For us marketers, the holiday season is like an endurance sporting event. From the dog days of summer, through Halloween and Black Friday, and all the way to Hanukkah, Christmas, and the New Year, it’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint. If you are to be successful in your efforts to push harder and further than ever before this holiday season, you need to be prepared to put in the preparation and hard work before, during, and even after the big event. So how do you prepare for the busiest […]
The customer journey can be a long and arduous one, calling at many ports before the decision to buy is finally made. As marketers, it’s important that we map the entire journey so we can understand which marketing touchpoints are vital navigation aids and which are merely signposts on an already clearly defined route. Marketing attribution helps us make sense of those customer journeys and optimize future voyages. Marketing attribution used to be a simple job. Full credit for a conversion was typically given to the first or last touchpoint, […]
Generating leads in the past may have looked like cold calls or emails to customers who have never been exposed to your brand. However, these tactics are proving to be outdated in many industries especially because there isn’t much solid ground to work from. Instead, marketers are finding that the best strategy for generating leads is to meet them where they’re at. This means creating chance encounters through online ads, carving out paths through clever content, or using social media to attract interest. When you do this, you’ll find that […]
When a business invests in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution like Microsoft Dynamics, it invests in the organization’s smooth running and efficiency. A well-maintained CRM will give everyone in the business, who needs access to customer data relating to just about any function, the right information at the right time. Conversely, a poorly maintained CRM can be a disaster. To understand what a healthy CRM strategy looks like, we should perhaps first take a look at some bad CRM habits that lead to the availability of multiple versions of […]
By Marie Wiese | President of Marketing CoPilot How Can I Navigate Out of the Unknown? As marketers and business people, we want to believe that we know and can identify everyone in our target market. But the reality is that we quite frankly, cannot. Think of your target market as a continuum that spans from unknown, to slightly known, to well known, and then qualified. The question we ask ourselves when looking at this image is: “How can we turn those unknown people in our target market into sales-qualified […]