CMA experts in branding, website design, digital marketing, content marketing, public relations and social media revealed their marketing best practices for 2020. In last year’s marketing best practices for 2019, they shared the significance of measurement and delivering ROI.

As you head into 2020, consider these best practices to guide and build your marketing strategies in the new year. A common trend throughout every best practice is the importance of personalized marketing. Although personalization has been an imperative marketing component, CMA predicts that in 2020, personalized marketing will become even more developed through linking data and content, while respecting a customer’s privacy.

Following are recent Evergage trends in personalization survey report findings:

• 98 percent of marketing professionals agree that personalization helps advance customer relationships, with 70 percent claiming that it has a “strong” or “extremely strong” impact.
• 85 percent state that their customers expect a personalized experience.
• 90 percent report a measurable lift from their personalization efforts.

Here are best practices in each marketing area:

Lynn Powell, Managing Director of Marketing

Branding

Marketing Best Practice: Create an Omnichannel Customer Experience

The solution to branding in 2020 is to nurture and continue to inspire. The best branding is about creating an omnichannel customer experience across all interactions and touchpoints, along with delivering on your brand promise. This will nurture and build trust with your customers because you know their interests and habits. In turn, the best of them will eventually become your influencers to help grow your brand. There’s nothing better than your brand growing organically and your customers feeling camaraderie with your brand values.

The good news is that marketers’ approach to omnichannel personalization is progressing, which also was cited in the Evergage report. The ability to connect to different marketing channels is essential for omnichannel personalization. However, just three percent of organizations reported having all channels connected in order to offer a completely cohesive, personalized experience from one channel to the next.

Here are more ways to incorporate this branding best practice:

• Know your customer and connect – Businesses need to know their customer extremely well and not just segment. Instead, as part of your marketing strategy, personalize your marketing outreach to deliver a seamless experience across all channels. This will show your customer that you not only know them, but you care. On top of that, your brand needs to feel connected to your consumers. The key is to be authentic in your outreach.
• Align content and tone – Integrate these into each stage in the customer buy cycle (awareness, consideration, decision).
• Don’t lose sight of your brand – Voice, principles and promise has to come through in all of your different channels and outreach. Be sure not to fall into the trap of getting lost in the weeds with market segments and customer data for personalization.
• Balance personalization and privacy – It’s imperative to find a balance between personalization and what’s considered privacy invading interactions. Although customers want and expect a personalized experience, there’s a delicate balance. According to Gartner, understand privacy principles and requirements such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, as well as personalization based on personal data from legal counsel, business advisory or other education avenues.
• Analyze, document, monitor and constantly improve – When you find what works, continue to go through this process.

Bob Weber, president of Weblications, a CMA company

Website Design

Marketing Best Practice: Use Web Personalization to Increase Conversion and Engagement

If you want to stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening in website design in 2020, along with increasing conversion and engagement, use web personalization to create a customized experience for customers and prospects. This approach empowers you to give visitors unique experiences that are tailored to them based on their location, interests, behavior and other characteristics. It also results in a more meaningful experience.

Also stated in the Evergage report, marketers’ satisfaction with website personalization has the highest correlation with overall personalization satisfaction (52 percent). In other words, the more satisfied marketers are with website personalization, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their personalization efforts overall. This puts a lot of pressure on you, to make sure your website personalization efforts are on target.

Here are ways to incorporate this web design best practices

• Integrate personalized content – Your website needs to contain different types of content, in various formats, so it has the ability to serve your visitors with a personalized experience, while showing the value your business can provide them. Some might prefer to consume their content through video, others through webinars and blogs. Be sure to stock your website with content in various formats, to accommodate those preferences and make meaningful interactions. In addition, include key messages and vary content topics to appeal to your different audiences and what would be relevant to them, based on their behavior at that time.
• Provide a seamless landing page experience – Provide your users with a seamless and extended personalized experience by carrying personalization through to your landing pages. When a user clicks from your social media network or online ad, your website needs to supply that user with a targeted landing page. Targeting can include interest, demographic information, location, etc.

You also can increase conversions through developing landing pages that:

• Are visually attractive
• Coordinate with marketing campaigns
• Establish a brand’s unique selling proposition
• Have social proof
• Include contact information
• Contain a strong and single call to action

There are tools to help you build high converting land pages including Unbounce and Instapage.

• Consider a personalization tool – To make web personalization an integrated part of your marketing campaigns, consider implementing web personalization software. If you’re a small business, don’t be alarmed by this option. Although web personalization software was expensive when it arrived on the scene and only was available to large businesses, today there are many good options for small businesses. Tools that provide personalization with web analytics include Adobe Target, IBM Product Recommendations and Google Optimize 360.

Dan Beldowicz, Director of Business Development

Digital Marketing

Marketing Best Practice: Know Your Buyer’s Journey and Personalize

We Are Social and Hootsuite’s latest collection of Global Digital 2019 reports reveals that internet users are growing by an average of more than one million new users every day, with all of the original ‘Next Billion Users’ now online.

With this many rapidly growing users, you have an enormous opportunity to reach your customers and prospects through digital marketing. When approaching digital marketing in 2020, stop focusing on the tactics and start concentrating on the customer. Knowing your target audience and their buyer’s journey will allow you to more effectively target your digital marketing efforts.

Here are more ways to incorporate this digital marketing best practice:

• Add personalized marketing – Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” Remembering names is essential in forming and strengthening relationships, as well as establishing rapport with individuals.
  • Personalization is the next stage in marketing segmentation. It encompasses collecting data related to your customers and developing custom marketing experiences that target specific types of customers through content. Add personalized marketing to blog posts, email marketing campaigns and more.

• Optimize your funnel – Segmentation funnels are producing for all marketers! A digital marketing funnel includes the buying stages a prospect will go through, starting with no brand awareness to ending with becoming a customer. Using this funnel, businesses with a digital presence can get leads and increase sales.
  • When building your digital marketing funnel, optimize each step to have the highest conversions. Learn your customers’ needs and give it to them. Neil Patel reported that companies who properly nurture their leads see a 450 percent increase in qualified prospects. Those who take the time to nurture and grow those customer relationships, see 50 percent more sales at a 33 percent lower cost.

• Implement hyper-targeted advertising – Targeted advertising campaigns deliver the best ROI. An ad that’s precisely curated for a specific audience segment, based on their wants and behaviors will be more effective and yield higher conversion rates. You can achieve that through delivering content that matches your target audience’s preferences. Employing this strategy will ensure that the audience is getting the exact content they need, at that time, to increase your conversion rate.

Kenneth Hitchner, Director of Content Strategy

Content Marketing

Marketing Best Practice: Frame Content to Match Your Buyer’s Journey Stages

To elevate your content marketing strategy in 2020, you must create brand awareness, build reputation and nurture prospects through your sales funnel. In addition, create content that’s high-quality and helpful to your target audience—whether it’s to educate, entertain or a mix.

Public Relations Today reported on a recent MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute study entitled, B2B Content Marketing 2020: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends. Although 79 percent of respondents rated their organization’s content marketing as extremely or very successful, only 41 percent said that they have a documented content strategy—leaving room for opportunity in this area.

Here are more ways to incorporate this content marketing best practice:

• Take segmentation to the next level – Content personalization is the process of collecting and analyzing data about your target audience to deliver relevant content that meets their interests and needs. Segmentation, which is targeting using categories such as gender, industry, geography, age, etc., is the most popular type of content personalization.
  • Take segmentation to the next level by using personas to generate relevant content. Also, you can connect with sales activity by framing content based on stages of the buyer’s journey. Despite the importance of this buyer’s journey, only 48 percent of all respondents in the MarketingProfs study have created content designed for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Consider the best content formats – The goal is for your target audience to build a relationship with your brand, products or services during the different stages. Consider the various content formats (blog posts, infographics, webinars, white papers, checklists, video blogs, press releases, case studies) and which ones will compel a deeper commitment from your targeted prospects.
• Personalize content for different platforms – To increase engagement and loyalty, besides boost conversions, personalize your content for different platforms. They can include social networks and email. By using this strategy, you’ll also deliver content in which individuals already expressed an interest.

• Refine content personalization – Finally, continue to refine your content personalization strategies. Hone your data collection processes and audience research, to enhance the way you target your customers and prospects, to lead them down the sales funnel.

The content marketing campaign that CMA implemented for Amerlux is a good example of a successful lead-generation program. Amerlux is a design-and-manufacture company that creates lighting solutions. CMA produced content in a variety of formats, including blogs, to drive prospects down the sales funnel. Because this campaign was focused on moving prospects down the funnel, compared to general brand awareness campaigns, CMA developed a content creation plan that framed portions of the content in a manner that mimicked a buyer’s journey and executed it.

Topline results of this award-winning campaign included driving 14,508 unique visitors to Amerlux.com, as well as 9,838 individuals to the “Locate Your Sales Rep” page on the Amerlux site. Additionally, 348 people provided their email addresses.

Kelly Potts, Social Media Specialist

Social Media

Marketing Best Practice: Implement personalization and consumer psychology

You can stand out and connect to prospects and customers on social media in 2020, by implementing personalization and consumer psychology. Businesses can use personalization on social media in a few ways. In addition to paid campaigns, such as remarketing or messenger bots, there also are organic, non-paid methods to give your social media accounts a more personalized feel. One way is through consumer psychology and market research. By understanding your audience’s likes and dislikes, you’ll be able to create content that strongly resonates with them.

Here are more ways to incorporate this social media best practice:

• Spend time understanding your ideal customer and what they enjoy seeing on social media. Are there specific words, phrases, designs, colors or content themes that they seem to like most?
• Utilize that information to craft unique content that will resonate and make them feel understood.
• Take the time to respond to comments in a personalized way. Simply addressing the commenter by name can go a long way! Interacting with customers one-on-one, as often as possible, can make your brand stand out in the social world of one-to-many marketing.

CMA implemented a social media campaign for its customer, New Jersey State Nurses Association (NJSNA). NJSNA represents the interests of the state’s 110,000 Registered Nurses, advances the profession of nursing and advocates on behalf of nurses and consumers.

After analyzing top NJSNA posts, CMA noticed two big trends:

1) Its audience engages with inspirational quotes, geared toward nurses.

2) The audience loves the color purple.

CMA started to test out more posts, which incorporated these findings, and immediately saw results. One post, in particular, that followed this formula of a nurse-related quote on a purple background generated 23 times more impressions, 44 times more engagements and 34 times more clicks than average.

 NJSNA gets results from personalized social media posts using quotes and the color purple

There’s a lot of room for improvement in 2020, when it comes to personalization across all marketing tactics. The Evergage report stating that less than a fifth (18 percent) of marketing professionals reporting that they are “very” or “extremely” confident that they have a successful strategy for personalization is further validation.

The good news is that although only 16 percent are “very” or “extremely” satisfied with the level of personalization in their marketing efforts, 97 percent plan to maintain or increase their personalization budgets. Are you going to be jumping on that bandwagon?

Do you want to learn more about how you can intensify your marketing efforts through personalization in 2020? Contact us today, to get the conversation started.