Those leads are then processed by the sales team via a CRM, eventually becoming won customers or dead deals. And once they’re a customer, they can generate revenue for the business for months, or years, into the future.

The latter part of this process is completely overlooked by most analytics tools. It’s all part of the same journey, but because B2B deals hardly ever close on the website (like an e-commerce deal), it used to be impossible, or very difficult, to report on the whole journey.

Then along came a company called Salesforce and changed everything.

Salesforce introduced the world to software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud-based applications no longer confined to a user’s desktop hard-drive but is accessible by any computer with an internet connection.

Since then, thousands, if not millions, of pieces of software have now adopted the Internet as their chosen operating system.

As the software exists on the internet, that means that it can easily receive and deliver packets of data. Initially, this meant software updates could be delivered in real-time (an innovation in its own right), but it also meant that these different pieces of software could deliver data to each other.

It’s in this innovation which closed-loop reporting has become possible.

Now, instead of analytics ending at the point the person becomes a lead, the data from your marketing, sales and revenue platforms can all be shared with each other.

Analytics no longer has to treat each of the stages as unique now that their data can be combined.

Instead of focussing on metrics that don’t measure true business value (clicks, conversions and leads), closed-loop analytics allows you to look deeper into the customer acquisition and revenue generation funnel. It gives you the answer to questions such as:

1.??How much revenue was generated from customers acquired through marketing campaign/channel/medium X, Y, Z?

2.??Do leads from paid search close at a higher rate than leads from paid social traffic?

3.??Are we actually acquiring customers or poor quality leads?

?

Let’s say you determine, using closed-loop revenue data, that Facebook sends the most conversions to your site. in comparison, the leads seem cheaper to your other channels, but further analysis reveals that the conversions hardly ever close into won customers.

On the other hand, search sends fewer conversions and they’re more expensive on a cost-per-conversion. However, those conversions close into won customers, who deliver lots of revenue, at a very high rate.

Knowing this, you can make more strategic decisions. Maybe you don’t have the budget or personnel to focus on both social and search. And the outcomes have revealed that it’s better to focus on search because that’s where you’re driving the most revenue.

Closed-loop marketing shows you which campaigns and channels drive the most revenue, according to the revenue attribution model you use.

It also shows you which drive the?least?revenue.

In other words, revenue data shows you which of your efforts are generating a return on your investment and which are simply wasting your budget, providing the information you need to cut spending on underperforming campaigns.

Without knowing which customers convert, it’s very difficult to form a complete picture of your customer buying journey. You can make educated guesses or interview a handful of customers, but there’s no guarantee that what you come up with reflects the actual journey your customers take.

One of the best things about consolidated marketing and sales data is that you can see every single interaction customers had with your brand—from their first anonymous visit to the day they signed the check.

What campaigns did they interact with? What pages did they visit on your site? Did they request a demo, sign up for your newsletter, or visit your contact page and call?

Of course, you can do that without revenue data too, but only for the journey from being an anonymous visitor to becoming a known lead.

With closed-loop marketing, you can isolate that information down to only those individuals who became your most valuable customers, find consistencies in the journeys they took, and map out a new journey that guides prospects through an ideal experience.

with CLM, marketing and sales teams form a partnership. Sales benefits because marketing’s data feeds into sales’ CRM, letting sales reps see what products, services, and features prospects are interested in.

This lets them craft more targeted and personalised sales pitches.

Marketing teams see which of their initiatives generate the most conversions and can use that information to send sales more qualified leads.

This means more commissions for sales teams, proving the value of collaborating with marketing.

Marketers not only get a strategic partner in sales, but also the data they need to prove that all of their hard work has a positive impact on the company’s bottom line.

?