The 3 Important Features Your Marketing Planning Software Needs to Ensure Success
With the hundreds of thousands of products being marketed and sold in the world today, it has become near impossible to make a product that truly stands out. One can even say that there’s no new thing under the sun.
In many fields, particularly in marketing, the battle is not in figuring out your competition’s trade secrets. Instead, marketing departments and agencies around the world need to concentrate on getting the right data sets to work on, and the right marketing planning software to do that work with.
Marketing Today
The marketing landscape in 2020 is particularly diverse. Marketers today are constantly looking for new ways to reach and capture the attention of their audience.
With constantly changing motivation and purchasing behavior brought about by the concurrently evolving use of technology, marketers need to be able to adapt as quickly if they want to keep producing results.
It’s also worth noting that the customers of today respond differently to marketing techniques than their parents and grandparents. This current generation of consumers are rarely surprised or impressed with new technology.
With enough information to last them a lifetime easily accessible through their mobile devices, consumers already know exactly what they want.
They no longer need the pitch: they’ve already seen some derivative version of your product or service in any of the media and marketing channels that are available to them.
How Should We Reach Our Target Audience?
Marketers should be able to determine exactly where their audience is, and give them the right kind of information that they need.
Reaching your audience can be a relatively simple process if you’re only vying for the attention of one or two segments with a handful of touchpoints.
However, the process can be challenging for marketers working with large multinational companies who need to market several lines of products to different customer segments at the same time. Add in the task of figuring out the right channel, writing the perfectly written and personalized message, conducting A/B testing, and performing various other optimization tasks, and the process can be downright chaotic.
For these companies, the stakes can be high, and any marketer whose green behind the ears are sure to be overwhelmed. And yet, companies manage to sell several product lines to different demographics just fine.
How do they do it? Simple. They use a marketing planning software that lets them do three simple things efficiently.
Whether you’re a small business owner searching for a solution to simplify your marketing efforts or a marketing executive looking for a robust marketing collaboration software to use for multiple campaigns, these three features should be non-negotiable:
Processing of Raw Data Into Actionable Insights
With the abundance of marketing channels and no industry-wide standard of naming and organizing information, having to refer to big data every time you need to make a decision can be a distraction or worse, become a source of confusion.
The point of having automation in any field is to simplify the work process. While it’s valuable to understand how to process and interpret the big data yourself, a good marketing planning software should be able to condense big data into easy to digest information, leaving you to make appropriate decisions.
Because you’re no longer spending valuable time and energy in data processing, you will have more bandwidth in looking for patterns and connections that may lead to unique insights. By distilling big data into actionable insights, marketers can concentrate on implementing new strategies that will lead them to success.
Seamless Integration with Various Platforms
As mentioned earlier, consumers today leverage multiple platforms in a day to get to the content, product, or service that they need.
This means that if a marketer truly wants to cut through the noise, their campaigns must be found in most, if not all of the relevant marketing channels.
In this scenario, an all-in-one marketing planning software is useful only if it is able to perform across channels seamlessly. Because different platforms may have different names for the same thing, marketing analytics tools need to be able to unify various metrics into a form that will help marketers to make a decision.
Ability to Evaluate the Messaging Impact
While picking the right channel and funneling strategy for each segment of your audience are incredibly important for a campaign, understanding how to make an impact through your messaging is even more crucial in determining your campaign’s success.
You can use the most effective media or platform to reach your audience and still miss on generating revenue because of ineffective messaging.
For marketers, this means knowing your audience in a way that allows you to help them with their specific needs.
While this doesn’t mean letting a computer take the role of a talented copywriter or the insights generated from a focus group or survey, a good marketing planning software should include analytics that is intelligent enough to evaluate the impact and make suggestions based on the available customer data and platform characteristics.
Conclusion
To say that a marketer must utilize every tool at their disposal is not only wrong, but it can also lead to disaster.
Instead, marketers must look for the right tool to do their work with precision and efficiency. Additionally, marketers should constantly look for opportunities to better their understanding of technology and customer trends.
By using a marketing planning software that's able to distill big data, manage cross-platform campaigns, measure messaging impact, marketers stand a better chance of generating actual results from their campaigns.
Market Plan’s all-in-one marketing planning software allows you to plan, produce, and execute campaigns within a single window.
Contact us today to know more or try the tool for free to see the amazing things it can do for the planning and tracking of your marketing.
