What does it mean to be an empowered marketer?

Let's start with the definition of empowerment. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us it is "The process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights."

So what does the word mean when applied to B2C marketers?

Marketers today have a million demands on their time. During a typical day, you might send out a few personalized emails, run A/B tests to drive conversions on your e-commerce website, publish some beautiful targeted ads on Instagram, and then analyze the ROI across all your marketing campaigns.

And that's just in one day! It's no wonder B2C marketers are feeling the pressure to continually perform.

That is exactly why marketers need to become empowered—so they can access customer data directly, easily execute complex marketing campaigns, and dive into detailed analytics to prove the value of their work. Empowered marketers work independently and efficiently, and still have enough time to spend on creative endeavors.

Sound fantastic? It is.

Here's how you can strive to become a truly empowered marketer.

Better understand your customers

You must fully understand your B2C buyer if you want to become an empowered marketer. Unfortunately, doing so is harder than ever because most consumers take a meandering and complex path to purchase. For example, your typical buyer might...

• Start browsing your site anonymously on his phone
• "Like" one of your targeted ads on Instagram
• Return to your website on his home computer
• Enter his email address into a popup to get a coupon code
• Finally decide to buy

That multistep, multichannel, and multidevice buyer's journey is standard in a B2C purchase today.

Unfortunately, however, because of the proliferation of channels and devices, most marketers would have a tough time identifying the individual buyer. Today, your customer data is probably stored on disparate platforms, such as those for email marketing, e-commerce, social media advertising, and customer service.

That's exactly why marketers need a single view of the customer, with all the relevant data unified in one place. Top brands can understand their buyers as they move through the purchase process by pulling all of this data into a B2C CRM.

By unifying all the different sources of information about your customers, you can quickly see and understand their favorite products, the communication channels they use most often, their purchase frequencies, and much more. Then you can start to use that data to better serve their needs and tailor your marketing to their preferences.

Automate to regain your time

Time is also vital to becoming empowered. If you don't have enough time to focus on your role, you'll never get anywhere. That's why it's so important to automate many of your core marketing campaigns. Smart, empowered marketers understand that automation can save time and effort, allowing them to get away from the manual, annoying part of marketing and, instead, focus on the important, creative work that can drive revenue.

Dynamic segmentation, for example, can help you customize your campaigns automatically. Instead of manually exporting custom segments each time you want to deploy a new campaign to your buyers, segments automatically update in real-time, as customers take action on your site.

Lifecycle marketing can also be improved with automation. Instead of manually batching welcome emails to each new buyer, you can create a dynamic segment for new customers that automatically sends the same email. Your message is automatically triggered each time a customer carries out a certain action or reaches a certain point in the buyer's journey.

With many of your core marketing campaigns automated and driving engagement with buyers, you're freed up to get more creative and try more inventive campaigns to help reach your revenue goals.

Own and access your data

Marketers already know the importance of data, but what about the importance of access to that data? Empowered marketers know not only how to use data effectively but also how to get access to the numbers they need.

Because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with customers, you always have to test various tactics. That's why you should A/B-test your entire e-commerce brand to learn what your customers want and don't want, as well as why.

With better and easier access to detailed marketing analytics, you can understand which campaigns worked and which didn't, and the data can help you make an educated guess as to why.

Understanding your data is just the beginning. The knowledge you gain from the data will help you take action to improve your messaging strategy. You can discover your top-converting marketing campaigns, which can spark ideas for how to create even better campaigns in the future. You could also learn...

• Your customers' favorite products
• Your top-performing email campaigns
• The best paid-social channels for acquisition
• The best channels for customer retention
• The pages on your site that best convert buyers

That information enables you to test new ideas for paid ads, email promotions, or copy on your website that may drive better ROI. You need to test, test, and test again so you can reach your customers with the right messages at the right time.

Don't be afraid to get creative

With a better handle on your customer data, automation of your key marketing campaigns, and analytics proving the value of your activities, you can become truly empowered. As a result, you can dedicate more time and brainpower to doing what you're good at: being creative. You can focus on trying out new tactics and working to have a real impact on your bottom line.

With the right tools, marketers can actually do it all. You can collect the data, get creative, test it, and repeat—all without too much manual effort.

Don't be afraid to try new things, experiment with different channels to contact customers, send out new types of campaigns, and much more. With the right data at your fingertips, you can also try innovative ways of acquiring new customers and driving long-term customer retention.

You will always be learning from your past successes and failures, and hopefully you'll be having more fun as you do it!

It's time to stake your claim and become The Empowered Marketer you've always wanted to be.