Back with a bang: five ways to supercharge your marketing in 2021

The pandemic has resulted in ups and downs
aplenty for Australian businesses, as well as considerable uncertainty about
exactly what the future holds. As the country's economic recovery gathers pace,
relevant, personalised marketing can help organisations reconnect with
customers and boost sales and profitability.

Here are five methods to supercharge your
marketing efforts in 2021.

Make
customer retention a priority

Historically, marketers have concentrated their efforts on winning new business – turning prospects into customers. Consequently, the focus has been on understanding where those clients are coming from and the activation events that bring them on to open their wallets. That's still important but same with hanging onto buyers for the long term, not letting them slip away after a single sale. Doing so requires extending your look at the customer journey – analysing buyers' online behaviour, obtaining a feel for what other products and services they're thinking about, and creating personalised email and ad campaigns to inspire them to buy from you, over and over.

Provide real-time offers

A recent Accenture report found firms that invest in machine learning and personalisation technologies are set to increase their revenue by a whopping 30 per cent within the next four years. What's even more powerful than personalised marketing is really a personalised offer delivered within the moment. Whether it's an immediate email or perhaps a pop-up on your web site or app, using the customer data at your disposal to produce a targeted buying opportunity at that critical instant you have someone's attention is a great way to turn browsers into buyers.

Test
and tweak your campaigns on the fly

The beauty of personalised digital marketing is always that nothing is set in stone. Equipped with tools where you can evaluate the success of your offers in tangible or near real-time, it's possible – and simple – to run two or more campaigns simultaneously. Quickly tweaking or trashing those that are doing poorly and amplifying those that are going off like a rocket will help you maximise the return in your marketing investment.

Get
on top of privacy management

Personalised marketing is data-dependent and also the onus is on businesses to store that data responsibly and only use it with owners' permission. The penalties because of not doing so can be significant. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation regime, which provides coverage for Australian companies that handle the information of EU citizens, can issue fines as high as 20 million Euro or two per cent of global turnover. The Australian government, meanwhile, is preparing to increase the fines our national privacy watchdog can impose, from $2.1 million to $10 million. It makes sense to make sure you have robust controls in position to govern the way in which data is used to create and distribute marketing messages.

Invest
in tools that maximise the strength of data

Creating marketing campaigns that reach
customers in the right place at the proper time is challenging, without the
right tools. Many companies are making do with yesterday's technology – their
CRM solution or perhaps a homegrown data program – and it is holding them back.
Upgrading to some customer data platform (CDP) that may collect and process data
at speed, and is easy to use, will give your marketing team to extract the
insights they need to develop relevant and timely campaigns that really
resonate.

Preparing
for success

Tough economic conditions and a climate of significant uncertainty mean the following year is likely to be a challenging one for Australian businesses of all stripes and sizes. Investing time and resources in personalised marketing will help your enterprise maintain mind and market share and position itself for expansion and growth when better times arrive.