With 2020 now in full view, let's talk about those resolutions. More specifically, your marketing resolutions... and how you plan to keep them.
Watch Mike Madden, Head of Commercial Demand Generation for Adobe Experience Cloud, for his webinar, 2020 Vision: Strategies for High Growth in the New Year, where he explored how to actually put your resolutions to work, so you can make the most of your marketing goals and priorities in 2020.
You'll learn:
-How to jump-start growth with personalization tactics
-Why revenue attribution matters (a lot) to your company's bottom line
-The marketing and sales connection and why it’s critical
It’s the new year, and all of us in marketing are thinking about growth.
For a lot of CMOs, it’s the number one priority.
But developing marketing strategies that drive growth — and executing them effectively — isn’t easy.
According to an Altimeter survey of 500 marketers, challenges that can get in the way of growth include scaling innovations, proving the impact of digital marketing, getting the technology right, and getting support from leadership.
The goal of this Webinar is to suggest strategies that can help you overcome challenges, and grow through 2020 and beyond.
At Marketo, we talk to marketers every day. They’re our customers, and helping them do better is our primary focus.
We also keep a close eye on the latest marketing research as we refine our product and add new features.
Based on conversations with both customers and analysts, as well as looking at recent trends, we’ve identified five strategies that can help marketing drive business growth in today’s climate:
Personalize everything. This means using technology to go beyond basic market segmentation and creating unique experience for individual customers and prospects.
I think the B2B buyers journey is becoming more and more like a B2C journey. Why? Because even though we work for a company, we still want to be marketed to like individuals, like you really know our needs, wants, and even dislikes.
Understand how marketing drives revenues (a.k.a., revenue attribution). Understanding and qualifying marketing impact is perhaps the most important thing you can do to get support from C-suite leadership.
Being able to prove that your campaigns are driving revenue is really just the first step. It shows the C-suite and your sales counterparts real credibility but even more so, it helps you get more money. At the end of the day, folks are trying to run a business. If you can prove dollars are better spent in marketing than anywhere else because you have become a revenue machine, wonderful things are to come.
Make mobile marketing a priority. Seems like a no-brainer, but I still find websites and emails that aren’t mobile optimized. And in a world where people literally spend more time on their phones than not on their phones, our prospects and customer don’t just need better experiences – they deserve them.
Measure long-term performance. Again, we have a no-brainer but think about it for a second.
What gets you really excited? Sometimes it’s reducing your cost per lead, doubling your open rates, increasing form conversions by 15%. You see, marketing is a rush! I’d compare the feeling of beating a control in a marketing campaign similar to winning the lottery. It’s almost addictive to get such immediate feedback and to actually win. But that’s where marketers can get sucked in.
Sometimes we love the engagement metrics MORE than say, shortening a sales cycle or increasing lead acceptance rates. This needs to change.
Connect marketing and sales. Closely coordinating marketing and sales efforts can dramatically improve the customer experience and reduce time-to-revenue. At Marketo, we developed a lead to revenue model with our sales counterparts with aligns our efforts across the entire funnel from database leads all the way through revenue won.
• Your customers want personalized content from all your channels, including web and email.
• They have less patience for generic web content and marketing emails, and are likely to tune you out if you aren’t speaking directly to them.
In a study by Hanover Group, “70 percent of business buyers said that personalized recommendations help them to obtain more value from their vendors — and 53 percent say that they would pay as much as 5 percent more for them.3”
What does that really mean? People value personalization so much, they pay more for a product just because it was more specific to them. Pretty power statistic.
• This is true for business buyers as well as consumers.
• Providing personalized content can create a better customer experience, and it builds trust.
• When people interact with personalized content online and through email, they are much more likely to convert.
The perfect example here is segment marketing. Every industry has it’s own specific needs, wants, and vernacular. A B2B marketer that sends blanket messages is less effective than the marketer that has specialized content and vernacular for financial services, manufacturing, business services, high education, etc.
Most marketers today rely on segmentation to personalize emails.
Many B2B organizations have a static website that serves up the same content to all visitors, regardless of where they are from, what device they’re using, and their business data.
While increasingly detailed segmentation and mobile responsive design can take you part of the way to personalization, it’s not nearly enough.
Predictive models that use machine learning to determine which types of web and email content customers prefer represents the next frontier in personalization.
This is a good time to talk about predictive account scoring vendors too.
By incorporating predictive content into your website, you can match the right content to each visitor, even if they are new to your site. (Browsing data like company name, location, etc. can help your model determine which content to serve.)
It can also help you personalize email campaigns and make them better over time.
To grow in 2020, we recommend you adopt predictive modeling to personalize customers interactions with all your channels.
As we noted during the introduction, getting leadership to invest in marketing innovation can be a big obstacle to growth.
Typically, CMOs use ROI and pipeline metrics to quantify marketing performance for the CEO and CFO. Those can be useful metrics—if they’re accurate.
Today, many businesses use spreadsheets and other piecemeal tools to measure marketing attribution. (So many reporting tools, marketers cannot report on campaigns in one single solution.)
For long and complex customer journeys with many different touchpoints, these partial solutions often understate the impact of marketing on revenue.
Accurate revenue attribution, then, is essential to marketing-powered growth.
A comprehensive marketing attribution system can help you improve marketing performance and gain support for scaling successful innovations.
For complete accuracy, your system must be able to track the customer journey from the first, anonymous contact (such as a visit to your blog or website) through all the different interactions that precede a sale.
You should also be able to define multiple programs, channels, touchpoints, etc. and map your complete customer journey, no matter how long and complex it is.
It’s important that your attribution solution connects seamlessly to your marketing automation platform and your CRM.
Marketing automation systems can track performance for different channels, but they can’t always tie all this information together, or link it to sales.
Your CRM contains the bottom-of-the-funnel data and actual sales.
To grow in 2020, we recommend you audit your current marketing attribution solution — and, if it isn’t accurate, change it fast.
• Mobile marketing has always been challenging, especially for B2B companies and B2C companies that offer complex products.
• But now mobile marketing is becoming easier and more profitable for a wide range of businesses:
80% of B2B buyers are using mobile apps at work, and more than 60% report that mobile played a significant role in a recent purchase.10
Consumers have an average of 4 retailers’ mobile apps on their phone at any given time.11
• Mobile apps are increasingly popular, both with B2B and B2C consumers.
• And mobile apps can be a significant source of revenues for B2B companies, particularly when they’re used to capture repeat orders from existing customers.
• Generally speaking, if you haven’t already optimized your website for mobile viewing and/or developed a mobile app, you should.
• If you already have a user-friendly mobile presence, making it even better can help you grow.
Mobile marketing automation can help you deliver more value through the mobile channel and attract more customers. How?
You’ll want to analyze customer behavior on your mobile-friendly web pages and in your mobile app.
You’ll also want to understand how mobile users are interacting with emails they open on mobile devices. Almost two thirds of emails are now opened on mobile devices.
Moreover, you’ll want to take advantage of mobile-first channels, such as text messages, push notifications, and more.
The mobile channel should be an integrated part of your marketing plan, and your marketing automation solution should fully support it.
Marketers are addicted to short-term metrics. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals keep us all on our toes.
But most of the metrics we measure today look at fairly compressed time-horizons.
By focusing so intently on the short-term, it’s easy to miss longer-term trends that can reveal opportunities for growth.
Incorporating longer-term KPIs into your performance measurement mix can help you see further than your competition — and grow faster
According to the 2019 CMO Survey from Deloitte, 56.5% of marketers that have AI use it for predictive analytics and customer insights.
Long-term performance measurement requires a complete dataset. Whatever tool you use for marketing analytics should connect easily to your CRM and other relevant platforms.
You should be able to design your own reports without resorting to spreadsheets or asking IT for custom code.
Ideally, you should also have access to predictive analysis that can forecast future trends from your existing data.
Predictive analysis often relies on machine learning and other forms of AI.
It can help you discover the characteristics of customers that respond to your marketing, seasonal engagement patterns, most appealing product combinations, and more.
You can use the insights you gain to design new, and more effective strategies.
Working more effectively with sales is a simple but effective strategy to grow.
It’s also harder than it sounds.
Many organizations have disconnects between sales and marketing baked into their existing processes.
Leads may be passed from person to person based on internal rules rather than customer requirements.
Marketing data may not be passed to sales (or vice versa).
Leadership may treat marketing and sales as fully separate entities.
If you’re not sure how effectively your team is working with your sales organization, consider how you’d answer the questions shown onscreen. [Attendees could respond to the questions on the slide.]
Connecting marketing and sales requires a mix of process and technology.
From a process standpoint, it means meeting with sales, sharing metrics, and identifying what needs to be improved. It also means being accountable for sticking to plans.
If you practice account-based marketing (ABM), it also makes sense to create a shared revenue model that tracks each step from lead to sale and allows marketing and sales to share ownership of the results.
From a technology standpoint, it’s critical to integrate marketing and sales data.
You also need a marketing automation platform that lets you design custom lead scoring models and easily share information.
With the right processes and technology in place, collaboration with sales will become easier — and growth will accelerate.
We just covered a lot of material. And that’s good news, because there are so many ways marketing can deliver growth.
You may not want to adopt all of these strategies at once, altogether.
Instead, think about where your greatest needs are as well as how difficult it will be to execute.
If you’d like to learn more about how marketing automation can help with your specific growth scenario, I’d be glad to talk after the meeting.
Or you can ask a question during our Q&A session right now.