ABOUT THIS ARTICLE ON ANALYTICS:

This article explains how Analytics could help you make smarter business decisions, create a responsive marketing strategy and align marketing to sales.

B2B buyers' behaviours are changing

We all change. It's part of life and business. When the stakes are high in business to business transactions, pay close attention to how this market is changing.  Depending on product complexity and market maturity, today's B2B buyers might be anywhere from 66% to 90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to the vendor (Forrester Research).

There’s a very powerful force out there in Modern Marketing and it’s called Data. The advantages are huge if you collect data, apply analytics and interpret insights. Analysis should be a part of every single thing you do with your marketing. Anything you do - any piece of content you create, any campaign you launch, or any marketing action you undertake - should be analysed.

Content in the future of marketing is intended to elevate the brand and effectively motivate customers to move to their next stage of lifecycle FASTER than they would their own.

Forrester Research says that customers are into 90% of their buying journey before they contact a vendor. This means that BEFORE the customer makes the initial contact, the sales department would need to depend on marketing to engineer the customers’ journey, to entice, guide and provide the necessary information to steer them to a decision.

The first contact with your customers may be a visual one. Creative visual artists and videographers can help you stand out visually. However, apart from the aesthetics, you need some "meat" in your content so you need writers to share knowledge about your business in your social posts, emails and blogs.

The Future Of Marketing

The Future of Marketing is where marketing (visual teams included) and communications teams come together to create a content-driven ecosystem that will elevate the brand and effectively motivate customers to move to their next stage of lifecycle FASTER than they would their own.

Basically, modern marketing in our times is multi-faceted and cannot stand alone. All your departments have to work together to convey a consistent brand message.

Damn right it would! I am talking about Marketing Analytics which is NOT just web or social analytics and is beyond specific marketing metrics. Most importantly, I am referring to Integrated Marketing Analytics which is usually more people-centric, featuring the prospect, lead or customer as the unit of focus.

 “The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years,” said Erick Qualman, notable author of Digital Library and Socialnomics. I couldn’t agree more. Social media has exploded in such a manner since it started in its simplest form in 1979 like UseNet which allowed users to communicate through a virtual newsletter (source: Brett Borders and Drew Hendriks). Perhaps the Millennials will remember ICQ in the mid-90’s?

Working with a restaurant chain for B2C PR, there were always specific food reviewers that we target for our client. It’s been known that every time a positive food review is posted by these reviewers, the restaurants would be packed for at least 2 to 4 weeks straight. That’s the power of positive PR coverage.

Neuromarketing made simple

Neuromarketing refer to the commercial application of neuroscience technologies and insights to drive business further. Such technologies include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and electroencephalography (EEG) to access the “pleasure centre” of the brain and let marketers know how people are really responding to their work.

I talk to small business owners everyday and tell me if you're feeling this too.

1. Your business has become a job which does not pay well.
2. You are not attracting the right customers so they’re not buying your products
3. You are not commanding the price that you deserve
4. You are not delivering to customers what you promise

It sounds like you may have a broken business model. If so, the best marketing in the world will not get you better business or better profit in the long term, except a whole heap of frustration.

Every marketer is expected to be highly creative and to create highly creative content. For several years, there was a huge hype on Content Marketing which Content Marketing Institute defines as ‘a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.’