The key to effective marketing depends on who you ask. At knowledge integration platform Onna, it’s a two-part strategy that involves working cross-departmentally in two-week sprints to meet desired outcomes. At real estate company Orchard, the key to effective marketing is continuously running and testing new ad campaigns and adapting to customer feedback when necessary. And at marketing technology company ContentSquare, the key to effective marketing is always taking a customer-first approach.
While strategies differ from company to company and product to product, the end goal is always the same: to optimize spending in order to generate qualified leads and achieve positive short and long-term goals.
Below, marketing experts from those companies share successful marketing initiatives they’ve recently worked on and what exactly went into them behind the scenes.
For Orchard, the key to effective marketing lies in continued testing and iteration. Head of Growth Marketing Ran Tan said that they regularly run tests across all of their marketing platforms and then iterate as needed. Additionally, Tan said that they regularly work with the CX team to gather customer feedback and adapt their messaging when necessary.
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
The goal of the growth marketing team is to introduce customers to our services and grow Orchard as a business, in a cost-effective manner. There are a few challenges that come with marketing services like Orchard’s. First, buying and selling a home is a big financial decision for consumers and one they only make a few times in their lifetime. Second, it’s typically a complicated process with a lot of different steps and nuances. And third, for a lot of people, it’s probably the first time they’re making this type of transaction, so we need to give them context on the original process as well as how we’re making it a better, smoother process.
For us, effective marketing helps explain the problem homeowners face, demonstrates why Orchard is a better solution and establishes trust with the consumer — all while keeping things simple and setting accurate expectations with the customer. Customers may start by seeing the ads, but then they’ll learn more through the website and through conversations with our team. The more they learn about us, more they engage with us. Our goal is to present the right information — and the right amount of it — at the right time, so that customers are excited about Orchard and know what to expect.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
For Orchard, the key has been continued testing and iterating. We run regular tests across all of the aspects of our marketing funnel from media channels to targeting, creative and messaging, landing pages and the website, and to the flow that customers complete once they hit the website.
To support this, we set shared goals and support that with cross-functional collaboration. We’ll work closely with other teams at Orchard. For example, our creative team helps us make great ads and we work alongside the product team to prioritize and implement tests on the website and customer flow.
For us, effective marketing helps explain the problem homeowners face and establishes trust with the consumer.’’
We also lean on other teams to hear more about what’s working and what isn’t. For example, we solicit regular feedback from our CX team about what they hear from customers. It’s a great way to get anecdotal feedback when we’re testing a new marketing channel or to understand if our marketing message is clear. Recently, we heard from our CX team that many customers are interested in buying newly-built homes. As a result, we’re now testing Facebook ads that specifically focus on this, and have also added some content to the site about how we help customers buy “new builds.”
What’s a successful marketing initiative you’ve recently worked on?
One recent success story is our Houston launch, which is a new market we entered in January. Orchard was live in five markets before we launched Houston. We had launched markets before but wanted to test something different this time to see if we could get even better momentum right from launch.
Historically, when we’ve launched other markets, we’ve run ads in our regular marketing channels but haven’t really focused on the fact that we’re new — the main message has been Orchard’s value props and what problem we solve. This time, we decided to test running launch-specific ads on Facebook. We set aside a separate Facebook budget for this, and the ads emphasized Orchard as a new solution in Houston, without going into as much detail about Orchard’s services or how it works.
The response we saw to this was overwhelmingly positive, and we saw great traffic to the site as well as great conversion further down the funnel. As a result, we’ve adopted these tactics for future new market launches, and are also testing ads in all our markets with simpler and higher-level messaging.
At Onna, effective marketing involves two key components: people and process. Head of Growth Peter Schroeder said that employees work cross-departmentally to ensure everyone is on the same page. Their sprint methodology has proven to be effective for keeping track of projects, improving time management and meeting deadlines.
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
Like most B2B marketing teams, effective marketing means market sourcing more qualified leads that ultimately lead to revenue. That said, we have a much broader mandate than that. We market a very technical product to a very sophisticated buyer, so our job is to educate. When people get to know us by attending an event or enjoying a piece of content, when Onna “clicks” for them, that’s when we know we’ve been effective.
Effective marketing means aligning all of your marketing to your brand and demand generation efforts.”
We’re also obsessive about the quality of our output. Whether it’s a blog post, webinar or sales collateral, it must demonstrate that we know our audience, tell a great story and prove that we know what we’re talking about. Anything less than that doesn’t cut it — we will always choose to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term sustainability.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
Effective marketing means aligning all of your marketing to your brand and demand generation efforts. This is easier said than done so, for us, there are two critical elements: people and process. The people at Onna are hugely collaborative, which helps marketing stay in lockstep with product, sales, partnerships, customer success, etc., to make sure we always have the latest information so we can best support the entire organization.
Regarding process, our marketing team operates in two-week sprints (part of Scrum methodology). We’ve found sprints to be really effective for keeping track of projects, improving time management and holding ourselves accountable to meet our goals. As for technology, after we find a scalable and repeatable process, we implement technology to help us scale faster than we ever could on our own.
What’s a successful marketing initiative you’ve recently worked on?
Events are a huge part of our marketing strategy and, obviously, because of the pandemic, it’s been difficult (if not impossible) to bring people together. The biggest conference of the year for us typically happens in February in New York. Unfortunately, all the wonderful people we would typically show around our beautiful city weren’t descending on NYC this year, so we decided to bring a taste of NYC to them.
We held a virtual roundtable that kicked off with a presentation from the COO of New York-based institution Ess-a-Bagel, including a behind-the-scenes demonstration of how New York bagels are made. Guests received a special brunch box bagel delivery to enjoy during the session. The event was a hit — we got a lot of great feedback from attendees, as well as valuable industry insights that we can use in future marketing efforts! This worked so much better than your out-of-the-box wine or beer tasting event because it managed to bring some real-life magic to the virtual realm and make for a fun, memorable, hol(e)istic experience.
At ContentSquare, effective marketing means always putting the customer first. Chief Marketing Officer Niki Hall said that understanding your customers and prospects’ needs and how they want to use your brand will result in a win-win situation for both parties.
What does effective marketing look like for your team specifically?
Effective marketing is when marketing is a growth engine for a company — always taking a customer-first mindset.
My vision of effective marketing for my team is to always have a customer-first mentality with the focus of truly understanding the needs of our customers and prospects and how we can help them be successful. By having a customer-first approach and consistently exceeding their expectations on how we solve their needs, it will always be a win-win situation. In addition, doing what is best for the clients and prospects will result in our success as a company.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
It all starts with a keen understanding of the business: company goals, growth targets, NPS, total addressable market and competitive landscape. Using this approach truly enables teams to focus on a North Star of where to move the business.
Next, devise your marketing strategy for a customer-first mindset, strongly grounded in the business fundamentals. Ensure you really know your customers’ and prospects’ needs and how they are engaging with the brand.
And lastly, roll-out the program, measure, continuously refine and execute.
Devise your marketing strategy for a customer-first mindset, strongly grounded in the business fundamentals.’’
What’s a successful marketing initiative you’ve recently worked on?
We recently hosted a Roaring 20s webinar with a leading industry analyst Zeus Kerravala. Using a theme that is timely and an analyst who has credibility in customer experience enabled us to attract a large audience and have a thought leadership conversation about the impact of digital transformation on customer experience. This is just the start of many thought leadership webinars we will be hosting as part of a series leading into a big brand campaign reveal.
