End-to-End Marketing: The What, Why and How

Androniki Bossonis

It’s no secret — marketing your business is hard. And it’s become increasingly more difficult with the advent of the digital age. That Yellow Page listing or  local television commercial aren’t enough to get your message in front of your audience — at least not all on their own. Today, businesses must do everything they once did but balance it with new marketing techniques, such as online advertising, social media, content marketing, and much more. They must learn how to bid on keywords, how to monitor campaign dollars, and to interpret data. 

….there is so much to do, and so much to do smarter than you did it before!

Marketing has evolved from the ‘broadcasting’ of brand messaging to creating targeted consumer engagement across multiple, continually-optimized platforms. Data is crunched from every channel and touchpoint along the path to purchase to inform marketing strategy, and to allow companies to make smarter decisions.  You are able to engage customers where they socialize and through their interests. Today’s savvy customers, of course, now expect nothing less. 

With dozens and dozens of business competing for the same, shrinking search real estate — the state of marketing has been altered forever.  The good news is that once businesses master the art of end-to-end marketing — it is a win-win for both the business and consumer.

What is end-to-end marketing and how can you use it to grow your business?

THE WHAT

With so many social platforms, advertising channels, and internet properties for any given business, most marketers are keenly aware that their brand message must be conveyed on every channel, whether online, offline, traditional, out-of-home, paid search or organic. More than that, they’ve known this for a long time. Some businesses rose to the occasion as early adopters of fully-integrated marketing platforms; now, after jumping the initial hurdles of migration, integration and analytics set up, they are focused on pinpoint optimization.

However, not all companies were early adopters of integrating their marketing channels. 

Companies that still kept some or all of their marketing data channels siloed now struggle with the harrowing difficulty of extracting actionable business insights from that data as consumers maneuver between unconnected channels. They are stuck with more channels and no way to make business sense of them.

I hear it all the time…businesses ask, “I have someone handling our PPC ads, and we get a monthly report on how many clicks we got, but how do we translate that into actual sales revenue?”, or, “It takes hours each month to try and calculate ROI from different channels and different salespeople, and we’re not always sure that we’re accurate. There has to be a smarter way?”

While the arduous task of setting up integration and analytics dashboards may seem insurmountable, it is well worth the effort. Marketing and data management platforms not only centralize data for continuous optimization and increased sales numbers, but they also furnish marketers with a comprehensive snapshot of the customer and that customer’s journey throughout various touchpoints and funnel stages. 

• Do customers drop off at a specific stage in the funnel? Why?
• Do they engage with your brand on social media, yet purchase by clicking on your paid Google ad or by calling the phone number on your website? How do you know which channel was responsible for converting them?
• Which ads, channels, or events led to the highest sales numbers?

That knowledge can help you find out why at a glance, so you can make decisions  geared toward more conversions and fewer lost leads. Knowledge is power.

In today’s fractured media macrocosm, each consumer leaves in its wake a substantial trail of data as they interact with companies across various channels. Having a strong brand is key, so consumers can recognize and identify with your brand no matter where they find you. But just as importantly, marketers can benefit greatly from mining customer interaction and demographic data to learn which customer segments responded to which message on which channel at what point in the sales funnel. Thus, they can truly optimize their marketing spend and increase sales numbers. Once the data integration is complete, and the sales/marketing dashboard is set up, businesses like yours can focus on tailoring relevant (even dynamic) and effective content, at every touchpoint.

The end goal is to create a cycle of efficiency, where consumer actions and sales data help predict the actions of the next set of consumers. It creates a continuous loop of targeting, communication and optimization.

THE WHY

Consumers are not in one place anymore. They must be reached on a wide variety of mediums and social channels throughout each day. Investing in more than one channel increases your brand recognition, while monitoring the performance of all your channels enables you to know your audience and refine your strategies to maximize ROI.

Another thing to consider is that brand awareness on one channel can improve results on other channels. For example, placing video ads on YouTube can increase direct Google searches for your brand by 400-420%.

Always start with a clear, well-defined brand strategy — one that identifies who you are, the needs and values of your audience, and the unique ways in which you solve for them so that your brand image and messaging is clear across touchpoint. Remember, defining your brand gives you the opportunity to make a connection with your customers that they will remember forever — it will also inform HOW and WHERE you should be speaking to them. The biggest mistake home service companies make is thinking that their corporate ID and branding should strive to resemble other companies in their field…the truth is, you need to stand out, not blend in.

THE HOW

Segment and Personify Your Audience:

Creating buyer personas helps you understand in depth the various members of your target customer base, who may have vastly different personalities, and may respond to different marketing messages on different channels.

 In the old days of “Spray and Pray” marketing, we would send the same message to all channels, and wait to see who responds. Now, we can send custom-tailored messaging to resonate with every customer type, at every touch point and every stage, and garner analytic data in real time. For example, do you speak to a first-time home buyer the same way you speak to a commercial property manager, or a seasoned investor? Not likely.

If you begin crafting your branding and messaging before doing the audience research, segmentation and personification to gain a deep understanding of your customers, you’re likely going to have to go back and make costly, time-consuming changes that could have been avoided by strategizing around buyer personas 

Dismantle Your Silos: 

It’s practically impossible to garner relevant information from separate marketing channels, especially when any given contact can move across multiple touch points. It may take some time up front to migrate or integrate your marketing channels onto one data management platform, but it will increase ROI in the long run. And, there are many platforms that are already set up and ready to customize to your needs, so it’s easier to integrate today than it ever has been.

Identify and Integrate Touch Points:

The advantage of multichannel, end-to-end marketing is the ability to create a  number of touch points, which, when set up correctly, provide valuable data to help refine your strategy. Examples of touchpoints include your website(s), blog articles, social media platforms, surveys, email campaigns, mobile app engagement, etc. Being able to watch your prospects and customers move across these channels is key: it gives you the ability to gain even greater understanding of your buyer personas, and allows you to see which touch points are working, and which ones need refinement.

Measure Lead-To-Sale, not just Clicks:

The days of looking at how many impressions, clicks and likes you received, without knowing which ones led to actual sales are over. Data-driven marketing platforms allow you to follow you customer’s journey from the first ad they clicked all the way to the final sale (and even to upselling).

The numbers don’t lie: you can generate (and pay for) a high number of clicks from an ad that doesn’t convert whereas another ad may generate fewer clicks and higher sales numbers. Know the difference. That data is critical to streamlining efficiency and maximizing spend.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

If I Only Had a Hub. As video, mobile, voice, and other digital channels emerge as key marketing players, your digital management platform becomes your hub of end-to-end marketing, not only because your platform now keeps track of all your channels, but also because your platform is equipped to crunch consumer behavior data and sales data. It’s Big Data, in real time. Save time. Save money. Do more, faster. All the good stuff.

 Listen Before Speaking. If you were in a relationship, would you prefer a partner who listened to your needs and responded, or one that spurted out pre-conceived statements and spoke at you? Marketers have historically devoted too much effort on devising a single messaging approach based on how they want to be perceived by consumers. However, today’s consumers respond far better to brands who focus on what their needs and wants are, rather than what you want them to hear about you. One message or story may resonate with one or two of your five customer personas. How effective is that? Does it make more sense to deliver the right message to each persona, at the right time? 

Your data management platform allows you continually learn more about how your customers respond, and what their persona-specific needs and wants are, so you can reach them directly, and with the right voice. Go get ‘em.

The Tables Have Turned. The idea of brand loyalty has shifted, as consumers became accustomed to a decade of customer-centric messaging from established leaders of end-to-end marketing. Now, instead of customers being loyal to a brand, the successful brand shows its loyalty to a customer.

 The Three C’s of Data: Capture, Correlate and Capitalize. The soul of end-to-end marketing lies not only in using data platforms to capture customer behavior, but in creating a win-win relationship. Once where customers have a more personal, memorable engagement experience, and where companies can use the data from those engagements to fine-tune their efforts.

Automation Nation. Contrary to confusing signals from email marketing platforms that implemented rudimentary automation features, true marketing automation has little to do with email. The top marketing automation platforms are data management platforms themselves, allowing a central command center to deploy your social, organic, paid, and content marketing campaigns, in addition to email marketing and sales CRM marketing. 

Reviews It or Lose It. According to recent surveys, 93% of consumers say product reviews influence their purchasing decisions, and 85% trust online reviews of local businesses as much as they trust personal recommendations. If you don’t have a plan or tool in place to collect and scrutinize reviews for your company, you could be missing out on opportunities for new business. 

To Bot Or Not To Bot: ChatBots utilize AI and NLP (natural language processing), to quickly assist your site visitors either instead of, or while they wait for, a customer service or sales representative. While not a replacement for human interaction, a well-structured chatbot can streamline and improve engagement, leading to more and happier customers. 

The A/B Sees: A/B or Split variation testing can help optimize results from campaigns and site pages. The numbers don’t lie, and the results from A/B testing can be dramatic. In some cases, repositioning items on a page or slight changes to verbiage can show significant increases in traffic, engagement, and/or conversions. 

In Summary

There are more marketing channels than ever before, and pay-per-click has made all of those channels highly competitive for businesses in the Home Service Industries. Consumer attention spans are growing shorter, as they are inundated with ads everywhere they look, and are used to being able to obtain whatever they need with one click. 

Today’s data platforms integrate and measure all of your business’s marketing channels, as well as allow you to deliver customized messaging to various customer segments.The best part is, they are making it easier and easier for small and mid-sized businesses to have the same data integration and analytics once afforded by only enterprise-level organizations.  This sets a level playing field for businesses to attract, nurture, service, and retain customers, in the most cost-effective way possible.

by Androniki Bossonis