You’ve just wrapped up a successful campaign. You’ve engaged with new customers, strengthen your brand image, and have seen a boost in sales — now what? 

Marketing is a constantly evolving profession, and producing new, relevant content is hard. However, you can make it easier by using your reach and engagement to safely open communication channels to inspire your next marketing campaign. 

This might involve encouraging internal communications to get a better idea of your business. Or, you might reach out to external stakeholders to learn more about what they want to see from your advertising and marketing material. 

Internal Communications for Marketing

Most successful marketing campaigns start as conversations between colleagues. However, if you only ever listen to other folks in the marketing department, you may find yourself in an echo chamber. 

Fortunately, advancements in remote software mean we are more technologically connected today than ever before. Video technology like WebEx and GoToMeeting makes it easy to touch base with finance before you sign off on a new campaign and chat tools like Slack ensure that all departments are on the same page when you reach out to different internal communications feedback. 

Finance

Finance and marketing are often seen as completely separate departments within the business. Many marketing professionals only get in touch with finance to receive their budget. This is a major misstep, as your marketing materials are supposed to support the bottom line — without regularly getting in touch with the finance department, you are like a ship without a rudder. 

Now, as a marketer, you don’t need (or want) access to every financial indicator that your business uses. Some indicators are highly sensitive, and sharing them may put business data at risk. However, being able to keep a near-constant tab on safe-to-share metrics like cost-per-sale and seasonality is crucial to ensure that your marketing spend is both profitable and relevant. 

Of course, every business will have different financial metrics that you can use to track success. The key is to find the metrics that you can share safely and want to improve upon. You can use this data to create marketing campaigns that respond to the internal feedback you receive from your finance department. 

Human Resources

Human resources (HR) and marketing professionals usually have a significant overlap of skills. Like marketers, HR professionals are adept at understanding people and the pressure they face. If you’ve been at a company long enough, there’s a good chance you are already fully aware of your HR department and the supportive services they offer. 

But if you only reach out to HR when you have a problem, then you are missing a trick. HR understands your company’s employees better than anyone else. That means they have a great insight into the people behind the product or service your company offers. As a marketer, you should use these insights to foreground your hard-working employees and create branded materials that highlight their achievements. 

When working with HR, it’s important to maintain privacy and confidentiality at all times. HR usually handles sensitive material that could cause embarrassment or damages if an unauthorized person gained access to them. You can prevent this by password-protecting PDFs before you send them. This adds an extra layer of security and ensures that important documents aren’t opened by the wrong people. 

Customer Service

Depending on the structure of your business, custom service may already be an integral part of your marketing campaigns. This makes sense, as customer service specialists have their ear to the ground and know customers better than anyone else in your business. 

You can safely utilize customer services insights by requesting anonymous data that maintains the privacy of your customers while giving you key insights into customer behavior and values. When retrieving these insights, you must take data protection seriously. 

A strong data protection policy can help you avoid most transgressions of privacy. Even if you think your communications network is secure, phishing scams and ransomware are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Without a preventative policy in place, you risk the privacy of your consumers and may be looking at a hefty lawsuit in the future. 

External Communications for Marketing

Internal communications ensure that your next marketing campaign properly represents your business and supports the bottom line. But marketing also offers a line of communication between your business and external stakeholders like your consumers and the local community. 

Consumers

Listening to consumers is an increasingly important part of marketing. Consumers today are more savvy and cynical when it comes to marketing campaigns, meaning that a hard sell is unlikely to be well received. 

When reaching out to consumers via surveys, focus groups, or social media, try to identify a problem that you can solve for them. For example, if you sell espresso machines but your consumers frequently report that they don’t know how to make a cappuccino, then you should create marketing materials that teach them how to make the perfect cappuccino. 

This kind of need-based advertising works because it gives something of value to the consumer. It’s a tried and tested model — just look at this Nike campaign that teaches consumers how to dye their own shoes — based on communication and feedback. 

When looking for feedback from consumers, it’s important that you keep shared data as confidential as possible. Even qualitative data like that gathered from feedback can be sensitive and you need to proactively prevent lapses in confidentiality by balancing data-driven marketing with user privacy. 

Community

As a marketer, you can help your business fulfill its corporate social responsibility (CSR) by opening lines of communication with your local community before your next campaign. This is particularly important if you are a major employer in your area, as big brands like Amazon have recently received flak for undermining the strength of the communities where they operate. 

You can safely open lines of communication with your community by hosting in-person events. These in-person events are great for community buy-in and don’t require you to jump through data protection hoops. You can use these community events to learn more about your brand image in the local area and promote positive PR about the ways you support your community. 

Conclusion

As a marketer, you have tons of data available to you to make more informed decisions. However, you cannot afford to overstep data-protection boundaries and must follow preventative privacy policies at all times. You can further secure your communications channels by using password-protected PDFs and collecting anonymous consumer data that cannot undermine user privacy.