With the social media looming larger than life on all marketing communication activities, everyone needs a hand with making messaging work. There are tools available that will perhaps take your marketing message to a better destination than before. These tools may not be able to harness the power of social media, but can certainly guide and direct on how to make it work in your favor.
The foremost parameter of a relevant marketing message is its ability to hit the right audience at the right spot. For this, the knowledge of customer requirement and market preferences is paramount. Fortunately, we do have tools and technologies that can help determine and track increasingly demanding customer preferences. These are technologies that help make sense of this new upside down playing field where the customer is not only the king, but also the state. And these tools that help marketing teams to cut a clear path through the chaos see the light ahead and make a beeline for it. Analytics and Big Data are the straw that marketing professionals in today’s business dynamics cling to, in order to find some semblance of sanity in the ocean of preferences out there. They help churn information into actionable products and services that will meet the demands of the discerning customer. Sellers today need to work in this completely gutted playing field and these tools are extremely handy in helping them float. And hopefully not become debris!
In these information overload times, a marketing team should target at actionables which are both part of marketing and sales. These are the activities where the new age technologies and tools can be of immense support, since messaging to elected customers is very critical. This is the best opportunity to make a message consistent across channels and message points – to clients, resources, stakeholders, analysts, and even potential vendors. For a message to make an impact, consistency is extremely critical, and this is a good strategy to maintain that.
However, the jackpot is far from being won. There are still a large number of gaps that ensure all data cannot translate into actionable points. There is still a slip that needs to be covered, and as a result, even with tools and technology to aid us, we are still some distance from driving social media and using its mammoth reach to touch a tangible goal. Along with technology, we still need a healthy mix of traditional marketing methods to drive our messaging decisions.
With limited help in the face of ever burgeoning social media functionalities, we need to clearly mark out our goals, targets and customer groups. We certainly cannot be everything to everyone, so it is a smart move to narrow down the field so the processes can be made specific to a particular goal and hence more efficient. Identifying target groups and creating messaging strategies for each, based on more specific data inputs about them, will be the smart way forward for marketing teams.
