Job of a marketing professional

The job of a marketing professional is not easy these days. The job of a marketing professional is not easy these days. There are significant activity and noise on all marketing channels. Is it due to marketing automation? It is not easy to be visible anymore. It is true that marketing automation has taken us to another level. Marketing teams have embraced or are embracing automation at an unprecedented level. We do see an increase in marketing budgets over the last few years. Marketing teams have been fairly willing to experiment with new technologies and don’t mind spending some bucks at new software or practice.I do see two types of companies when we meet companies. First is the group where LinkedIn Ad tech has been tried but clicks and impressions have not justified ROI. Another is the group that is about going to LinkedIn Ad-tech because there is a platform launch coming up, leads not coming through inbound or outbound channels and going to conferences is quite a costly affair. The lure of reaching millions on the other side (that’s invisible) always makes you believe that it might work with the right message, target campaign. And you know what –we would add the word AI, Smart, Predictive; show an image of the brain or cogs or gears or humanoid. Marketing teams are also finding new ways to update their contact list regularly. Technology is playing a crucial role here. There are APIs available to provide email addresses and LinkedIn profiles through the accuracy of results is being worked upon. This was and is the task that would reap rewards when you spend money and time. Approaching the decision maker at a time when she/he is settling in a new job, designation, the organization is a good way to generate leads for years. Keeping in touch with your champions in existing and new customers is a practice followed by matured marketing teams. We do hear that the marketing automation space is overcrowded. Its true but there is still room for innovation. There are opportunities to enhance the productivity of market research, inbound lead, and outbound lead generation teams. Limitation in this field is the availability and cost of external data. Marketing automation is one of the fields with a great dependency on access to external data. Data is limited to medium and big corporate houses. While LinkedIn continues to build a closed ecosystem, marketing platforms will have to find other ways to capture data on people. Ad-tech platforms with the highest number of profiles might win that battle. The overcrowded market will force the innovators to think of other ways to provide insights into marketing and sales professionals. Chrome plugins have become the favourite way to provide information and might become the trend. As I said above, the marketing domain depends on the availability of external data. In a way that is limiting factor. There is potential to generate insights when external data is married to internal data such as email transactions with potential decision makers. End users will have to allow plugins to analyze their emails to get insights. A year worth of emails might be a good point to start. There might be a treasure hidden behind that email analysis. Go and explore it. Information is key to B2B sales and marketing folks. This is one of weapons sales and marketing depends on. Keeping an eye on prospect customers is important and it is something that every marketing professional seeks. This information is used to win clients, build a marketing strategy, build sales goals and provide inputs to the product team. OceanFrogs platform helps you provide you with signals that one can use to target customer, have a well-informed conversation, and analyze industry trends.