It is the time of year when entrepreneurs reflect on the year that is last and gear themselves up .
As we emerge blinking and bleary-eyed in the holiday season into 2018, it’s not just a situation of focusing on ‘what is new’. Part of developing and growing as a company demands an analysis of failures and your successes .
You take together with you what worked and discard what did not.
There are in fact quite a few crucial martech topics from 2017 that marketers should remember well into the coming months.
The resurgence of email
Email marketing is by no means the answer to every comms campaign, we have seen a far more savvy use of email in the latter part of 2017. And also this resurgence of the channel is set to continue.
Marketers bringing value, and are saying less. They’re ensuring more coherent messaging over a period of time, and participating even though.
This is only because technology exists to make this process occur — efficiently and fast — so why do it any other way?
Marketers are slowly realising the function of email is to instruct and inform! So 2018 is the time to find out what it is really capable of.
Kicking out the average
To the Chartered Institute of Marketing, I spoke in ancient 2017 about this being the year that the livelihood kicked out the average, and this prediction was fulfilled.
Entrepreneurs have been bogged down with second rate solutions
There’s been a trend to ‘get on and do stuff’. And, from a technology perspective, entrepreneurs have killed a lot of the sophistication that previously existed in their usage.
This shift has been crucial, particularly because the martech stack is constantly getting bigger. And for too long, marketers are bogged down with second rate alternatives that do not generate enough return or which are either too expensive.
It should be recalled that ROI is influenced by both the cost of the campaign and the revenue yield. Keeping it simple so that marketers can perform their jobs quicker, slicker and is therefore.
Iterating journeys
Marketing was about evolution rather than revolution, together with journeys reviewed and established as a starting point, benchmarked, iterated and refined according learnings along the way.
This approach to automating, creating and assessing customer comms journeys will stay legitimate long into beyond and 2018. There’s never been a greater demand for agility, and together with all the speed of tastes, behaviour and consumer need set to get even faster next year, marketers cannot afford to have a step.
Focusing on marketing metrics which matter
After my Marketing Tech site predicted how large machine learning could be in 2017, it was about this time last year. And, as the year has unfolded, there has been a switch to center.
Open and click rates are Only vanity numbers
Because, in fact rates are nothing but vanity numbers, that is — they’re so far removed from a business’ main point that they’re almost irrelevant. They won’t catch attention. But stats that are more meaningful can be uncovered by automation engines.
As we proceed into 2018 marketers that have not yet shifted their attention that is analytic will need to begin honing in on the data at their hands. Then take action if it’s possible to report on participation section lead dents and expansion. If mapped correctly metrics will probably begin to mirror net gain inbound enquiries and, ultimately. An click speed is relatively worthless!
GDPR
It wouldn’t be possible without touching on the hype that has been the General Data Protection 23, to look back on 2017.
The headlines this past season have been dominated by the data security overhaul that was imminent, along with the new ruling is due to take effect! However, the level of conversation surrounding GDPR reflects the scale of the impact and the changes they are likely to have on the marketing profession.
The fact that people are speaking about GDPR highlights the fact that, thus far, there’s been lots of scaremongering small practical chat and, sadly advice offered. Entrepreneurs are led to believe that this is going to be.
Of course marketers will be caught out if they are still blindly spam customers and prospects with irrelevant and reckless content. However, for everyone else, GDPR will encourage believing. It’ll give entrepreneurs the last push they will need to make certain they only distribute timely, relevant and personalised content to their connections, and it will make them think twice about the tech they use to manage their advertising efforts — is it GDPR-compliant?
As with most areas of business, prevention is much easier — and cheaper — than treatment, so the opportunity to get actually clued up about GDPR is now. There.
