Marketing Insurance: Covering Your A** One Campaign at a Time
Every marketer is about to lose their shirt over skyrocketing sales and marketing costs. Costs have been going up while sales conversions have gone down for the last several years. While small businesses tend to spend 5-10% of their revenue on marketing, many are bumping that up to 15% and beyond to make up ground.
WTF is Going On
AI is Wrecking SEO
I'm not going to pull punches - this will piss many of my marketing friends off that believe AI in SEO is a God-send. While it might be true short-term, the competition in the SEO world is scaling faster than you can create AI-written articles.
Furthermore, copy is becoming robotic and duplicative across articles, as AI is inherently duplicative of what already exists.
AI is great. I'm not going to sit here and just shit on it, but to think that SEO is going to remain the same is nuts. Ranking in ChatGPT and Gemini is going to be the name of the game, and it's uncharted territory to figure out.
Digital Ads are Sucking
While SEO rankings are plummeting, digital advertising is more expensive than ever. According to Gartner, 69% of B2B companies plan on spending more this year to compensate for slowing growth. The Wall Street Journal predicts just under $1T will be spent on advertising in 2024.
This means the pay-to-play game is tanking too. The higher the supply of ads, the more expensive it's going to get. As large companies that have neglected social media advertising come into the game, the SMB world is going to get crushed.
Conversion Rates Down the Toilet
If you're good, and I mean really good, your conversion rates on your website are about 2%. Let's say you do get that contact form filled out - sales conversion rates are typically between 15-20% from opportunity to closed won these days.
This doesn't help anyone and shows that spending more isn't the answer. If your bottom of funnel sucks, why would you keep filling the top?
Marketing CYA
While we can talk about a plethora of channels that are having doomsday-like results, that doesn't help fix the problem. So I'll skip why cold emailing has become synonymous with spam, word of mouth isn't reliable, and conferences aren't what they used to be...
Instead, let's talk about what you can do to cover your ass (CYA) in 2024 as a sales or marketing leader.
Who is Engaging?
While marketing seems to be burning, the fact is that people are engaging with your content, ads, and emails whether they're reaching back out to chat or not. They're showing interest, but they haven't had enough of a hook sunk in to take a dreaded sales call or sign up for a trial.
The question is whether or not you know who is engaging? Most don't.
Take cold calling as an example. Is it best to blindly call everyone and their mother? Probably not. Yet, if you see someone clicks on links in your email 465x, someone should be picking up the phone immediately.
The same applies to marketing, but few know how easy it can be.
Who is on Your Website?
While tools like Pardot, Clearbit, and Lead Forensics have shown which company is visiting your website for the last decade or more, it's limited in helpfulness.
Microsoft was on your site... who cares?
They have 250k employees. How helpful is it to know an account was engaging? Not very. Even if you're targeting small businesses, if it's more than a 1-person shop, you don't know who clicked on your ad, email, or article.
Recommended by LinkedIn
It's only now, in 2024, that we're able to see WHO is on your website, down to the exact person... without opt-ins.
Think about what this means...
Knowing who is on your website is the ultimate form of covering your ass. The question is whether or not that's really possible?
Going Out of Business
While there's 3-4 companies that can de-anonymize your website visitors, there's a couple problems with them:
That's where Identity Matrix comes into play.
Identity Matrix: De-Anonymize Website Visitors
Identity Matrix is the only tool on the market that can de-anonymize 50-70% of your website traffic and show:
This level of data lets anyone, even a junior marketer, turn marketing efforts into a positive ROI. It doesn't matter how expensive advertising or how competitive organic content gets. You'll turn nearly every visitor into. a lead.
Check out how it works:
Once you have this data, you can score your leads and route the highest intent prospects directly to your sales team. Everyone else? They get put on a drip-nurturing program until they show even higher intent than browsing your website.
Is it Legal?
It's legal if you don't get caught. Just kidding.
Yes, Identity Matrix is completely legal and is GDPR and CCPA compliant. How? It's because we de-anonymize US visitors that have opted into partner marketing at some point in time.
With the U.S. being an opt-out country, not opt-in like the rest of the world, you can stay 100% compliant with all laws, without exception.
Calling Bullshit?
It's new technology. Be skeptical. Don't believe it until you see it.
I challenge you to reach out to myself or my team at Identity Matrix to see a private demo of the platform in action.
Combat rising costs with data your competitors wish they had before they get their hands on it too.
Written by Stephen Lowisz, Founder & CEO of Identity Matrix and the Revenue Institute.