As a marketing executive, your plate is not only full, it’s bursting with high-level operational tasks, planning, and senior leadership meetings. With multiple KPIs, OKRs, metrics, and measurements all judging the success and failure of you and your department, it is often tempting to throw budgeted dollars at seemingly innovative solutions that make big promises.

Frequently, however, these investments can fall short of expectations, or even create more headaches.

Without a clear understanding of marketing achievements, it’s hard to know whether investments are working, or are just wasteful spending. While setting clear objectives and goals is the first definitive step towards determining marketing ROI, there are ways to dig deeper and leverage data to help determine what programs are garnering the best results.

Thankfully, marketing leaders can now make strategic decisions around investments and budgeted dollars thanks to detailed analytics and insight available with innovative marketing technology solutions. The rise of these solutions makes it easier than ever before to understand dollar investments, track success rates, and even visualize the relationship between a marketing team and other departments within an organization.

Here we’ll explore a few types of B2C marketing technologies and tactics that are clearing up lingering questions posed by marketing executives:

Marketing Automation

While the concept of automation might not be revolutionary to seasoned marketing leaders, it’s helpful to realize the ways this bread-and-butter solution can be reimagined and revamped for today’s B2C marketing generation.

Today’s marketing leaders need more than triggered emails and segmented audiences. Detailed analytics and insights are now built into sophisticated automation platforms to track and record historical data. B2C marketing leaders can use this data to see what types of messaging audiences are responding to, which programs are working, and where processes can be refined.

Marketing executives can then take a step back and analyze performance across multiple campaigns, to assess what is working and what isn’t. Visualizing marketing investments against ROI helps determine whether the results are worth the financial risk.

Artificial Intelligence Marketing

Reaching far beyond the automation platforms many marketers know today, artificial intelligence marketing (AIM) is now an unavoidable necessity for innovative marketing leaders worldwide. The seamless combination of big data, machine learning, and complex analytics makes AIM a must-have for any marketing executive looking to increase ROI and revenue. At its core, AIM helps you sift through large amounts of data to glean valuable insights that help inform future decisions and campaigns.

AIM solutions constantly identify new ways to communicate and engage with consumers across multiple platforms, devices, and channels. This is an opportunity to seamlessly orchestrate a multi-channel marketing strategy without added platforms or FTEs. AIM solutions gather and report on these metrics automatically for a completely real-time view.

For marketing leaders, this means a continuously open window into ROI, output, and campaign performance at any moment. Executives can glean insight and offer feedback on campaigns that are continuously being updated and optimized for a true feedback loop of marketing development.

Unified Consumer Profiles

As any marketer knows, understanding the target audience is key to increasing marketing ROI and overall revenue. When marketing teams want to truly understand their audiences on the personal level, unified consumer profiles can help organize and visualize the consumer data available from a wide range of resources.

Marketing platforms that incorporate AIM effortlessly collect and combine this swath of consumer information into a single database. The technology then uses that pool of data to create unified profiles of individuals, each one informed by data from interactions online and offline, mobile and email, social engagement, and more. Marketing teams can leverage these unified profiles to achieve greater levels of personalization with their campaigns and, therefore, better results.

These consumer profiles also enable marketing leaders to refine high-level strategies and content by using insights they provide about audiences to help other departments be more effective. For example, data about customer behaviors and preferences might inform the development of new products or store layouts. These profiles can help determine buyer personas, identify upsell opportunities, and uncover hidden revenue opportunities.

Data-Driven Solutions

Marketing leaders can use the data provided through today’s most advanced platforms to make informed decisions, better understand processes, and uncover previously hidden insights, including actual return on marketing-invested dollars.

Final Thoughts

With new B2C marketing technology solutions continuously emerging, marketing leaders have more options than ever before, which can be overwhelming at times. Resist the temptation to go all-in on the next big thing without understanding what it’s promising, and how it’s going to deliver on that promise.

Consider the results that AIM technology could deliver for your company, and explore platforms and tools that incorporate it in ways that will provide the greatest benefits to your team.

Request a demo to learn how the Emarsys B2C Marketing Cloud incorporates AIM technology and what it could do for you and your marketing department.

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