This presentation is based on research we’ve conducted over the last year with 500 B2B Marketers in the US and UK as well as our having worked with some of the best modern marketers in the world over the last 14 years.
Firstly - It’s all about your customers and connecting your brand with your customers.
Secondly – Make the Board of Director’s Love Marketing.Let me share a little story I was told by one of my customers last week… Typical boardmeeting … Finance gives an update … people listen – no interruptions … operations gives an update … people listen – no interruptions … Sales gives and update … people listen – no interruptions … last on the agenda Marketing … all over sudden everybody on the board is a digital marketing expert because they have a Facebook account and are telling you what Marketing should be doing … does that sound familiar??
The role of today’s digital marketer is much different. As a “marketer,” you can’t simply leave technology decisions and investments to the “techies.” Your role is now much bigger… and requires connecting, reaching, engaging and understanding consumers across multiple platforms…and then using data to drive marketing performance improvements.
So marketing’s role has changed dramatically in the past 5-10 years. Traditional marketing was about generating awareness and then passing initial contacts to Sales, which handled education and moving folks through the buying process. Click: Today, Marketing plays a much more important role throughout the buyer’s journey. In fact, last year the Google and Corporate Executive Board study showed that buyers are 60% through their decision process BEFORE engaging with a Sales person. This means marketing has to play a much bigger role in the selling process and must absolutely be joined at the hip with sales.
The research I mentioned earlier has led to us to create what we call the 5 Tenets of Modern marketing. These are the areas that traditional marketers said made up the modern marketer. These are:Targeting EngagementConversionAnalysis andMarketing Technology
The first one is TARGETING. This is not a new idea. Marketers have been targeting buyers since the beginning of marketing. But there is a different way to do it in the modern world. Targeting is about truly knowing your customer – since the beginning of time marketers have understood that you can’t know too much about your customers. The path to customer-obsessed marketing begins and ends with customer knowledge.
A very well know management consultant said decades ago: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him or her and sells itself.” – Peter DruckerAs Peter Drucker noted, this is not a new concept.
So, how did we first start targeting? First, we started out with only the knowledge that individual sales people had in their heads and their Rolodexes. But when the salesperson left, that knowledge walked out the door with them.So,Sales people were asked touse sales force automation system to keep that customer information all in one place within a company and give visivility to various departments on who the target buyers were and where they were in the sales cycle. BUT, this still depended on the SALES person putting in the right information.Then our customers moved online and began to get more and more of their information from digital sources rather than sales people, so not only was the information in an SFA system out of date, it was increasingly limited. Modern Marketers realized they could fill this gap by understanding what people looked at online, what forms they filled out, and what emails they reacted to. With this, the idea of Digital Body Language was born. MARKETING now had valuable information about buyers to help them do marketing AND that they could share with sales to give them better visibility into where buyers were on the buying journey.So,Sales people were asked touse sales force automation system to keep that customer information all in one place within a company and give visivility to various departments on who the target buyers were and where they were in the sales cycle. BUT, this still depended on the SALES person putting in the right information.Then our customers moved online and began to get more and more of their information from digital sources rather than sales people, so not only was the information in an SFA system out of date, it was increasingly limited. Modern Marketers realized they could fill this gap by understanding what people looked at online, what forms they filled out, and what emails they reacted to. With this, the idea of Digital Body Language was born. MARKETING now had valuable information about buyers to help them do marketing AND that they could share with sales to give them better visibility into where buyers were on the buying journey.
Let’s go through an example. This is Stephanie. In the traditional world, all we had was Stephanie’s demographic information. It’s what marketers used to buy lists and it’s what marketers captured on a web form.First, let’s look at the way things used to be. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century. (Quite poorly I might add). What we know about Stephanie here for example, based on her demographics, is that she is the SVP of Digital Operations at Forbes Travel Guide. She’s a Mom between the ages of 25-44, who has a household income of $120k (so she’s doing alright, way to go Stephanie) and that she lives in Denver, Colorado. NOTE: change title/job/location to fit the delivery of the presentation.
Now you can get a much more complete picture of potential prospects like Stephanie through their online behavior, orDigital Body Language”. And by carefully reading a person like Stephanie’s Digital Body Language, (which is revealed through online activities such as website visits, white paper downloads, social interactions, searches performed and email responses) you can not only improve messaging and engagement, but also reach out to her at the right time and place when she’s receptive the content you’ve created. We’re able to communicate with her as a person, not just as a prospect.NOTE: you can edit the DBL items in the slide to fit the delivery location.
important SLIDE!The Universal Buyer Profile provides the final piece of the puzzle. Finally, we can bring complete customer knowledge together with personalization of both content, and more importantly, timing, to deliver on the promise of 1:1 marketing: personalized content in context.
THE SECOND TENET IS ENGAGEMENTBack in the days before digital marketing, if a sales rep walked in and asked, “How do I sell something?”The sales manager would have said, “Go hang out where your customers are and be interesting…and the first rule of being interesting is to be interested in them.”
As we started to engage with customers online, a lot of campaign design was done manually. But then marketers needed to manage the process of connecting websites and email campaigns, which meant lots of Gantt charts and project planning. As we became Modern Marketers, whiteboards of campaign flows…evolved into Campaign Canvas flows, and creative could be visually created using WYSIWYG editors. Now you can even connect display ads using AdFocus and add additional apps.
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Extend multichannel campaigns with your choice of applications and power your initiatives. AppCloud partners span the entire marketing channel landscape from demand generation to events to brand management.
Being engaging often relies on making a personal “connection” with the person in the audience.
Now the connections are Digital, Social, and Mobile. You can bring paid / owned / earned media into …… one multi-channel campaign, while at the same time both targeting and understanding response at an individual level lets us deliver on the vision of each marketing channel…… becoming a performance channel, and multichannel campaigns being understood in terms of their effect on individual audience members. DIGITAL – ONLINE ADVERTISING AS WELL AS EMAIL, SEARCH ETC.SOCIAL – PUBLISH FROM ELOQUA’S CAMPAIGN CANVAS AS WELL AS TRACK THROUGH CAMPAIGN IDsMOBILE – THROUGH ANY DEVICE (RESPONSIVE DESIGN)
While marketing is measured on how it can drive pipeline and revenue contribution, one of the major outputs is content. In starting to look at this problem, we realized it really boiled down to creating the right content for the right people and getting it to them at the right time. We started to think of content as something that is created for a specific purpose to connect with a specific customer persona. Ultimately, content is the fuel of your marketing engine. Content is implicitly tied to marketing and as we expand the reach of what Eloqua can do for Modern Marketers the next natural step was to bring content closer to Eloqua.State-of-the-art Content Marketing is just the latest edition we’ve made to the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Why?To truly leverage the amazing power of data and Eloquaand reach the holy grail of being a 1:1 marketer, there is a requirement that you have uniquecontent for every data combination. You need to have content that matches your data attributes…you need to think of content as data. We must create the right content for the right person at the right time and deliver it through the right channel. The old paradigm of Content Marketing used soft concepts like viral or engagement. It was suggested success resulted from being clever or funny and hoping that your content would be picked up and be seen and shared….. This type of content marketing was much more akin to old fashioned reach and frequency marketing. Now we are becomingData Driven Content Marketers.
State-of-the-art Content Marketing is just the latest edition we’ve made to the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Why?To truly leverage the amazing power of data and Eloqua and reach the holy grail of being a 1:1 marketer, there is a requirement that you have uniquecontent for every data combination. You need to have content that matches your data attributes…you need to think of content as data. We must create the right content for the right person at the right time and deliver it through the right channel. The old paradigm of Content Marketing used soft concepts like viral or engagement. It was suggested success resulted from being clever or funny and hoping that your content would be picked up and be seen and shared….. This type of content marketing was much more akin to old fashioned reach and frequency marketing. Now we are becomingData Driven Content Marketers.
Conversion Every marketer since the beginning of time has known they have to turn their programs into revenue. So now you have your audience’s attention. They are showing interest and you need to convert that interest into sales. Easier said than done, right?
Addressing the whole customer lifecycle brings sales and marketing together in spirit and process. How does this happen? With increased interaction comes accelerated conversion: better leads delivered faster.Digital Body Language from social campaigns can be leveraged to gain greater visibility into buyer/prospect needs by the sales force directly as well. Once you know who your prospects trust you can engage in a more relevant manner.ASK THE AUDIENCE HOW MANY ARE USING LEAD SCORINGAutomatically qualify sales leads based on demographic, behavioral, and social characteristics in a flexible, easy-to-use HTML5 interface – build lead scoring models without technical skills. Take advantage of multi-model lead scoring to score leads across multiple business units, products, or regions.ELOQUA PROFILER – GIVES SALES VISIBIITY INTO PROSPECT DBLELOQUA ENGAGE – TEMPLATED EMAILS THAT SALES CAN USE QUICKLY. HELPS IMPROVE SALES EFFICIENCY
Digital Body Language from social campaigns can be leveraged to gain greater visibility into buyer/prospect needs by the sales force directly as well. Once you know who your prospects trust you can engage in a more relevant manner.ELOQUA PROFILER – GIVES SALES VISIBIITY INTO PROSPECT DBLELOQUA ENGAGE – TEMPLATED EMAILS THAT SALES CAN USE QUICKLY. HELPS IMPROVE SALES EFFICIENCY
AnalysisPowering Data Driven Accountability We joke about it, “Which half of my marketing is wasted?” –- the most quoted anecdote in the history of talking about marketing automation. Marketers have always known they have to measure things. Now more than ever before.
Advanced reporting and analysis capabilities allow the Modern Marketer to “quantify and justify” marketing’s contribution to the bottom line.
It’s no wonder that marketing and sales are aligned around the numbers. Our lead visualization technology delivers pipeline, opportunities, and revenue at a glance – from a unified sales and marketing perspective.
But what is reporting without action items? What value do insights have without resulting actions?
Marketing Technology There will be more digital information about your buyer’s intentions in the future. The platform has to be designed from the ground up to aggregate large amounts of information about the buyer profile and process it at scale.
A Gartner study got a lot of attention and understandably so: It predicted that CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs by 2017 – that’s a powerful statement. But, as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility…and in the modern CMO’s world, that also means accountability. As the marketer controls more program spend and more technology spend, across more digital, social, and mobile channels, the challenge to demonstrate effectiveness also increases. Now that marketing has a seat at the table, we must deliver, because we are more accountable than ever before.
No one can predict what the next cool channel or technology will be. The marketing platform of the future must make it easy for new technologies and channels to be integrated into the daily life of the marketer.
That's why a marketing system of record with technology that captures and delivers a Universal Customer Profile is essential. This wealth of customer knowledge allows you to optimize Modern Marketing functions through a Marketing Cloud centered on truly knowing the customer. A Marketing Cloud that includes content marketing, social marketing, targeting and segmentation, data management, and sales enablement. And true, Multichannel Campaign Management, from website and social to advertising and email, allows you to deploy and track your marketing campaigns across any channel.
By deploying the 5 tenets, you are able to truly know your customer, deploy multichannel always-on marketing, and prove value with data driven accountability. Focusing on these goals…