In this day and age, marketing and tech can work hand in hand to achieve many of your startup’s goals. When it comes to leveraging customer data, having them join forces could mean major growth for your business. But how do you go about doing this?
We asked ten entrepreneurs what their best practice for bringing together technology and marketing department to make use of the amount of customer data businesses are now able to collect. Check out their answers below and keep in mind that cooperation can go a long way:
Sit at the Same Table
In today’s day and age, the tasks carried out by marketing require tech, design and content, which means people from those departments ought to be working, even sitting together. Our marketing operations team rotates where they sit, so they can be physically close to our revenue and tech teams. This, in turn, helps us utilize our marketing tech stack to leverage the data we have on our customers, prospects and leads.
– Shane Snow of Contently
Share the Same Goals
Make sure both your marketing and technology departments have shared goals. Shared goals help align priorities and facilitate open communication. If departments are working in silos, neither team will be able to fully leverage customer data to grow the business.
– Chuck Cohn of Varsity Tutors
Work in Sync
Technology and marketing go hand in hand with one another. Your marketing department and technology department should always be working in sync to reach business goals. Today’s society is technology driven, therefore marketing has to be as well. If you have a team that can bridge the gap between departments to work together, the possibilities are endless.
– Phil Laboon of Eyeflow Internet Marketing
Agree on Metrics
Your online marketing efforts are only as good as the analytics your technology department uses as measurement. When you have both marketing and technology on the same page as far as what metrics are most important and how to measure them, you can better gauge the success of your marketing campaigns. You can make changes on the fly based on these metrics to help generate better results.
– Nicole Munoz of Start Ranking Now
Segment Buyers
The old saying, ‘It costs five times more to acquire a customer than to retain a customer,’ is why your technology and marketing department must work together to segment customers based on past buying behavior. Tech should segment buyers who have not purchased in the last 30, 60 and 90 days. Marketing should incentivize according to the latency of buying in order to drive repeat purchases.
– Kristopher Jones of LSEO.com
Use Visual Communication
Quality visual communication can make meaning out of mountains of data. Use graphs, charts, infographics, motion graphics, and text-light presentations to draw useful conclusions and discover trends in your customer data. Then use visual assets to connect with them on social and online, since today’s consumers are much more likely to engage with and share video and photos.
– Amy Balliett of Killer Infographics
Work With a Database
Have the technical department set up a database, spreadsheet, or some kind of regularly updated repository of data that the marketing team can browse. If marketing only ever asks about specific pieces of data each time, then they’ll only ever get information about what they already know. Having open access makes it possible for new, spontaneous trends to be discovered and acted upon.
– Roger Lee of Captain401
Meet Weekly
We have weekly tech meetings that include members of our marketing team. Our product marketing manager creates weekly meeting notes in our company wiki. We also use AppBoy, which allows us to send personalized updates via push notifications and email campaigns to our users. Its dashboard allows our marketing team to access our user database and see custom user attributes.
– Brian David Crane of Caller Smart Inc.
Fully Integrate
For us, these are no longer two separate departments. Technology and marketing, for our company at least, are one in the same, as they are so intrinsically tied to one another and rely on one another’s data and input to make effective meaningful changes and execute successful strategies.”
– Blair Thomas of First American Merchant
Work With a Liaison
Your technology and marketing departments should have a closer relationship than ever before. I’ve already started to experiment with having a liaison employee who works with both teams to align different goals and really take advantage of the things that each side learns. For large companies, it may be helpful to have a team working to bring those insights together into stronger goals.
– Adam Steele of The Magistrate