The seven habits of effective marketers
There are seven key habits that are common to almost all effective marketing organisations, according a report by Eloqua and Econsultancy, based on the 2010 Planning and Budgeting Survey.
The report, entitled '7 Habits of Effective Marketing Organisations', was compiled to develop a better understanding of how organisations are currently thinking about investments in their marketing programmes, systems, and people.
The study found that the top seven habits of the most advanced marketers currently include:
- Establish benchmarks and encourage oversight With more revenue responsibility than ever before, marketers have to attain C-suite buy-in and must also use new technology to help establish measurement standards.
- Retain to acquire Customer retention metrics are vital for planning processes and marketers must pay attention to retention by increasing the information exchange between retention and acquisition teams and by placing values on retained customers.
- Balance brand and direct marketing Marketers should strike a balance between direct and brand ads and traditional and digital, and when it comes to the budgeting process, companies should use digital in conjunction with traditional marketing to enhance response rates.
- Target and publish for budget season Content marketing is key for companies with longer sales cycles and branding efforts should be timed to coincide with corporate budget season (which is August through October for 40% of companies).
- Hire and train for tomorrow As more organisations are focused on data-driven marketing, the necessary skill sets are expanding and evolving and the three biggest shifts concern the intersection of marketing with data and technology, the increased demand for content creation and management, and the need for improved user experience.
- Be ready for the upturn With hopes of an economic turnaround, 56% of respondent companies are planning for a larger budget in 2011 compared to 2010.
- Take advantage of technology Companies adopting the right marketing technologies will have a competitive advantage and newer technologies such as marketing automation and marketing resource management are quickly growing with a number of companies planning implementations or evaluating the technology.
The full report has been made available for free download from Eloqua's web site - click here (free registration required).
For additional information: · Visit Econsultancy at http://econsultancy.com · Visit Eloqua at http://www.eloqua.com
