What are the top 3 things marketers must do for increasing revenue?
Marketers must do the following to increase revenue :
1) Increase “Differentiation” between brand and its competitors: Like us (marketers), consumers are struggling with our complex and fast-moving world. Brands that offer instant meaning or clarification from the noise are the ones that will win in today’s frenetic environment. This means marketers must seek absolute clarity about what makes their brand meaningfully different to their consumers, and then ensure that this differentiation runs through the customer experience lifecycle. Unfortunately, many marketers do not know what their brand stands for and resort to poor marketing communications to look busy.
2) Use Content Marketing: The key is not to call the decision maker, but to have the decision maker call you! I like to think of “in-bound marketing” as the new “outbound marketing”. Earlier when we had a product or service to sell, how did we get the word out? We tried press releases, TV ads, print ads, cold calls, banner ads, display hoardings and any other means we could afford. Now, people have switched off and are no longer paying attention to the thousands of marketing messages that they come across every day. Content marketing means getting found by prospective customers rather than trying to push your product or service to the uninterested masses. This comes with benefits like re-qualified leads, lower marketing costs, higher conversion rates, higher customer satisfaction and lower customer acquisition rates.
3) Practise Agile Marketing: : Market opportunities are like windows of opportunities which open and shut and ceteris paribus, the winners are the ones who move fast and capitalize on opportunities earlier than others. Agile marketing seems hard for most legacy marketers who are used to getting more time from concept to market. Agile, if practiced right, can help increase revenue by improving productivity, transparency, prioritization, measurability, customer satisfaction and competitiveness.
A marketing tool that you suggest for improving profitability?
Here are some concrete techniques to help you improve your margins over the long-term:
1. Velocity matters. Going back to my last point about agile marketing, the faster your turnaround time from idea to execution, the more likely you will be to generate momentum and capture opportunities. This in turn means improved profit margins. So think about how can you speed up the process? Are there steps you can eliminate? Ways to shorten parts of the process? Can you automate, template, or pre-do steps? Can you script out your linkages between people and departments to speed up the process? Remember, the faster you make the cycle, the better your margins will be, all things being equal. What also helps is using collaboration technology tools like trello, asana and slack.
2. Up-sell and cross-sell: When we increase the amount sold to our customers at one time, we’ll improve our margins because we’ll be increasing the purchase velocity and therefore lowering the cost of sale in terms of overhead burden. So how can we increase the average unit of sale per customer, sell higher priced offerings, offer larger units of purchase, cross-sell complementary products or services etc. All this allows us to amortize our marketing cost over higher revenue hence grows our profit margin. Some of the useful analytical tools are : Omniture, Clicktale , MixPanel , R , SAS etc. or even custom dashboards on SFDC.com or Eloqua.
3. Retention Management: Marketers should do all they can to keep clients actively purchasing from the company by analysing the most common ‘drop points’ in the client’s purchase history/journey. Can marketers strategically reinforce our differentiation systems across the customer journey to reduce that attrition? The lifetime value of a customer is far higher than the amount you spend on acquiring a customer, so use retention and churn analytics tools heavily.
Your Secret sauce for magical customer experience?
For too long customer experience thinking has been just about touch-points. That still matters, but the secret sauce lies is the whole experience. Companies need to combine top-down judgement-driven evaluations and bottoms-up data-driven analysis to identify key journeys, and then engage the entire organization in re-designing the customer experience. This requires shifting from siloed to cross-functional approaches and changing from a touch-point to a journey orientation. This is secret to a magical customer experience. For example, in HCL Technologies we look at the new joinees first 90 days’ experience and re-design all key touch-points leading to the award-winning program “Fare Well”.
Profile: Apurva Chamaria is the Vice President and Head of Corporate Marketing for HCL Technologies. Apurva Chamaria is going to be speaker at Great Indian IT Marketing Summit & Awards 2017.
The post IT Marketing Leader: Apurva Chamaria, VP & Head of Corporate Marketing, HCL Technologies appeared first on Paul Writer.