Challenge 1: Overwhelming report data
Digital marketing success relies on constantly interpreting the incoming report data. Without it, marketing managers cannot effectively adjust their strategy.
Tools like Google Analytics or similar obviously let marketers configure their own reports, which does help to keep an eye on things. But with the sheer number of different tools used for everything from screen recording, A/B tests, newsletter, CRM, SEO optimization, etc., it can be all too easy to forget one.
But building one Dashboard to monitor everything isn’t easy either. Aside from Google’s Data Studio there are no free options, and even Data Studio relies on paid-for Connectors for many non-Google services.
Easily keep track of all your key metrics
You can improve your digital marketing execution with the dashboard Cards in Digital Assistant. Just connect to any tool’s API and generate the charts you desire. Since APIs are ubiquitous in all SaaS apps you can create dashboards from virtually any app you use for your marketing.
This is like a single pane of glass for all your tools and helps managers keep an eye on all tools, even the ones you visit less frequently – without risking to overlook them.
Ask your smart assistant chatbot for charts
Dashboard Cards are a great way to build portable charts as you can receive these Cards via chatbots or embedded into workplace chats like Slack or MS Teams. These allows digital marketers to constantly receive impromptu advice from their chatbot, whenever they want to look something up.
What’s even better is that you can even receive dashboards with the Digital Assistant chatbot in MS Teams or Slack. Since charts are HTML5 elements which neither platform supports natively, the chatbot virtually takes a screenshot of the chart and sends that to the user.
Challenge 2: Close the sales loop
Finding a winning lead-generation strategy can be all in vain, if your new contacts evaporate in the sales pipeline or regularly don’t get qualified. There tend to be two major roadblocks that prevent traffic from converting into customers:
- Hand off to the sales team is awkward
Maybe there isn’t an easy way to provide context to sales people what other data you hold over their contacts, i.e. things gathered from other marketing tools, making it easy for sales to miss important signals - Features gaps in the CRM
Theoretically the CRM system should act as a hub for all the various streams of data about each contact, e.g. PQL milestones they reached, page visits, newsletter subscription, etc.
All too often however, such integrations are either not possible or very costly, and rarely see a satisfactory implementation.
Don’t let leads slip through the net
To plug the gaps in your sales cycle there are two solutions a smart marketing assistant can offer that you should consider:
- Make syncing with the sales team easier
Instead of spamming your groupchat with lots of Salesforce links, just share a entire contact’s Card as a message attachment. With the Digital Assistant app for MS Teams, you can just ask the Assistant to pull up a contact for the team.
This makes it easy to discuss and enrich the shared knowledge about a user and correctly qualify their activities for the sales pipeline.
- Create cross-app dashboards
If you have multiple sources of data for your inbound marketing, why not create a centralized dashboard that can combine lists and charts into a single pane of glass. With Digital Assistant you can simply connect to your favorite marketing apps and let users add Cards to their Board. Plus, they can subscribe to notifications so they never miss another update.
In comparison to static dashboard tools which look the same for every user, this creates a personal experience that every user can tweak by pinning or subscribing to only those Cards that help them be more productive.
Challenge 3: Spot trends early
Whether something is trending on Twitter or search behavior on Google is changing; entire business models depend on spotting trends early and reacting to shifting patterns before the competition. For marketers it can be very hard to separate noise from reliable signals.
An effective way to keep on top of trends could to build trend dashboards that collect and aggregate data and patterns from 3rd party services (e.g. Google Trends) as well as your own internal metrics (e.g. usage logs, page views, etc.).
Of course you will know best what metrics are going to be really useful to you, but here are some of ideas how a trends dashboard can help inform your digital marketing strategy:
- Google Trends
Keep an eye on how search terms, news topics or YouTube searches evolve over time or across any regions that are of interest to you
- Twitter Trending
If you have one or multiple local businesses you could quickly cash in on current topics by keeping an eye on Twitter trends. Trend listings are available for most locations.
- AppDynamics or New Relic
BI solutions are key for any business to analyze the data they generate themselves. From growing pages, shopping cart abandonment or customer sentiment, there is an almost unlimited amount of metrics you can pin to your Digital Assistant. This is done via the built-in Chart generator which is directly receiving the figures from the connected API.
- Google Data Studio
A much-loved tool for digital marketers you can embed entire pages from Google Data Studio as Cards for your Digital Assistant Board. You just need to make sure the pages are small enough to roughly fit into a Card the size of a Post-It note
Challenge 4: Keep marketing channels topped up
As every digital marketer knows, publishing frequently – preferably daily – is essential for content marketing success. Content marketing can be hard to scale with teams under pressure to balance their time against all their other obligations.
It’s not uncommon that marketers get their best social media ideas whenever they are not at their desk. Hopping from the Twitter app, to the Facebook app, and so on, is tedious and makes publishing harder.
A digital assistant for marketing can help your team publish more frequently by offering a dedicated Card that lets users queue new posts for the social media channels.
All they need to do is ask their chatbot assistant to make a new post and let the Assistant handle everything automatically, by sending the content off to each of the selected social media sites.
Challenge 5: Reduce costs and improve spend
Especially since the pandemic has forced many organizations to limit their marketing budgets, it has become ever more important to keep a watchful eye on active campaign performances and monthly spend caps for each CPC channel.
Doing this manually is prone to oversight, and frankly a tedious exercise for a digital marketing officer. But by deploying a smart assistant for marketing you can set up notification rules that will automatically alert you when something requires your attention:
- Exhausted budget warnings
Every CPC platform lets users set daily and/or monthly budgets which is a good stopgap to avoid overspending. But there isn’t often an easy way to see the current spend in relation to the budget, or get reminders as you’re nearing the cap on the account. Digital Assistant provides such functionality by looking up the current spend via an API and setting it in relation the calendar month. If things get out of hand, it triggers a reminder notification to the user.
- Significant drop in click-through rate
Digital Assistant can make simple calculations such as comparing the figure from the last campaign to the one before. If the difference is greater than a preset threshold, it can alert the marketing team to prompt further investigation. This can prevent that an accidental mistake, i.e. a wrong link, gets perpetuated for example by unknowingly duplicating an erroneous campaign.
- Increase in cost per lead
Another potential area for digital marketers is if the cost per acquired lead is escalating, suggesting problems in the bidding process or drop in the relevance of the ad. This is again something that’s easy to miss, but the Digital Assistant can alert the team early to check if an issue is starting to develop.
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Hopefully you have found a few things that your marketing team could benefit from in their daily activities. If you’re interested in finding out more, speak to us via chat or register for a FREE plan of Digital Assistant.
