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How Your Business Can Use Data to Find its Value Proposition

What makes your company and its product or service different from your competition? As any small or medium-sized business owner knows, the answer to that question is vital to long-term success. If you cannot differentiate yourself, your audience will eventually veer toward the lowest price point, making any business growth unsustainable. That’s what makes a value proposition such a crucial part of your marketing efforts. If you can concisely describe why your product is both valuable to your audience and different from its competition, you can build your entire business on that description. But how do you get there? Especially for startups and small businesses, coming up with the perfect value proposition can seem like a difficult endeavor. By gathering relevant data, you can make sure that the statement you end up with is not just relevant to your audience, but can also be used as the sustainable basis of your competitive advantage. First Step: Define the Problem Forbes.com quotes legendary inventor Charles Kettering in stating that “a problem well stated is a problem half solved.” Every product and business, at its core, should seek to solve an elementary problem that its audience solves. But how do you know what that problem is? This is where data first enters the equation. Through market research, even small businesses can define latent consumer and business needs that their products might solve. The process can be as simple as customer interviews and surveys, or as complex as in-depth evaluation of your audience’s daily behaviors. The key, on all ends of that spectrum, is the gathering and using of data to judge your results. If your audience wants to give you their feedback on latent or obvious problems they need a product to solve, you have to have a platform in which you can gather and evaluate that feedback. Survey tools connected to your CRM, for example, can help you organize your data in a single space. Second Step: Describe Your Solution Of course, a problem matters little if your business cannot fix it. Your product should promise to provide the solution to the problem(s) you found in the first step, helping to improve your audience’s lives in one way or the other. In this second step, it’s time to find out just how it might do this. At this point, don’t worry about your value proposition being a snappy marketing slogan or differentiating itself from your competition. The goal is purely to make sure that you can define exactly how your product would solve the problem defined in step 1. Third Step: Competitive Research Next, it’s time to understand exactly how your proposed solution fits into the competitive environment. Have other businesses also recognized the same problem as you, and are they trying to solve the problem? If so, is their solution different than yours, or similar? In the course of this step, data once again becomes crucial. Competitive research can go as far as understanding the keywords other businesses bid on in their search […]

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Why Using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore Makes Good Sense

If you manage a website, you probably use a content management system, or CMS. If you want to run an efficient sales operation, you better take advantage of a quality customer relationship management (CRM) solution. But too often, the two don’t connect well enough for you to make the most out of either’s functionalities. Fortunately, Sitecore and Dynamics are here to change that. CRM and CMS, Explained Frequent readers of this space know about the benefits of a CRM, and particularly Microsoft Dynamics, to optimize your sales processes. It allows you to keep track of each potential and current customer, providing you with more in-depth information on them as they move through the sales funnel. A CMS, on the other hand, improves your website management ability. It offers you the opportunity to streamline, edit, and manage any content on your website, helping you build a website presence designed to gain brand awareness and audience attention. Rather than having to build the content directly in HTML, you get easy editors designed to create beautiful web pages. Today, almost 50% of the top 1 million most-visited website worldwide use a CMS. 5 Benefits of Integrating Dynamics CRM With Sitecore On their surfaces, CMS and CRM solutions may seem like they don’t have much in common, or that your business is perfectly fine using only one but not the other. But if you dig a little deeper, using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore actually comes with a number of tangible benefits for your target audience. 1. Build Targeted Content Based on Contact Information Personalized web content is becoming more and more important to impress and convert your website visitors. In fact, three quarters of consumers get frustrated when the content they encounter is not personalized to them. Of course, you need your visitors to convert in order to have a chance of turning them into customers, and frustration is not a great motivator to accomplish that. Given that statistic, imagine being able to leverage the information you gather about each of your CRM contact into more relevant website content. That’s exactly what Sitecore integration can provide. Now, you can show each one of your contacts information tailored specifically to their needs as soon as they visit your website and contemplate whether they should become customers. 2. Automate Lead Generation Stream into CRM As beneficial as a CRM can be for your sales efforts, it can be frustrating on the marketing side. Too often, there is no easily automated way to feed new leads into the software that then automatically assign to the relevant sales agents and territories. But what if you could build your lead generation web forms in Sitecore, and transfer them over to Dynamics automatically? Now, an otherwise manual process becomes easily automated. In addition, you can even configure Sitecore to capture information from partially filled forms, increasing your insights into your target audience and web visitors. 3. Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts Despite constant efforts to push it off its throne, email marketing […]

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Marketing Personalization is Real, Thanks to Increasingly Available Data Insights

We live in an age of personalization. Armed with more data than ever before, businesses now have the opportunity to move away from mass marketing ‘blasts’ and toward increasingly targeted, personalized messages. Consumers across industries are welcoming this opportunity. Ad blocking is on the rise, with an estimated 86 million U.S. internet users actively suppressing promotional messages online this year. At the same time, personalized marketing and particularly email messages generate significantly higher attention, engagement, and transaction rates than their non-customized counterparts. Increasingly, your audience expects personalization. And fortunately, the ability to gather and utilize data about your audience has made the process significantly more realistic for small and medium businesses to implement. The Rise of Big Data and Data-Driven Marketing A few years ago, big data officially became a topic for businesses. The rise of online marketing has enabled us to collect a large variety of information about our audience, allowing us to draw insights that can help create more relevant and personalized messages for potential and current customers. That rise of data, in turn, has led to an emphasis on data-driven marketing. As Ad Week points out, basing every marketing decisions on data you have gathered about your audience has turned from a novel approach into an integral business process in the course of just a few years. Your audience knows that you’re collecting information about them online. Now, they expect you to actually turn that information into value for them. Turning Big Data into Actionable Insights Of course, there’s a significant problem with big data and data-driven marketing that has long plagued small and medium businesses: the resources needed to accomplish that feat. Thanks to advertising platforms like Facebook, Google Analytics, and more, everyone can gather the sort of data needed to personalize your marketing. But few organizations actually have the budget and manpower necessary to turn that data into actual, data-driven insights and actions. As a result, the last few years have not just given rise to the importance of data. They have also widened the gap between audience expectations and small/medium business capabilities. Your largest competitors may be able to interpret and use real-time data, but if you can’t, you’ll fall behind in the eyes of your audience. Fortunately, the past may be the past. Increasingly, thanks to machine learning technology, data collection and pattern recognition are becoming more available to businesses of all sizes. In fact, machine learning has officially entered the sphere of possibilities in small business marketing. How To Personalize Your Marketing Using Data Every business can collect data about their audience. And thanks to machine learning, even small businesses can now use that data to create actual, personalized marketing strategies. The reason, as Tech Emergence shows, lies in the increasing availability of technology. Tools like IBM Watson, for example, allow businesses of all sizes to recognize patterns in their data and even predict user behavior for a reasonable cost. But pattern recognition still does not get to the core of the potential advantage […]

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How ClickDimensions Can Enhance the Success of Your Dynamics CRM

In today’s digital environment, even small and medium businesses can benefit significantly from customer relationship management software. Find the right CRM, and you can grow your business by more efficiently reaching out to potential and current customers, enhancing both your customer acquisition and retention efforts as a result. No less than 74% of businesses now use a CRM, and that number increases to 91% when only counting businesses above 11 employees. The increasing data availability, along with the fact that simply integrating the software into your business processes can raise your productivity by 30%, accounts for that adoption rate. Still, simply installing CRM software may not be enough. If you don’t connect it with a marketing automation solution, you may be missing out on a significant opportunity. That’s why ClickDimensions is such a perfect partner product to a powerful CRM like Microsoft Dynamics. ClickDimensions: An Overview ClickDimensions, at its core, is a marketing automation tool. In other words, it’s a software solution that helps you automate your marketing processes, saving both time and resources in the process. The software accomplishes this feat through a number of individual features that range from email marketing to reporting. Combined, they help businesses of all sizes create a more comprehensive and consistent marketing strategy designed to get prospects into and through the sales funnel. But unlike most other marketing automation tools, this one does not operate in isolation. Instead, it integrates directly with your Dynamics CRM solution, helping you take advantage of the sales data and processes you have already established for more personalized, effective marketing. The Marketing Features of ClickDimensions To accomplish its goals, ClickDimensions offers a number of individual features that are worthy of discussion. Each of them is related directly to marketing and marketing automation: Email marketing. Through a native email tool within Dynamics CRM, you can create beautiful marketing emails with a simple drag and drop system. Email data, such as open and click rates, is reported both on a comprehensive and individual level within Dynamics. Marketing automation. Dynamics uses workflows to help you create a set of automated emails. In ClickDimensions, the process is even easier. Create visual communication flows with multiple branches, sending automated email series based on actions that your visitors and leads are taking on your website. Landing pages and web forms. Any business focused on lead generation needs effective web forms to capture these contacts. Within ClickDimensions, you can create these forms, along with the landing pages on which they’ll live, using a similar drag and drop system as email creation. Data is dynamically filtered back into Dynamics for more comprehensive lead profiles. Integrated event management. Does you company rely on events or webinars to generate leads and convert customers? If so, you’ll love the integration with software like GoToWebinar and WebEx, helping you manage each registrant and recording information  related to their attendance. Reporting and Surveys. Naturally, the tool helps you improve your marketing reporting abilities. It also allows you to create surveys, which help you […]

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5 Reasons Integrating Dynamics CRM Can Enhance Your MailChimp Success

In many ways, MailChimp is the ideal email marketing solution for small businesses and startups. Its pricing model is reasonable, while building emails is both simple and effective. Designing attractive emails is possible even for novices in digital marketing. But at the same time, using the software in isolation may cause you to lose out on some significant opportunities. MailChimp, at its core, is an email marketing tool. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive marketing approach, you may want to consider combining it with Customer Relationship Management software. Here are 5 reasons your business benefits from this type MailChimp and Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration. 1. Build Beautiful Emails for a Relevant Audience The intuitive and simple email design tool may be MailChimp’s biggest selling feature. Through a simple drag and drop mechanism and a variety of existing templates, users can build completely custom marketing emails designed uniquely for their audience. The wide variety of examples online today showcase just some of the possibilities of the design tool. Unfortunately, using the software in isolation may mean beautiful emails that never quite reach the intended audience. MailChimp’s contact management system is basic, allowing for some list segmentation but generally limiting itself to uploading lists and sending one-off or scheduled emails. Integrating with Dynamics allows you to take advantage of MailChimp’s strength while eliminating its weakness. Now, you can use the same design tool while also making sure that your emails will reach a relevant audience at the right time. 2. Collect Lead and Customer Information for More Targeted Marketing Wouldn’t you love to know which of your potential and current customers, open, click, and maybe even convert on your emails? MailChimp can record all of that information. But if you use it in isolation, it’s difficult to actually take advantage of the data you collect. Microsoft Dynamics, on the other hand, strives on data integration. It collects relevant actions by your audience in their lead and customer records, allowing you to build targeted marketing campaigns. For example, you can build an email campaign designed specifically for users who have clicked on another, relevant email in the recent past. MailChimp collects the information, while Dynamics allows you to put it to sound marketing use. 3. Combine the Simplicity of MailChimp With the Power of Dynamics MailChimp continues to outpace the email marketing software landscape significantly, with almost 50% in market share among businesses. The reason, as mentioned above, tends to come back to its simplicity, allowing even marketing novices to build beautiful and convincing emails. And yet, an email marketing tool is far from possessing the same power as a CRM. Microsoft Dynamics, for example, allows marketers to perform actions that range from response tracking and lead scoring to conditional, branch and child workflows. If you’re ready to advance your marketing from simple one-off emails to complex workflows designed to engage your audience, you need a CRM. Similarly, if you want to optimize your lead to customer conversions, you better have a system in […]

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