Connie Lanter is a Senior Customer Success Director in Marin Software’s San Francisco office, with over 20 years of experience in customer success and account management. She helps digital and traditional advertisers across a diverse range of industries improve marketing results and drive revenue.
What do you do at Marin?
I work closely with some of Marin's largest enterprise customers to find ways to continually improve their digital marketing results. I think of it as long-term relationship building and turnaround, which includes understanding each customer’s goals and pain points, and then finding solutions for them. At the end of the day, it’s all about formulating the best possible solutions for our customers with the least amount of friction.
How are most paid advertising teams working today?
During our recent webinar, Unifying Your Search and Social Ad Strategies, 62% of our pool of over 400 survey respondents identified “operating in silos” as the number one way of running their paid advertising programs today. Only 21% of respondents said that that they have a unified search and social program.
So, only one in five organizations are where they need to be to compete in an increasingly multi-channel world. Plus, I’m really curious about how many of those 21% are doing search + social combined management across the board. I bet if we asked them they’d say it was partially managed together.
What are a few common barriers to running combined search and social advertising campaigns?
It’s interesting that 35% of those same respondents have separate search and social teams, and 16% don’t have a shared budget. These results aren’t surprising, since many teams aren’t thinking in holistic terms and focusing on the customer journey.
To achieve a truly integrated program, there are so many hurdles and pain points to overcome, including team silos, isolated budgets that aren’t working together to reach common goals, conflicting strategies, and a lack of communication, even sometimes when folks are sitting right next to each other. Not only is this frustrating, but it’s also slowing teams down, causing unnecessary conflicts, and ultimately preventing teams from maximizing the effectiveness of their digital marketing programs.
There’s also a knowledge gap that teams have to overcome, since the different channels are often unique beasts that require their own set of skills, knowledge, and continuous learning. With a unified approach, however, you get to become an expert on “digital,” not just a single platform.
In the long run, this not only serves teams better, but it’s a great growth and motivational opportunity for individual contributors, particularly at smaller companies. Someone’s expertise may lie in one channel, but with a unified approach, there’s always a chance to learn new things and excel in a different medium.
What are the benefits of a unified approach?
Once teams graduate to omnichannel, the benefits are pretty numerous—at the very least, being able to speak in one brand voice, and at the very best, gaining more traffic, more clicks, and more business. From our own research, we’ve seen teams double their conversions from adopting a unified strategy. Customers who don’t have a unified approach to digital advertising are simply leaving money on the table.
What do you recommend that advertisers do to unify their campaigns?
Start from the ground up. Define your goals and KPIs—starting with the overarching company goal—and then collaborate to answer a few basic questions: What’s our message? What are the nuts and bolts of how we’ll deliver it? What are we serving up on Google? On Facebook? On Twitter? On Amazon?
And, how are we looking at our full marketing program to measure which touchpoints are working and which ones need to be tweaked? It’s making sure teams have the right creative for the message they’re conveying, the right holistic strategy, and the right tools to measure success and act on the insights.
Any closing thoughts?
There are ways to get around silos and hurdles and really focus on a strategy that ultimately leads to more conversions for your organization. It all starts with a conversation and having a trusted digital advertising partner to offer an objective view of cross-channel performance.
However challenging implementing a combined strategy may be up front, it all pays off in the end with more engagement, clicks, conversions, and revenue. Baby steps can lead to great strides.
For more information on implementing a winning cross-channel advertising strategy, view our webinar, Unifying Your Search and Social Ad Strategies.
