HubSpot was founded throughout a time when people were below constant attack from aggressive outbound marketing tactics.
I’m certain nobody misses the undesirable ads, spam emails, and cold calls that utilized to interrupt their day in the mid-00s.
Ad retargeting was not a thing, so we all needed to settle for repeatedly seeing exactly the same ads for products there were absolutely no interest in.
Marketing is promoting a lot since then. Thankfully.
Nowadays, companies have the ability to develop appealing advertising campaigns that complement their particular inbound strategies and speak directly to their audiences’ needs. The concept of journey-based advertising continues to be widely adopted and marketers can now create customized content for individuals at every stage from the buyer’s journey.
Targeting has become more sophisticated, meaning that advertisements are now less interruptive and much more informative — so advanced, in fact , that that we now take for granted the quality of the advertisements we get served within our Instagram feeds and Youtube . com videos.
Dare we state it — in some cases, the ad suggestions are actually really useful: “Oh, hey ad for that brand new running watch that I didn’t know I needed but now am obsessed with. ” There is still a lot of bad advertising and below average marketing out there, but it’s important to recognize just how far we’ve come.
But , as marketing capabilities have evolved, also has the digital landscape. Which has created a host of new challenges for marketers.
Cutting With the Noise
There’s more selection online now than ever before, and exactly what was previously helpful has, oftentimes, become noise. Where i was once served two advertisements a day for a new jacket, we’re now served 22. Where there was once 3 restaurants in the local area providing takeaway menus, there’s now 30.
In 2020, this particular trend has accelerated because of COVID-19, as more and more businesses possess moved online and added to the ever-increasing competition for interest. This increased volume of sound is causing consumers in order to tune out, and customer acquisition costs to go up. And marketers are struggling in making an impact.
To overcome these new challenges, marketers need a new approach — one that allows them to adapt the way they advertise to how consumers want to buy.
Today, the buyer’s trip is rarely linear. Consumers now interact with brands upon laptops and smartphones and via social media, websites, and third-party influencers on the path to the purchase. And they still anticipate a consistent brand experience all through.
Nowadays, the only way advertisers can break through the noise on the web and deliver a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints is by using extreme relevance: both in terms of content and location.
Relevant messaging is the key in order to grabbing consumers’ attention, interesting them, and guiding these to the next stage of the potential buyer’s journey. The first step towards providing this is meeting the audience where they are. With over four billion people globally now working from home, consumers’ buying behavior and content usage habits are changing rapidly.
In the U. S., keeping home has led to the 60% increase in the amount of articles consumed — Americans are now watching roughly 12 hours of media content each day, according to Nielsen data. Knowing where an audience will be paying attention is as important as knowing exactly what messaging is likely to resonate.
Once a marketer knows where their target audience is usually spending their time, the next challenge is to create advertisement content that addresses their needs in an engaging method and is tailored to whichever stage of the buyer’s journey they are at.
For example , in case a prospect is at the attract stage, an ad in order to them become more familiar with a brand name and core value proposition would probably perform a lot better than a niche ad that illustrates a specific new feature. That type of ad would likely work better with audiences that are a lot closer to a purchase decision and comparing the feature sets of different products.
However , most companies today are battling to deliver the type of relevant, appealing ad content that resonates with consumers. And, generally, the cause can be traced to a disconnection between their own marketing, website, and sales efforts.
When these elements aren’t working in unison, it is extremely difficult for internet marketers to get a clear view of where prospects are spending their time and which usually stage the buyer’s trip they are at. This can make it virtually impossible for them to provide relevant messaging and leaves them with little choice yet to resort to those out dated outbound tactics I described earlier.
In 2021, the key to delivering better marketing lies in marketers’ ability to unlock the data at their disposal and leverage it to deliver hyper-relevant messaging and a unified buying encounter.
At HubSpot, we call it up ‘CRM-powered advertising. ‘
A Data-Driven Approach to Advertising
CRM-powered advertising enables marketers to produce more relevant, engaging ads for prospects in three key ways:
- By providing them with up-to-date customer data, which allows these to understand their audiences’ choices and purchase intent.
- By giving all of them reliable reporting based on alternative customer data, which provides information into what’s working plus what’s not.
- By allowing them to automate their ads based on live CRM data, which allows them to continually deliver relevant ads as potential clients move to different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Let’s take a look at an example.
State you’re a demand generation specialist working at a B2B company. Competition is rising in your industry and get seen a decline in the number of qualified leads originating from your ads each month. You know that a more targeted and personalized approach is needed. And you also turn to CRM-powered advertising.
Being a first step, you develop a different campaign for each phase of the buyer’s journey. For your attract stage, for example , you use data in your CRM to produce a lookalike audience based on your own happiest customers. This will be your own target audience. You know that your industry’s security features are a essential differentiator in the market so you generate ads that highlight that will aspect of your value proposition.
Because the target audience you’ve created is reflective of your greatest customers, you get a high proportion of click-throughs. This network marketing leads prospects towards the next phase of the buyer’s journey, where they get the opportunity to download an ebook to learn more about your company’s products and services. Your software gives you the ability to make custom fields on the down load form, which helps you to gain more granular preference information, and ultimately, get to know your prospects better.
You have set up your campaign to immediately route these new results in your sales team, and because you will absolutely working out of a shared CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT, you see a number of prospects move into the “demo” stage of the journey.
Again, using your CRM data, you sync these lifecycle stages to the display network you’re using, which usually automatically begins to serve a brand new set of ads to prospects based on the next stage of the journey. This allows you to deliver hyper-relevant messaging that address the pain points that are specific to prospects who are for the verge of making a buy decision, such as social evidence from happy customers.
As deals close, you then use attribution reporting to see specifically which new customers engaged together with your ads and report to your own leadership team on the variety of deals your CRM-powered technique influenced.
How to Get Started With CRM-Powered Advertising
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is built to enable marketers to launch CRM-powered advertising campaigns plus deliver a seamless experience for prospects — through the first time they see an ad to the moment they become a customer and further than.
It offers ads tools that will allow marketers to build significantly segmented audiences, serve different ads for different stages from the buyer’s journey, and exactly measure the performance of every marketing campaign — all informed simply by rich CRM data.
Marketing has come a long way since the times of interruptive, irrelevant, and irritating content that once focused our screens. A new era is unfolding — a single in which consumers expect appropriate messaging across every touchpoint and in which companies should find new ways to reduce through the ever-increasing volume of noise online.
A CRM-powered advertising strategy, driven by a CRM platform built with this purpose in mind, empowers marketers not to only gain deeper information into their customers’ needs, but to turn those insights directly into engaging content with the potential in order to delight prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey.