The wide net once used by marketers to distribute a message is archaic and ultimately useless. Now, a much smaller, more targeted approach is demanded from prospective buyers. With this the marketer’s job duties have expanded with new demands of personalization, relevancy, and timeliness. To manage all of their responsibilities, marketers are forced to work smarter not harder. Through strategy and a well thought out marketing technology stack marketers are able to target and distribute content like never before.
“I am a huge proponent of trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t and not doing things for the sake of doing things,”
Technological advancements provide marketers relief. New technologies have not just allowed marketers to reach people with their message, but reach the right people with the right message with more ease and less work while providing a transparent insight through the power of data. In a fast pace field like marketing, efficiency and agility are top priorities. Tony Yang of Mintigo discovered this when he began working in small, lean marketing teams with limited resources. “I am a huge proponent of trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t and not doing things for the sake of doing things,” he says.
After starting his marketing career at one of the biggest tech companies in the world, IBM, Yang has since had plenty of experience working in small startup companies to help him determine what working smarter means in a variety of settings. “One of the most important things I learned is don’t try to boil the ocean. You have to work smarter. You work hard, but it is more important to work smarter,” he says.
Yang has created a marketing mélange that works. Depending on the company’s marketing goals, he uses a mixture of both lead based and account based marketingto successfully spread his marketing messages. This approach allows him to be more proactive, but if not used in the correct way, can lead to the ultimate waste of effort. If you target the wrong account, you are not working smarter. Just reaching people for the sake of getting your word out there, is not the best way to go about it. “What is more important than reaching a lot of people is reaching the right people,” he says.
The ability to reach and accurately target the right people, or accounts, is a combination of art and science, and these efforts can be greatly improved by technology. The challenge has now become creating the optimal technology stack that will guide a customer through the preferred path. When this is in place and working, marketers are at their optimum level of efficiency. Yang believes that this new fully integrated technology stack that is tied together and driven by data will help to create the perfect ecosystem for an optimized customer journey that allows marketers to work smarter instead of harder.
