MAIN INSIGHT 09
Erica Colson
GLOBAL HEAD OF MARKETING
- PRODUCT CERTIFICATION
How has your approach to customer acquisition changed post-pandemic?
There’s an increased push towards digital from marketing teams, and there’s a lot more noise in the market. However, I do think we’ve all got webinar fatigue now.
With digital marketing you have better visibility for measurement, but you are also competing, and it’s difficult to capture hearts and minds through a screen when there’s so much going on. The good, successful companies are going out into the market in innovative ways, with new types of content that delivers what customers need. We need to learn from them, and think about how we fit nurturing and building trust into that journey.
Crucially, sales isn’t just one hit – there’s a big nurturing side to the relationship. We need to create a digital journey that builds trust, and be present to support customers, not just to sell. My background is in educational psychology, and we’ve been doing internal workshops for marketing people on the importance of emotional buying and capturing hearts and minds.
What does a digital mindset look like in your organisation?
In a nutshell, your customer journey is now competing with Amazon, or with the expectations that it creates of buying journeys. When we’re buying something online for ourselves or for our business, we expect the same level of service.
If the buying journey is difficult, people will get annoyed very quickly, regardless of the sector. So when you’re designing a process you have to compare yourself both to the wider industry, and also your personal experiences when you clock off.
When you’re designing a process you have to compare yourself both to the wider industry, and also your personal experiences when you clock off.
Valuable content can be created if digital and telemarketing work together.
How is your marketing approach changing to bring together digital marketing and traditional telemarketing?
Telemarketing is often viewed as a terrible annoyance to people, however, when done well, it’s not viewed as marketing, but rather as a customer/sales support line.
Valuable content can be created if digital and telemarketing work together. Digital is great at understanding what customers are looking at and what they’re downloading. Telemarketing works really well when it is used as a follow-up, where someone from the team gets in touch with the buyer because we can see they didn’t find the information they were looking for.
Telemarketing is a great way of starting to build a trusting relationship, which comes into its own further down the line when sales approach the customer and there is already a relationship.
How important is it for your organisation to track a buyer’s digital activity before proactively trying to market or sell to them?
Intent data is where things are going. It’s how marketers can be smarter, especially with their targeting budgets. The more niche your service, the more important intent data is.
Even if you have a qualified buyer persona, if people aren't in the market, you're either wasting your marketing dollars by targeting them, or you're annoying them - or both. You can’t afford to annoy future potential customers, especially if your target market is small. I think there’s some catching up to be done in this regard, because the software systems and the market generally isn’t where it needs to be. There’s a lot of ad hoc work to be done to get intent data right.
Intent data is where things are going. It’s how marketers can be smarter, especially with their targeting budgets. The more niche your service, the more important intent data is.
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