Want To Create Your Next Real, Measurable, and Impactful Marketing Campaigns? Know about Marketing Technology Martech and CXL’s winning process. [Review]

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The realities of digital marketing are felt strongly with the ever-growing power of customers to choose how, when, and where they want to interact with your brand.

As a result, you as a marketer might find yourself now in a much challenging situation with responsibilities of not only telling a delightful story about your brand but also of providing remarkable customer experiences.

Then to thrive, your team or marketing organization must take a data-driven approach and craft ever more tailored experiences that meet your customer expectations.

TOOLS: MARKETING TECHNOLOGY STACK

What’s the Marketing Technology stack?

Dan McGaw (CEO Founder of Effin Amazing, a Martech stack and analytics agency) shares the ways Martech tools can help you run your campaigns and solve your business problems.

According to Dan, Marketing technology or Martech stack includes your marketing tools, support tools, sales tools, and even your developer tools.

All this customer data is important, and you want to make sure that you use these systems to optimize your marketing.

What can you accomplish with your Martech stack?

There’s no point in building all kinds of tools together and integrating a tool stack unless you have a goal.

Dan recommends Ryan Rudd’s Stack Funnel to get you started in the right direction.

The marketing technology stack version by Ryan Rudd shows the segmentation of the tools based on buyer’s journey: Attract, Convert, Nurture, Sales Close, Analytics, and Automation.

But take note that thousands of Martech tools exist today. And even if consolidation happens, with big Martech companies acquiring small companies, this could pose some issue on your Martech stack especially when some products would be discontinued or no longer supported by the new companies.

So, how can you choose when there are a lot of options out there? Dan advises on the following:

1. Make comparison before you make any selections.
2. Consider tools based upon integration. It’s critical for your growth. If a tool can’t be integrated with the rest of your stack, then it’s going to have siloed data, and that data’s not going to be able to be used to convert your customers.
3. Research on who has what features and who does not, and who has what integration powers and who does not.

Check out these tools that Dan uses to run his business in Effin Amazing:

Google Tag Manager: Very important for understanding the users who come to your site and understanding your traffic sources.

Segment: Critical for sending customer data to different services. It is a customer data platform where you can collect, transform, send, and archive your first-party customer data.

Salesforce: Mostly because it has far more integrations than any other CRM out there, through both AppExchange and Zapier.

Clearbit: Get the right data directly into the tools you already use as it can integrate right into the existing stack including Segment.

Amplitude: Put all the data that flows out of your products and gain insight into which combination of features and actions translates to business outcomes.

For an in-depth discussion about Martech stack — tools specific for lead generation and capture, automation, and CRMs, sign up for CXL to access the course Optimizing Your Marketing Tech Stack.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Once you figure out what tools you need, and you’re done with your Martech set-up that will convert more visitors for your business — from marketing automation to funnel optimization — you’re now ready to put together a marketing strategy.

Lindsey Christensen shows high-level marketing frameworks to accelerate your business and career growth.

But Lindsey talks about the 8 core areas of marketing and how this should be taken as part of your marketing strategy.

1. Product marketing. Product marketing sits at the intersection of marketing, sales, product, and engineering. Some focuses of product marketing include conducting user research; understanding who the user and his wants; and identifying market opportunities. Product marketing also runs product packaging, pricing, and messaging.
2. Brand. Asks the question how do you want your brand to be perceived by the market or the user? This focuses on voice and tone for the company, establishing the look and feel of the brand, the company’s positioning, and product differentiation.
3. Demand generation (or lead generation, growth marketing, sometimes digital marketing). This focuses on creating a pipeline of sales leads, funnel optimization, channel experiments, and retention.
4. Events and Community. Community-building events and platforms are used to engage with users, nurture influencers, and thought leaders who support your company's mission.
5. Sales enablement is usually found in a type of company with a larger sales team or a longer sales cycle. One that requires more marketing support and creates collateral for sales teams like presentations and email templates, helps educate sales about market opportunities, training sales about product releases and marketing campaigns as well as writing case studies.
6. Public Relations or PR understands where customers consume information and news, secure coverage in relevant media, nurture media and analyst relationships, and maintain calendars of events for newsworthy items or events that you may be running. Content and Creative provide the promotional content for the PR team, media kits for journalists and analysts, thought leadership pieces, brand materials.
7. Operations and Analytics. Operations encompass managing the software tools such as a marketing automation platform, optimizing workflows through tools and best practices, and tracking key performance indicators; whereas Marketing Analytics conducts business and market analysis or even product analysis to identify new markets to enter or forecast trends.
8. Sales. Marketing and sales work towards common goals on the same buyer’s journey and the same funnel.

With this holistic perspective of marketing, you are one step to building out a successful marketing strategy.

Create a research plan.

• Conduct a SWOT analysis.
• Identify key stakeholders and the role they’re going to play in your strategy.
• Identify the available market data.
• Also, identify and plan for unavailable data.

Interview, analyze, and augment

To conduct your research plan, you would need to go through making sense of the available data in search of customer profiles, competitive landscape, marketing history; augmenting data to fill in the gaps where needed to get a clear picture for decision making; and interviewing stakeholders about the market.

Think in terms of how this might fit into the SWOT analysis. You must be methodical and aggregate the data that you’ll need, organize the objective and anecdotal data into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Creating a cohesive strategy

This is the part where you would go through:

1. Organizing a minimum viable strategy, considerations, and options for that strategy, and how to repeat it. Deal with foundational elements that found to be missing. Evaluate if it’s reasonable to organize and run a lean marketing campaign to execute within a reasonable amount of time while aligning this with your corporate vision. Use the OGSM framework (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures).
2. Goal setting. Set your metrics or key results using the SMART method, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely; and
3. Methods for tracking progress and evaluating success.

Execution

Set yourself up for success with:

• A kick-off meeting to build excitement and stakeholder support.
• Tools to keep you organized and sharing progress across departments.
• Best practices for continuing down an agile path to success

Project Management

To any successful marketing campaign, project management is a key factor. Thus, a project manager must be able to deal properly with resources, scope, and attribution.

The typical issues that arise with poor project management fall into the said three specific categories, according to Alexa Hubley of CXL.

But this could be avoided when the objective is clearly set out for you and your team. Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy shares his advice on objective setting, which is all about choosing one path, sticking to it, even though it may slight another.

ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease of Implementation) framework could also prove useful for your team to know which goals to prioritize.

Overall, a recipe for a successful marketing campaign starts with careful planning coupled with informed decision-making and a methodical approach during implementation.

The courses featured here are part of the mini degree program, Growth Marketing. If you want to learn more about the program, visit CXL Institute. CXL Institute also offers mini degree programs: Conversion Optimization; Customer Acquisition; Data Analytics; Digital Psychology and Persuasion; Growth Marketing; Technical Content Marketing and Technical Marketing. CXL Institute offers digital marketing courses taught by the absolute best practitioners in the world today. Some of the companies that train their teams at CXL: Amazon, Google, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and many more.