Marketing departments are one of the most overworked teams in many organizations. With a variety of channels to cover for each stage, managing different campaigns, and creating content for them regularly makes the employees of the department juggle with out of control tools. Many of them complain that there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done.

According to a recent study done by the Workfront, a supplier of project management software said that 1 in every 4 industry professionals remarked that they experience high stress on a daily basis.  Around 80% of the surveyed marketers said that they are overloaded with work. The survey from Paychex, where 2,000 of the employees were interviewed, said that about 3.84 days per week, a marketer is stressed.

The question now the marketers need to answer is are they focusing on the right thing. For example, suppose you are a marketer, the email creation takes about 30 to 50 minutes in a day, and then the landing page takes about 3 hours. Now you have to sequence the segmentation process for your database before sending the mail, and as you hit the send button, there is a problem with your email marketing tool.  

In 2020, every organization will be struggling to deal with various marketing channels that it can tap into. There will be too many channels and too many campaigns to run, but the decision should be made what to focus on. Neither the content nor creativity should be affected due to the narrowing of the focus, sophisticating the marketing methods to improve the creative application for different types of content that needs to be promoted. It takes about 6 commercial touches before a brand’s message conveniences the customer to convert. Though the number is important, timing and creativity are of essence.

Marketing professionals need to answer a certain question when looking toward their complete marketing plan. Will this engage my audience? And what content is required for the campaign to be successful? Marketers, when creating a need, should focus on empathy, the best quality every human possesses. Tapping into empathy can change the course of the complete marketing department, but it would be challenged on which empathy they are actually focusing on.   

Analytics will be the next tool marketers can utilize, gaining access to various data to showcase which content works and which fails. It will also be an opportunity for marketers to cherry-pick every content that works or doesn’t work. 

Delivering the best message in stipulated time

Every marketer’s job is to provide a fresh piece of content to every user visiting his site; it should be typically an ‘AHA’ movement. Whether it’s via whitepaper, ebook, guide, or video, its originality should dictate the amount of effort the marketing department is investing in cherry-picking the communications. 

According to the current data analyzed based on the content creation and traffic for each of the created content, marketers should spend close to an hour on the SEO for the blog, 3 to 5 hours on high-value blog, 10 to 15 hours on low-value PDF downloads, and 30 to 40 hours on high-value PDF downloads.  SEO will be a part of the current channels used for promotion, send our emails, or create social media posts based on the boost that is required. Benchmark for each content and industry will widely vary, experimentation might be the best chance for the marketer to actually find the sweet spot.  

Implementing a benchmark will help address mundane tasks and the most profitable tasks in marketing though marketers need to be innovative when selecting a benchmark, or they might get caught in a loop of overemphasizing.

Tools to address sophisticated campaign

Intuitive analytics is imperative for businesses that want to deliver improved RoI. Marketing departments need to ensure that they are delivering communications that are relevant and more pertinent than ever before. Despite the additional workload, many professionals are not making it even easy for themselves to target a wide variety of solutions. If the marketers are still, in these modern times, going through spreadsheets or uploading/downloading lists from the email platform themselves, they are wasting time.

Automation is set to bring the required feasibility and usability of the manually intensive jobs that they don’t have to do anymore. Automation is just brought in to do more; it segments the users and brings the required analytics to entice each of the customers with different offerings. With rising consumer expectations and attitudes diversifying, depending on how they feel, marketers need automation to track the intuitive behavior of the users’ technology.

Let’s, for example, take automation on tour, if one of the contacts is thoroughly searching for the brand’s website without provocation, your automation tool should be trigged through more personalized emails to them to improve their engagement. A reactive piece of communication lets the customer know they are being listened to and can further improve the conversion rate. Every part of the communications can be an intelligent way of making customers interact with the brand; it will improve the marketing effort and lead development.

Automation can even bring the required agility when a user is receiving more than the required promotional message. They might get frustrated and react negatively toward the brand, so building automation that has filters and curbs is much more actionable.

What can marketers take?

The challenge for every marketer is the anxiety of being left out on the ongoing race to gain customers and increase revenue. What all marketers need to do today is to ease their workloads and still create better content for the customers and prospects over the course of the next quarter. Not only marketers but even the sales team should get involved in creating value for the campaign with promotion and convey metrics that matter the most. Customers’ online behavior and buying habits are evolving rapidly, and even marketers can be lagging in keeping track. Therefore, automation tools can be one of the best saviors. It will be ultimately saving the marketer’s time, giving them time to focus on other important activities. For marketers, 2020 will be an exciting time as they move toward automation tools and more process-based experience for customers. To know more about sales and marketing, you can download our latest whitepapers on Sales and Marketing.