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[FAQ attached below this article] What's Changing? On August 31, 2020, Marketo Engage will implement a new retention policy specifically for Sent & Delivered Email activities. Under this policy, data for these two activity types will be stored for a rolling 90-day period from the activity date for use in Smart Lists. This is a change from the current default retention period of 25 months, and from the current Extended Data Retention subscription option period of 37 months. Upon the policy taking effect, data older than 90 days for these two activities will be deleted and no longer available for export. Any Smart List with the “Was Sent Email” and “Was Delivered Email” filters (including NOT Was Sent and NOT Was Delivered) should be updated to ensure the maximum lookback date is 90 days. If the lookback date is greater than 90 days, the Smart List will continue to function, but only activities that are 90 days old or less will qualify. Why? In 2020, we are improving critical parts of the underlying Marketo Engage infrastructure, including Batch campaign processing, similar to the Trigger campaign improvements made in 2019. This new infrastructure, in combination with the new retention policy, is expected to result in shorter lead time with large email sends and faster segmentation processing to deliver significantly faster processing to our customers. Note, the revised retention policy is one, among several, aspects that come together to deliver this improved performance, but broadly speaking reduced retention helps with faster database look ups and search across the run-time infrastructure. What's NOT Changing? Aggregated data – including Reports, Dashboards, and Analytics – will not be affected by this change (unless they reference a Smart List with these activities). The new policy will not affect any activity type other than Sent and Delivered (for example, Was Opened activity data is not affected). Further, this change does NOT affect Engagement Program casts. What Customer Actions Are Needed? First, you'll want revisit where and how you're using these two activity types. Audit your Smart Lists and ensure the date ranges for these two activity types are less than 90 days - if you must use a date greater than 90 days, we suggest running a process to export to an external system. You will need to create this before the new retention policy takes effect on August 31, 2020. Information on how to export activities using APIs can be found on our Developers Documentation website. We appreciate you understanding as we move toward an enhanced Marketo Engage experience for all customers. Please download and review the FAQ attached below for further suggestions, workarounds and additional information.

By: Sesame Mish The most important part of any marketing team is its people. Without the right people—and the right combination of people—things like resources, processes, and strategy won’t be optimized. You need dynamic individuals at the helm, all working in areas of their strengths, banding together in unison to achieve company goals. All marketing teams should think of it this way—and digital advertising teams are no exception. So, what’s the best way to form your digital advertising team, in particular? Let’s explore… By now, marketers are acutely aware that we’ve entered the digital age—we communicate by email with our customers, we promote our brands through social media, and we always point people to our website to learn more. On that same note, we have seen the advertising landscape undergo a massive shift—from the retro Mad Men-esque days of print ads and advertising agencies all the way to the present day emergence of digital ads and internal digital advertising teams. With this transformation comes a new set of roles and duties that need to be taken into consideration when forming your digital advertising team. But at the same time, we don’t want to forget the attributes and skills that made our Mad Men predecessors so great. Therefore, Modern Mad Men need to embody both the old and the new—someone who understands the foundational elements of being a good advertiser with someone who lives and breathes the digital space. With this in mind, check out our new infographic, Mad Men of the Millennium, to learn which elements you should consider when forming your modern digital advertising team. View the infographic in a new window here. Please use the HTML code below to embed this graphic <a href="http://blog.marketo.com/2015/11/infographic-how-to-form-your-digital-advertising-team/"><img alt="[Infographic] Mad Men of the Millennium" src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Mad-Men-of-the-Millennium_Marketo.png" width="100%" /></a><br><p><small>Brought to you by <a href="http://www.marketo.com/marketing-automation">Marketing Automation Software by Marketo</a></small>

By Emir Eliot-Lindo I’m not exaggerating when I say that the impact of digital and mobile technology has changed the agency’s traditional role—and value proposition—forever. From my ringside seat as Marketo’s VP of Alliances, I’ve watched in real time the rapid change in the constellation of marketing partnerships. The shifts are everywhere and they are profound, particularly in how technology is redefining decades-old agency relationships with marketers. To put this in context, think back a few years to when the agency was figuratively the CMO’s right arm. Anytime you had a meeting, at least one representative from the agency also sat in the room to help the CMO think through brand and creative decisions. But today, this paradigm has begun to change. Don Draper needs to get his geek on The agency-as-right-arm was typical in the `Mad Men’ era, but with the emergence of new digital and social channels of communication, people now expect brands to interact with them in the ways that they want to interact. This takes place as digital ad growth is exploding. It’s a pivotal moment with big opportunities. But as the relationship between consumers and marketers evolves, more than ever marketing executives need agencies to guide them through the digital landscape. It’s still a slog. A study by the Association of National Advertisers and McKinsey found that “systems, processes, budgets and metrics are still designed largely around mass campaigns and promotions” and “old-school methods of broadcasting to customers.” An overwhelming 96% of the executives polled said they wanted to make data-informed decisions a priority. But incredibly more than one-third said their companies still don’t use digital data. And nearly half reported that they don’t yet have the right analytics in place. The changes forced by digital can be daunting to CMOs who don’t have the skills to deal with this new world order. Here’s where agencies can step in. Many are fast expanding their traditional expertise in brand and creative to include expertise in data and technology. And they are increasingly in a position to help to pull together mobile and web data in coherent ways to enable CMOs to act on marketing insights. How am I doing? Wherever it starts, CMOs need to know how to understand the customer journey and to serve up the right piece of content at the right time. It could start with a mobile interaction or a video interaction, maybe from a laptop or tablet computer or a smart television. Eventually, this will expand to the world of IoT (Internet of Things) where everything from a fitness tracker to a refrigerator offering the potential to trigger marketing messages. That’s a big opportunity, but it also presents big challenges as day in, day out, the marketing landscape continues to explode, leaving the bewildered CMO wondering about the next step. `Oh gosh, I’m supposed to be the expert on all this advertising and marketing tech? I don’t know what to do about it, and my team doesn’t know either.Somebody needs to be the expert.’ That’s where agencies come in. Shifting role of agencies Is it any coincidence that more agencies are acquiring (or building) systems integrators to bolster their ability to draw insights out of digital data? Agencies have always been the experts on data and creative, not so much when it comes to technology or analytics. That’s why we’re seeing a blending take place with more agencies seeking to acquire or partner with technology shops. On this thread, we've seen Publicis paid $3.7 billion to buy Sapient last year. Other big companies, including the likes of WPP, Accenture, Deloitte, Google, and Facebook, have snapped up creative services shops. The rationale: create one-stop shops for marketers, offering everything from website design to ad buying to management of its e-commerce functionality—and more. No time to waste As Nissan's global marketing chief, Roel de Vries, pointed out on an earlier occasion, marketers now must make sense of an enormous amount of data that's complex and expanding. But they need to resist the temptation to bring this functionality in-house. This sort of expertise is scarce and expensive. Don’t risk watching someone else poach away your coveted talent after a year or two in the job. This job is best served by agencies who can reach deep inside their organizations for talent and serve as the connective tissue between creative and tech. Which sort of agency should you select as a partner? There’s no single answer—corporate culture and geographical proximity obviously factor in—but the best choice will be an agency that can demonstrate the kind of expertise that helps a CMO or marketing team reach their business goals. They ought to be able to detail precisely how they’ll help beyond mumbling clichés about getting `a whole bunch of eyeballs.’ CMOs don’t have time to waste as they grapple with the advent of mobile and social and cookie-based marketing, not to mention Facebook and Google. They will need partners who can help turn big data into business insights and help deliver measurable outcomes. It’s a new world out there.

Quick Event Checklist: Quick Event Checklist – Marketo.com Checklist for Webinars: Managing Successful Webinars: A Marketer’s Must-Have Checklist – Marketo.com Checklist for Setting up Webinars: Managing Successful Webinars - Marketo Checklist Social Media Calendar Template: Your Sample Social Editorial Calendar Worksheets for Lead Generation: Worksheets Marketing Measurement Checklist: The Marketing Measurement Checklist [Infographic] – Marketo.com Email SetUp Checklist: Secret Email Checklist Improve B2B Email Deliverability with Marketing Automation Marketo Email Marketing: Thinking Outside the Inbox Mobile Email Marketing Nine Signs That It's Time to Switch Automation Systems Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Blogging 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: LinkedIn Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Google+ Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Pinterest and Instagram 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Twitter 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Facebook Inbound Marketing Cheat Sheet The Marketing Measurement Cheat Sheet Online Community Cheat Sheet SlideShare Cheat Sheet Podcasting Cheat Sheet Content Marketing Cheat Sheet Lead Nurturing Cheat Sheet Email Deliverability Cheat Sheet Marketing Automation Cheat Sheet Lead Scoring Cheat Sheet B2B Email Marketing Cheat Sheet Landing Page Optimization Cheat Sheet The Changing B2B Buyer Salesforce.com for Marketers Cheat Sheet Sales 2.0 Cheat Sheet Social Sales - Truth about Sales 2.0 How to Attract, Hire, and Grow a Rockstar Marketing Team Marketing Automation and the Marketing Battles What to Test in Your Emails The Cost of Delaying Marketing Automation When "Boring" Means "Amazing": How Testing Makes Go-Live Day a Snooze 17 Email Rules You Absolutely Have To Break 5 Ways That a Solid Marketing Automation Solution Can Help Small Teams Succeed 30 Things to A/B Test for Lead Generation 5 Lead Generation Metrics Every Marketer Should Track Mapping Lead Generation to Your Sales Funnel Here's How to Make Your Website as Personalized as Your Email How to Create a Marketing Persona for Your Business Cheat Sheet: How to Design a Marketing Automation Discovery Guide SEO and PPC Keywords What To Seek In A Lead Nurturing Solution 4 Pieces of Social Media Real Estate You Shouldn't Ignore SEO Cheat Sheet: Best Practices for On-Page Optimization A Marketer's Guide to Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) Email Deliverability and Design: Email Deliverability Design and Creative Checklist – Marketo.com

Welcome to our second interview in the latest edition of Marketo’s Q&A Series with Mashable—“Ask the CMO: Lessons Learned.” I found this interview particularly compelling because it tackles an industry that people don’t historically think of as requiring a lot of marketing—education. If you have a great school name—like this edition’s interview subject, Chris M. Kormis, CMO of the Georgetown McDonough School of Business—students will always want to apply and attend, right? To an extent, but in an increasingly noisy digital world, everybody—including premier education institutions—has to compete for attention. What you’ll learn from Chris is that the education industry, and specifically higher education, has been inherently changed by the growth of digital. Like all other vertical markets, digital is now the central thing that education marketers need to use to ensure their institution stays relevant and continues to grow. As we heard in the interview with Charlie Metzger of the Detroit Pistons, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling tickets, products, or an education; everyone needs to think about ongoing engagement—it is the key to the new era of marketing. And as Chris reminds us, this digital era doesn’t give us permission to forget about the human element of what we do. Emotional engagement is still ever-present, especially in the world of marketing automation—no matter what your industry. How does digital become the thread that ties it all together? Read on to find out more. The following interview originally appeared on Mashable. Over the past two decades, higher education marketers have greatly transformed the methods they use to contact and inform potential students, parents and alumni. Whereas past higher ed. touch-points were based around direct mail and live events, today's higher professionals need to also incorporate email, mobile, webinars and social media into the marketing mix. While they build out multi-platform marketing strategies, university CMOs are also tasked with beating the competition. Today, the battle between schools to attract students is as competitive as the college admissions process. To get a feel for how drastically academic marketing has evolved, we spoke with Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business' CMO, Chris M. Kormis about what she's learned after two decades in higher ed. — and how she and Georgetown are communicating with an increasingly digitally savvy and globalized audience. Q&A with Chris M. Kormis, CMO of Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business 1. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self that pertains to your career in marketing, what would it be? If I could travel back in time, I would tell my younger self to speak up and share my ideas — even to those in higher roles. 2. What's the most unexpectedly important skill from your past that you've found plays into your success? Be nice. Be honest. Work hard. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Pinkie, taught me those three rules, and I live by them every day. 3. You spent nearly 20 years at George Washington University before decamping for Georgetown. How has higher education marketing changed since you started at GWU, and how has it changed while you've been at Georgetown? Technology changed marketing over the last 20 years. There are more engagement opportunities, and they call for operating at a substantially faster pace. At first, digital communications operated alongside traditional media outlets, like newspapers, radio and television. Media channels have redefined themselves over the years. We still have newspapers, but we also receive news online. We listen to local radio stations, but we also listen to Pandora and other online music providers. As the delivery of information has changed, we need to adapt to this changing environment. Now, we are able to better define our audiences and send them targeted and re-targeted messages. Plus, we have the tools to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns. News is immediate now. Two decades ago, we would publish school news once or twice a month in a newspaper. Today, our audiences want their news as it happens. Our websites now enable us to push out news immediately. We still need to gather, sort, and report, but we can report it faster. 4. What are the three biggest trends that you see in higher education marketing today? What’s unique about marketing for a post-graduate degree? Targeted newsletters are providing readers with the content they want to read. Re-marketing to prospective students who have clicked on our ads or visited our website helps maximize ad dollars. In-person information sessions are highly valuable. People still want to talk to other people — face-to-face. Technology will not replace personal interactions. When you market an undergraduate program, you basically have two really different audiences: 16- to 18-year-old high school students and their 40- to 50-year-old parents. Those two groups like to receive their information in very different ways. When you market for a post-graduate degree, you can better define your audience and develop targeted messages for them, enabling your program to attract and build a diverse global class. 5. Georgetown's McDonough School of Business is one of the top business schools in the country. Why do you still need a marketing strategy? What business problem are you trying to solve — won't MBA candidates apply to you regardless? All brands—both well-known and new—need marketing. This is especially true in higher education, where we add new audiences every year as students explore how they will achieve their career goals. Post-graduate education is a competitive marketplace, offering different types of programs and experiences. Prospective students are savvy about what they are seeking in a graduate program. It's important for Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business to tell its story about providing transformational experiences to educate and develop principled leadership — with a global mindset to be in service to business and society. If that's a match for what prospective students are seeking, then both the school and the student will be successful. 6. A lot of people don't always associate data, metrics and algorithms with academic marketing. Can you discuss why higher ed. CMOs need to leverage technology just as much as, say, retail CMOs do? What can higher ed. CMOs glean from technology-infused marketing? Higher education CMOs have a duty to responsibly use the university’s funds wisely. We don’t have the large budgets found in the for-profit world, yet we still need to target our audience and share our message to attract students. Technology can help us measure our results and quickly adjust our plans so we are not wasting dollars. 7. As you mentioned above, print is far from dead when it comes to higher ed. marketing. In fact, you said, it's one of the more effective ways to target students and their parents. How do you create a compelling print marketing strategy in 2015 and how does it tie into your digital strategy? We still print view books and an alumni magazine because people ask for them and read them. Our view books contain fewer pages than they did in the past because we post a lot of the detailed information online. When prospective students attend a college or graduate school fair, they want a takeaway that tells them about the school and its programs. Later, when they leave the fair and look through their stack of promotional materials, they want to see your school there and to have it stand out, or it could be forgotten. For our magazine, we print two issues a year and mail them to all of the school's alumni. This is a personal way of contacting each alumnus as they remove the magazine from their mailbox and set it aside to read later. When they pick it up again, the school has reached them again. This happens until they finish with the issue. This contact is important. People touch and use magazines and other printed materials. They're lasting, unlike emails, which are often deleted before they're ever opened. 8. One of the distinct aspects of B-school marketing, as you mentioned, is that you're not only talking to wide-eyed students — you're also talking to mid-career professionals who have very specific goals and requirements, as well as alumni and donors. What tools do you use to reach them, how do you engage each group and how do you keep the conversation going? We communicate through multiple channels: publications, advertising, digital communications, dynamic website content, social media and press outreach. One of the most effective ways to communicate, though, is still face-to-face discussion. Georgetown McDonough’s Office of Alumni and External Relations reports up to me. Our assistant dean for that area, Justine Schaffner, has developed deep connections with our alumni to engage them in our efforts to recruit students, bring in career opportunities and financially support the school's initiatives. This is a high-touch strategy that is critical in higher education. 9. How do you bring your social and digital initiatives to a live audience, and how does Georgetown University McDonough School of Business differentiate itself from other B-schools? Can you describe a particularly successful social or live initiative? I am active on Twitter, and social media is a big part of our engagement strategy. Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business is distinguishing itself as the premier destination for global business education through its classroom content, experiential learning, faculty experiences and interactions with alumni from around the world. We engage our students and alumni through social media every day through our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube content. One of our most successful campaigns is our Global Business Experience Photo Contest during which our students post photos from their consulting projects abroad on Instagram. We then publicize the contest and invite people to vote. The photos with the most votes win, and then we share the winners again via social media. It’s a great way to interact with people on social media and to share our students' global experiences. 10. How will higher ed. marketing change in the next decade? Will we see less live events and more mobile interactions? Less traditional ad placements and more targeted social campaigns? We will always need live events — at the school as well as around the world to reach our global audience. Nothing replaces human interactions. We also will continue to see increased mobile engagement through interactive social media, webinars and online chats. Advertising still plays a role, but it needs to appear where the audience is online and be creative to engage prospective students.

Author: Yifat Mor According to Gartner, customer experience is the practice of designing for and reacting to customer interactions to meet and exceed customer expectations, to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. So, why, exactly, is customer service the ultimate marketing tool? Let’s explore just that. As technology evolves, the bar is being pushed higher for more intuitive user interactions and usability. Achieving a customer experience (CX) that exceeds the customers’ expectations is becoming increasingly challenging. But know that, in general, ease, speed, and accuracy are the 1-2-3 punch that will keep your customers loyal over the long haul. And that customer experience is more than just customer service or quickly answered queries. It encapsulates the entire lifecycle of your customers. So, Whose Responsibility Is Customer Experience? In the past, the responsibility of the customer experience has typically been divvied up between customer support, product, and other departments. Rarely has the responsibility rested squarely on one department, which means the authority to ensure top notch CX throughout every phase of the funnel or customer journey has been spread too thin. A top-level view on CX reveals that it best fits under the umbrella of your marketing department (which is why marketing typically controls the majority of the customer experience budget). A Shift in Importance So why the sudden focus on the customer experience? Offering great service has always been important, but is that what is really going to make a difference for your brand? Yes, the answer is an emphatic YES! Your competition is growing and gaining more accessibility to your customers, learning where they hang out and how to ease their pain points. Meanwhile, there has been a customer-facing shift—they are now self-empowered, educating themselves thoroughly before each purchase decision, engaging your brand via whichever channel they deem fit and expecting the kind of service that is always there. This has disarmed the product battlefield and opened up a new realm for you to conquer in order to win and keep customers—the customer experience. Branded, personalized moments at each and every point of customer engagement is what market leaders are seeking. The gap must be closed between customer demand and what brands are actually delivering. With that being said, here are five checkpoints that your company should focus on in order to get your customer experience strategy up to snuff: 1. Sport a User-Centered Design This is the first checkpoint you put your entire customer experience through. You can erase the need for other fixes along the journey by ensuring that your website/product/service is intuitively built to cater to your users’ expectations and needs. You definitely need to hire some talent to stay abreast on the ever-changing reality of user behavior—having a smart design is only one fraction of this equation. Perhaps even more importantly, you need to test like crazy, analyze, adapt, and then test again. A/B testing is a brilliant approach for configuring the best marketing strategies for your business and it is also an incredibly intuitive method for testing your CX. User-centered design is crucial for learning about your customers’ needs and wants, enabling you to cater to the consumer through marketing strategies and, of course, providing optimal customer experience. 2. Offer Personalized Engagements It’s true that sometimes, personalization isn’t crucial. Some engagements are general and don’t require the extra finesse of personalized content. However, when personalization matters, it really matters. This is important throughout the entire funnel or customer journey. If your visitors have to dig and search to find relevant information on your website, you are creating more effort and, in essence, driving a huge wedge of inconvenience between you and them. This is especially true if you consider the fact that your competition is likely investing in these top-funnel, personalized experiences. By the same token, once your prospects have become paying customers, any query they present to you must be personalized. Don’t neglect your valued customers by displaying information that is geographically and contextually irrelevant to their account, needs, or past experiences with you. Seek out an automated solution that easily enables you to create a personalized experience for your customers. 3. Provide Clear Paths to Resolution Not every customer engagement with your brand will be cut and dried. Sometimes technology cannot satisfy your customers and the human touch is required for more urgent issues. When the path to resolution is anything but a seamless straight line, it adds effort to the customer journey and puts a damper on the customer experience. Re-channeling should be intelligent and immediate. If the first engagement is with a dynamic contact center or other self-service platform, then escalation to phone, chat, or email should be easily accessible and targeted to the right agent, with the right skill set. Having a clear mind on your customer’s needs is a positive side effect of knowing your target audience. Naturally, the course of your customer intel will evolve as your company tests and grows. However, your initial target audience will tell a lot about the type of queries you may receive, and it’s wise to cater the design and CX accordingly. This is a customer’s dream—but it unfortunately does not occur often enough. Be the change! 4. Retain What Your Customer Says As I eluded to in point #3, if you want to knock your customers’ socks off, then make them tell their story only once. Throughout the escalation process, each point of contact, or agent, should have the full customer story from every previous customer engagement. They also must show a high regard for customers’ time by referencing this information to speed up resolution. (As a consumer myself, I’m thinking YESYESYES when I read this!). Remembering your customers is a process that harkens back to gathering and analyzing the details of your target audience through market research. Assuming that your company is not the first service they’ve used within your industry, learn the drawbacks of the previous companies they worked with and use these shortcomings to better your own service and hone your strengths in a highly saturated marketplace. By the time your customers engage with you because of a problem, question, wrong service, or faulty product, they are probably not in a particularly chipper mood. Having to revisit and explain the issue over and over can, and likely will, exacerbate any frustration they may feel. It also is proven to decrease confidence in your brand as it shows a lack of care and indicates antiquated technology where your CRM is concerned. Show up for your customers and know what they want before they have to ask…again. 5. Properly Sync Social Mobile customer service is in the spotlight lately and your customers often defer to social channels when seeking resolution via mobile devices. According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans spend an average of 37 minutes daily on social media, which is more time spent than on any other internet activity, including email. It’s almost impossible to offer the kind of always-by-your-side support, across all social media platforms, that is necessary in order to pacify and even delight your customers. If you have noticed unresolved questions, comments, and tweets on your social channels, or if your CRM is not syncing and recording these highly valuable customer engagements on social, it’s time to invest in a real solution. Social customer service platforms, like Conversocial, can help put your mind and customer experience at ease. It’s the era of the customer, and they’re calling the shots. When they pull the trigger on social, you need to be there with the answers they need. What Have We Learned? Your CX needs a health check to be sure that you are putting the necessary focus on this growing value. One winning ingredient to the never-ending challenge of keeping customers happy is knowing the ins and outs of your consumers’ behaviors. In customer service and, more importantly, in marketing, communicating with your customer means anticipating their wants, needs, and problems even before they arise. In 2016 and beyond, the battle will not be won on the price page or over product features, but rather on the entirety of your customer experience.

Here are a couple campaign request form templates that were developed to capture all the information needed to build a webinar program in Marketo. I build a lot of these one-off programs and was finding myself spending too much time tracking down information from various people. The attachments are as follows: Campaign Request Form - External (used when campaigns originate from a department outside of marketing (ex. Sales)) Campaign Request Form - Internal (used when campaigns originate from a member of the marketing team) Campaign Request Form - External First tab: this is the tab that the campaign originator will complete Second tab: this is an example of what a completed webinar campaign request form will look like Third tab: this is an example of what a completed email campaign request form will look like Campaign Request Form - Internal First tab: this is the tab that the marketing team member will complete to originate the campaign Second tab: this tab contains the appropriate tokens used for emails/landing pages Third tab: this tab contains the appropriate information for GoToWebinar Fourth tab: this tab contains information need to post a portal ad The additional campaign tabs are added to the external request form once received by the marketing team. We also use a Google form for some project requests. That may be an option too!

Written by Phil Fernandez, Marketo CEO. He is a Silicon Valley veteran, with more than 30 years of experience building and leading breakout technology companies. Phil is a well-known writer and speaker on topics related to digital marketing, marketing automation, big data, and entrepreneurialism, and is the author of Revenue Disruption (Wiley, 2012), which delivers bold new strategies for any company to transform its sales and marketing to accelerate revenue. Who is the most important exec after the CEO of a company? In answering the above question you probably would have said the CFO, COO or the Chairman. For a hi-tech company you might have mentioned the CTO. And for B2B enterprises there likely would have been some votes for the head of sales being the next most important executive after the CEO. I’m guessing you would not have chosen the head of marketing. But that would be exactly the right answer today. Over the past five years, the Chief Marketing Officer has quietly emerged as having a major impact on revenue, growth, customer satisfaction, and overall company strategy. Reflecting the growing clout of marketing leaders, some major corporations (McDonald’s, Campbell’s Soup and Audi USA) recently installed CMOs as their new CEOs. This relatively new reality has big implications for CMOs and the marketing function itself. What has been the catalyst driving this rise of the CMO in the past couple years? Technology. The new digital-centric business landscape has not only empowered today’s buyer to be in control of the buying process, but it has dramatically increased the number of ways that a brand can “touch” the customer during and after her buying journey. With a myriad channels and touch-points between a company and the buyer—the need for an integrated, holistic approach to managing the entire customer lifecycle is critical. The person responsible for coordinating all this into an “engagement marketing”strategy? The CMO. The new, strategic approach to marketing engagement is very bottom-line business oriented. It’s really focused on nurturing rich, mutually beneficial relationships with customers throughout their entire journey—including after the purchase when the real loyalty building has to happen. This new emphasis on end-to-end customer engagement means that the CMO is now assuming responsibilities that not long ago were owned by sales, service and even operations. Earlier this year my company, Marketo, contracted with the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey 500 marketers about a wide range of topics, including how they view engagement in marketing and the role of CMOs in driving this new marketing paradigm. The survey findings illustrated the new thinking that is transforming both the marketing profession and industry: 63% of marketers view engagement as customer renewals, repeat purchases and retention. 78% of respondents think engagement occurs in the middle or end stages of the marketing funnel. Only 20% of marketers defined engagement as a top of the funnel awareness or emotional brand building tool. 75% of CMOs and senior marketing executives expect to own, or at least play a major role in managing, the end-to-end customer engagement for their companies in the next 3-5 years. As CMOs gain more stature in the corporation by shouldering even more responsibility for driving and activating the entire customer lifecycle, they are also getting more credit for being revenue drivers. Of course, the department or executive who owns revenue growth (and can deliver it consistently with an upward trajectory), pretty much rules the game in business. To handle this new level of responsibility—CMOs today need to adapt. What it took to be a CMO 10 years go and what it takes to be a CMO today are two different things. Marketing has always been a blend of art and science, and it still is to a great degree. There is no question, though, that the science part has gained primacy in the new world of tech-powered, omni-channel marketing. From mastering the digital and social channels that customers use to educate themselves on your products, to understanding how advanced analytics can drive truly personalized communications and engagement, marketers must now possess a whole new set of tech oriented skills and capabilities. “Test, learn, repeat and scale” have long been part of the marketing model, but in this new tech-centered environment these concepts are the daily lexicon of the CMO and her marketing team. All of this means that today’s CMO needs to combine the technical abilities of a project manager and data geek with the big picture strategic business capabilities that go beyond brand building and driving awareness and preference. This is not to say that CMOs must be tech engineers any more than CEOs or CFOs need to be. But, in addition to finding and leading the marketing talent that has the requisite technology skills required to thrive in the modern marketing world, the CMO needs to be comfortable with these new capabilities and tools as well. CMOs can’t just sit in the corner office and delegate. They need to be in the center of the action, driving the strategy and operations. And that includes getting their hands “dirty” with the technology, analytics and digital media that power customer engagement in the 21st Century. That’s probably going to be a challenge for some marketers. But, no one ever said stepping up to become the second most important person in the corporation was going to be easy! But those that can make the shift now find themselves joined at the hip with the CEO. The corporation’s growth and success really do depend on the close collaboration and productive relationship of its two most important executives.

From Heidi Bullock is the Vice President of Demand Generation at Marketo. She has over 13 years of B2B marketing experience in high tech companies. Her expertise includes product positioning, brand strategy, product marketing, and demand generation. Now is a great time to be in marketing. Not long ago, if you were asked at a cocktail party what you did and replied, “Oh, I’m in marketing,” you were almost guaranteed a response like, “Wow, you’re the one that works on all the fun logo-covered fleece vests!” Historically, this misconception was largely due to the inability of marketers to demonstrate their impact on the business, i.e. showing the efficacy of campaigns and knowing where to invest (or not)—and clearly understanding the process the buyer takes when evaluating a product or service. But times have changed. Thanks to technology—especially marketing automation—we now have tools that help us understand the digital footprints of our buyers—how they like to be communicated with, the frequency, the message, gain visibility into which programs drive real business results and which don’t, and even ultimately help us predict buying preferences. With such powerful inputs available, marketers today are uniquely situated to understand all facets of their customers and the journey they undergo. One function that has originated as part of this new data-driven era is the role of the demand generation marketer. This role and organizational function is dedicated to driving demand and ultimately revenue. In many organizations demand generation is often associated directly with acquisition, but a better and more modern wa to think of it is as “transformative demand generation,” and this is where marketing executives need to focus. If you align your team around this concept, you’ll gain better insight into all areas of the customer journey—not just the early stages. Transformative Demand Generation Transformative demand generation is comprised of three key criteria: Having an agreed upon, shared model, set of definitions, and goals for aligning marketing and sales efforts. Creating a shared revenue model with clearly defined stages, conversion points, definitions, and service level agreements (SLAs) is critical. This is your blueprint for what marketing and sales are responsible for. A good model should be customer-centric and should model the customer’s journey. There should be clear handoffs between marketing and sales, and ideally you can put SLAs in place to ensure consistency in response times. By doing this, you can clearly assess the health of your business, identify bottlenecks and respective fixes, and begin to predict your business outcomes. There needs to be an ongoing focus on the model and an emphasis on iteration as learnings come in—but this is great way to make sure both teams are aligned. A focus on driving revenue first and foremost—and throughout the ENTIRE customer life-cycle. This lens must be used across all marketing programs—throughout the journey, from acquisition to retention. You should have a clear way to evaluate if a program makes sense for the business. Now a large brand initiative may be more complex to assess, but it is still important to understand. This starts with identifying goals and determining when you will measure impact, and when (what are the different points in time?). There are times you go through this exercise and it becomes abundantly clear that a program does not make sense to continue. That learning is equally valuable. Here is a simple example: Your team may be considering a tradeshow and the goal is for acquisition. If the event costs $20K, the organizer tells you there will be 300 people attending. You estimate that the team can scan half the people, and you estimate that 30% will have the right demographics. At that rate, you are spending over $400 / lead. That may be fine for your business—or not—but the point is you need to KNOW and then use that knowledge to evaluate the opportunity—and all opportunities with this lens. Being data-driven to measure and iterate to make the best decisions for the business. This one goes without saying—but you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The key here is being laser focused on the right things to measure for your business. It’s helpful to have a mix of performance metrics (answering how did you do?), diagnostic metrics (what’s working, how can we improve?), and lastly leading indicators (these should help you forecast how you will be doing). A key part of your planning process is to identify up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then build your measurements to capture the right information. This means you should measure things not just because they are measurable—but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability. 3 Key Benefits of Transformative Demand Generation When done well, transformative demand generation provides marketers the ability to do these 3 things: Align with sales and other key stakeholders within your organization. By establishing an agreed-upon model upfront, definitions and goals—both marketing and sales efforts are pointed in the same direction. Make the right investments for driving the desired business outcomes. It is critical to identify goals for programs (whether it’s a brand campaign or retention) and estimate upfront if your investment makes sense to achieve your desired outcome. Be forward looking—and forecast what will occur. You should be able to discuss not only what just happened, but also what WILL happen. This is one of the most critical thing marketers can do to build credibility. Today’s demand generation has fundamentally shifted. It should no longer be thought of as simple acquisition or the team that focuses at top of the funnel and only generates volume. Transformative demand generation has the power to drive revenue throughout the entire lifecycle of a buyer. Applying transformative demand generation principles will ensure your marketing organization has a framework to align with sales. It sets a new standard to employ tools to attribute, predict, plan, and benchmark campaign performance. You may start to see that half of your programs are not worth the investment—but instead of being disappointed, be glad that you know and are able to identify the gaps. Ideally, the team should be able to predict the future revenue impact of marketing dollars invested. Marketers—from executives down through the practitioner level—that work within this framework will be able to drive and show the impact across the entire buyers’ journey. These are the marketers that will succeed and, of course, have respect.

Marketing and the Internet of Things, closer than you think For many years, we kept being promised that “the year of mobile” was upon us. When it failed to materialize, it was easy to become jaded and write off much of the discussion of that coming wave of innovation as hype. But somewhat suddenly, we now look around, with everyone reaching for their phones every other minute — or checking them on their Inspector Gadget watches — having integrated them into their soaring digital expectations of daily life, and we realize, “Whoa, it’s a mobile world.” Businesses who figured out how to leverage that ahead of the rest — Uber is the poster child example — gained a tremendous advantage. Keep that in mind as you read this Q&A with Andy Hobsbawm, the CMO of EVRYTHNG, one of the leading companies powering the emerging ecosystem of the Internet of Things. Surely, at least some of you rolled your eyes thinking, “Et tu, Scotte?” You’ve been hearing the drumbeat of the Internet of Things for long enough without seeing it materialize that you’re inclined to write off all articles like this as hype. My humble advice: don’t be so quick to dismiss this. The acceleration of technology adoption is real — revisit The Second Machine Age — and widespread distribution of the Internet of Things is probably much closer than you might think. Once it hits its tipping point, what we accept as everyday reality is likely to change very quickly. Now is a good time to start to learn about what’s possible, even today, and the challenges and opportunities that we’re going to face as marketers. Andy has a vested interest in this, of course. But in conversations with him, I find he does a wonderful job of explaining the technology and the scenarios by which it is able to impact marketing. More importantly, he has a wealth of real-world examples to share to demonstrate those effects. While we haven’t unveiled the MarTech Europe agenda yet — stay tuned for that next week — I am excited to say that Andy will be one of our speakers, helping to bring more of these examples to life for us. 1. Tell us a little about your background and how you came to EVRYTHNG. My background hasn’t involved a formal career path. I ended up following the things I’m most curious, fascinated, and passionate about and seeing where that led me. This explains a singular lack of cohesiveness in the story so far – or perhaps, as Steve Jobs pointed out in his epic Stanford commencement address, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” In any event, I’ve run entrepreneurial sales businesses while back-packing in Australia, written songs and played guitar in a spectacularly unsuccessful London rock ’n’ roll band, helped start the first international web agency Online Magic — later Agency.com, which went public in 1999 — co-founded an environmental non-profit Do The Green Thing, and most recently my IoT software company EVRYTHNG (with a bunch of other stuff in-between). The inspiration for EVRYTHNG was meeting a friend Niall Murphy, now fellow Founder and CEO, in a coffee shop several years ago. After co-founding European Wi-Fi network The Cloud, Niall had been wrestling with the idea of every object having an addressable, real-time presence on the Web. Why couldn’t the physical world be online and referenceable, searchable, mashable just like other forms of digital information? We both felt strongly that the Web will inevitably include billions of objects sharing dynamic information about themselves in real-time. And it seemed clear that some kind of transactional economy would emerge around this exchange of object information and that there needed to be a new kind of software infrastructure to manage the digital identity of physical things and make it easy for apps to access this data flow and provide new kinds of services and experiences. At the time it didn’t seem possible to realise this vision, but fast-forward a couple of years and mobile and web 2.0 technologies had become sufficiently widespread and cost-effective to make this scale of information exchange and dynamic service creation possible. And object connectivity tech like NFC, Wi-Fi chips, RFID and printable sensor tags had started to pass key tipping points in terms of cost. EVRYTHNG was incorporated in 2011. By 2012 all co-founders were assembled — which includes Dom Guinard, CTO and Vlad Triffa, EVP R&D, recruited from ETH and MIT — initial funding was raised and the early team was operational. EVRYTHNG is based in London and New York, with offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Minsk. 2. How real is the Internet of Things (IoT) for marketing today? A recent Economist Intelligence Unit survey reported that senior marketers globally believe IoT will make the biggest impact on marketing in the next five years, ahead of other related technology trends like big data, real-time mobile personalized transactions, and customer experience. Meanwhile, CTOs and CIOs are working on IoT strategies from the perspective of technology infrastructure and platforms to support the enterprise. And the range of products that can become part of the IoT is exploding based on the falling costs of connectivity technologies like printed electronics on smart packaging. Smart home devices with native, embedded connectivity are only the tip of the iceberg. Over three trillion consumer products are made and sold each year (some calculations put this as high as ten trillion). Of these, the most obvious IoT candidates like consumer electronics devices, home appliances, and cars represent 0.2% in volume. The wider IoT opportunity for marketers is the “Internet of Everything,” which includes everyday non-electronic ‘dumb’ household products that can also be given real-time, social web intelligence via smart packaging, smart software and smartphones. By our calculations, close to a trillion products shipped annually will be digitally-capable in some form by the end of this decade. By our calculations, close to a trillion products shipped annually will be digitally-capable in some form — from image recognition or RFID to printed sensor tags and embedded chips — by the end of this decade. 3. Can you give a couple of examples of great IoT-enabled marketing? Maybe one for B2C, one for B2B? We believe that there are three main consumer use cases for smart products powered by an IoT platform like EVRYTHNG. Firstly: Products-As-Media. Once activated, products become a data-driven, owned media platform to launch digital experiences and content, and acquire ongoing 1:2:1 consumer relationships. Diageo use EVRYTHNG’s IoT platform to let consumers interact with bottles using smart tags and smartphones. For example, letting consumers personalize a gift by adding a unique video gift message to their bottle, or rewarding consumers with loyalty points for interacting with products in “on-trade” bar locations. Additionally, tracking these items in the supply chain to make logistics and product operations smarter. Secondly: Products-as-a-Service. Physical goods that are packaged and delivered with a digital layer of personalized services can adapt themselves to user preferences and get better over time as they learn and new digital upgrades are made. Like Tesla cars that can upgrade performance and fix product defects while you sleep. Smart products are easier to differentiate and charge premium prices for, harder to switch from, and create new revenue opportunities from subscription or usage-based services. Smart products are easier to differentiate and charge premium prices for, harder to switch from, and create new revenue opportunities from subscription or usage-based services. Our customer Gooee, which puts chips and sensors into bulbs to disrupt the industry by selling “lighting-as-a-service.” Running on the EVRYTHNG IoT platform, these connected bulbs lower electricity and maintenance costs, but also contain motion sensors to track retail footfall analytics or trigger security alerts, plus CO2 sensors for smoke detection. So a lighting company is now also in the business of security services, fire alarms, inventory management, and energy efficiency. Another example is Diageo Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Adding a printed sensor tag from EVRYTHNG partner Thinfilm, powered by our IoT smart products platform, lets Diageo know if the bottle has been opened or not. The ability of the printed electronics label to send a different signal based on a “sealed” or “broken” state, in combination with real-time cloud data analytics and alerts, tackles the issue of counterfeiters re-filling bottles with poor quality alcohol. It also means that when consumers tap the tags with NFC-enabled smartphones, the bottles can switch messaging from pre-purchase incentives to post-purchase cocktail recipes. Thirdly: Ecosystem-Connected Products. Products can unlock additional user and business value by making more connections with partner products, apps, and data services in the digital ecosystem. For example, your premium Spotify account can now stream playlists in your Uber rides, the new Jawbone fitness tracker offers contactless NFC terminal payment in combination with Amex, and Visa partnered with BMW and Pizza Hut to enable in-car voice-activated ordering and payments. An example for EVRYTHNG would be how iHome’s smart products use our IoT platform APIs, based on open web standards, to integrate with other clouds so their products plug in to third-party service like Homekit and SmartThings or Wink and Nest. 4. What are some of the other things that are possible, that you expect we’ll see over the next year? We are moving into the Third Age of Marketing: Product Voice. The industrial media age of Brand Voice gave way to a social media-powered age of Consumer Voice, and now the product itself is having a say. Products are dynamic, web-connected intelligent objects and can play an active, functional part in how they are made, sold and used. The industrial media age of Brand Voice gave way to a social media-powered age of Consumer Voice, and now the product itself is having a say. We are fascinated about how shipping and operating physical products with real-time marketing experiences and digital services creates new business value and transforms consumer relationships and product operations for brands. And we haven’t scratched the surface of what’s possible with manufacturer brands using an IoT smart products platform like EVRYTHNG to connect their products to the web and manage a combination of hardware, software, and real-time data to transform the product journey from factory floor to high street to living room and recycling back into component materials. We expect to see a greater use of streaming analytics and complex event processing software, as well as machine learning systems, in combination with IoT data streams. For example, triggering alerts of a poor user experience so brands can offer customer service prompts. If, say, a consumer who presses a button five times in a row on a new device, it’s a fair bet they’re having difficulty getting their new product to work. To avoid poor negative reviews on social media or expensive product returns, the brand could send a “how-to” video link or the offer of real-time chat support to the user’s smartphone. For example, triggering alerts of a poor user experience so brands can offer customer service prompts. Devices will be increasingly valued not just for their stand-alone functionality, but for how well they work within the digital ecosystem. Considering that simply switching on the washing machine will lead to communication with the appliance app, the home hub network, the clothes and washing powder that go in it, as well as other smart home digital service experiences, it becomes clear that silo operations don’t make sense for businesses or consumers. Success will depend on the ability to connect with an interdependent network of devices, apps, and services, which means that data is no longer to be collected and coveted, but shared. We also think that native apps will overload consumers and fade away as web apps provide users with everything they need in one place — their browser — transforming products into interfaces that are used to access one simple, unified platform — the Web. Finally, we expect more product engagement data to be combined with first-party data to offer more effective and joined up segmentation and re-targeting in the real-time advertising markets. So traditional and digital media use data-driven decisions to drive consumers to engage with products, and those product interactions are in turn fed back into the calculations about what messages to serve the next time. It clearly makes sense for, say, a shampoo manufacturer to understand that a consumer has digitally engaged with a sample in the last week, and make smarter decisions about where they are in the purchase journey when re-targeting them with an offer to convert to purchase. 5. What does EVRYTHNG do to facilitate all this? To explain what EVRYTHNG does, lets recap why its Internet of Things platform-as-a-service is needed in the first place. Consumer product manufacturers need to digitize their products at scale and connect them to the Web to get value from the Internet of Things. The kinds of things companies want to do include: Let customers digitally connect to products for a better user experience (e.g. your garage door alerts you if you left it open so you can close it remotely, or a designer bag you’re thinking of buying confirms that it’s the genuine article and not a fake). Make supply chain operations more efficient with real-time product tracking intelligence (e.g. know if parts of a shipment go missing, or products end up in the wrong place, or are being counterfeited, etc.). Acquire customer and product information they wouldn’t otherwise have had — e.g. who is using their products and where they are, what they are engaging with, and how content drives interaction and sales. EVRYTHNG exists to help manufacturers of consumer products do exactly these kinds of things with its IoT smart products platform. Manufacturers can connect their products to the EVRYTHNG cloud and access data management and analytics services to make them smart, interactive, programmable, and trackable. Our specific role in all this is to manage the digital identities of these products as active data entities on the Web — what we call “Active Digital Identities” — with associated real-time data to drive applications for end consumers and business users (e.g. supply chain tracking). The EVRYTHNG platform allows brands to digitize their physical goods using a range of connectivity technologies — from image recognition, QR codes, BLE, NFC, and RFID to printed electronics and sensor tags to embedded chips — and manages the real-time IoT data to run applications in real-time on the Web that unlock business and customer value. EVRYTHNG operates as a B2B cloud platform-as-a-service, so brands own all the data and control their digital consumer and supply chain stakeholder relationships directly. 6. What capabilities — not just technical, but organizational — do companies need to implement successful IoT-enabled marketing programs? People expect brands to play a useful, relevant, and meaningful role in their lives, and the media they consume is increasingly mobile, social, and powered by real-time data. However, marketers default to delivering advertising messages in a regular sequence of campaigns, instead of “on-demand” personalized services and experiences. Marketers default to delivering advertising messages in a regular sequence of campaigns, instead of “on-demand” personalized services and experiences. The more broadly IoT technology is used, the greater value it delivers. As an enterprise platform, for example, EVRYTHNG’s smart products software powers “always-on” content and digital experiences, and transactional services like e-commerce or supply-chain tracking to prevent piracy. Real-time purchasing and behavioral data create opportunities for cross/upsell and efficiencies in inventory and supply chain management. Marketers need to see IoT as an innovation and growth opportunity and not another ad tech campaign tool. Marketers need to see IoT as an innovation and growth opportunity and not another ad tech campaign tool. Additionally, we believe that the Internet of Things sits at the intersection of a convergence between the worlds of enterprise technology systems and marketing. The CMO has increasing responsibility for leveraging enterprise platforms to generate and capture demand and build brands, while CIO/CTOs are charged with implementing real-time technology systems that connect with customers and business partners to go-to-market more effectively. By activating products as data-driven interactive media and operating them as real-time digital information services, EVRYTHNG’s IoT platform enables a suite of applications across the enterprise — from consumer engagement, to supply chain operations, to connected product services — where these two domains meet. We believe that the Internet of Things sits at the intersection of a convergence between the worlds of enterprise technology systems and marketing. 7. How should marketers address privacy concerns associated with these new capabilities? You can’t really talk about data privacy without also raising the issue of security, since one protects the other. A lack of consumer trust in IoT security and privacy was recently cited in the FTC’s “Privacy & Security in a Connected World” report as the biggest blocker to widespread adoption. As FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez noted: “The only way for the Internet of Things to reach its full potential for innovation is with the trust of American consumers.” A separate report by Business Insider in the UK came to the same conclusion: data security and privacy concerns are the biggest barrier to IoT becoming mainstream quickly. As EVRYTHNG’s CTO Dominique Guinard points out, “Private data, inevitably, will be exchanged, exposed and leveraged — there’s no going back from where the Web, social-media networks, and smartphones have already taken us.” The point is to make sure that these exchanges now happen inside certain frameworks. There’s no going back from where the Web, social-media networks, and smartphones have already taken us. The point is to make sure that these exchanges now happen inside certain frameworks. The question is partly about technology and partly about consumer perceptions and social norms: do people think it’s worth trading personal information for personalization? Technically, the IoT can respect consumers’ privacy and protect their data, but consumers may decide that the exchange of personal information is justified by the value of personalized services they get from their products in return. Manufacturer brands also need to decide where to draw the line and strike a balance between IoT data management and privacy. BMW deciding not to share any of the real-time data they collect from their vehicles with third parties is a good example. Yes, we want our connected cars to understand where we want to go and use information about environmental conditions and our personal preferences to get us there more intelligently, but we don’t want this digital data trail used by anyone else without our consent. From a technology point of view, the Internet of Things creates a multifaceted mesh of network connections, devices, data systems, and individual users — and this data is also transported or stored in different places. So it’s vital that multi-level security and privacy controls and policies are built into the core architecture of any IoT system managing this data flow. In other words, each part of the system should only access, manage, or share data that it’s allowed to. The EVRYTHNG IoT platform, for instance, regulates every step and exchange in this process. Each product layer in the ecosystem uses encrypted keys (or passwords) to identify itself, and fine-grained, customizable policies define the data that each specific component can access or influence. This lets a customer of ours, like iHome, program customizable granular rules into their smart products defining precisely who can do what in every part of the connected system. So if your neighbour comes over to borrow some milk, she won’t be able to discover your smart products on her smartphone, as she doesn’t have the required permissions or secure keys. Thank you, Andy. I’m looking forward to hearing your presentation at MarTech Europe in October!

By: Camille Crandall When I first came on board at Marketo, I was amazed by the power of marketing automation and the data it provided to marketers and salespersons alike. Starting a conversation with a new prospect was easy when I already knew what they were interested in—it was like Facebook stalking for marketing and sales professionals. Sign me up! A few months into my SDR (Sales Development Representative) role, with the marketing automation engine running in the background, I began to understand what I was selling and changed my messaging to create value instead of only building upon what was already provided by marketing automation. Thinking of it with “if/then” logic, I would draw lines between interests and needs, mapping Marketo’s services to customer pain points. For example: If a person is showing interest in creating content and they are a marketing manager, then they might be interested in aggregating data to determine what content is the most successful. This changes the conversation from “I noticed you downloaded XYZ whitepaper” to “I noticed your interest in content creation, and so I am curious about your engagement strategy. How are you leveraging data to help your team create marketing assets that will most greatly affect the bottom line?” See the difference? With a marketing automation platform working in the background, it’s easy for a salesperson to become a fanatic. But what happens when the inbound engine (aka: inbound marketing leads qualified by SDRs) isn’t getting you to your quota? Or what if certain prospects haven’t converted into known leads? You don’t want to miss out on such great opportunities—especially if there is a true business need or pain point your prospect is experiencing that your product could solve. To meet this delta between what the inbound engine produces for your pipeline and blowing your numbers out of the water month over month, you, the sales rep, needs to explore the world of outbound prospecting. Let’s take a look at just what this entails: The Outbound Prospecting Landscape Cold emailing/calling can be a daunting task; however, outbounding is extremely similar to inbounding. The only difference is knowing where a prospect’s interest lies and inferring. For outbounding success, it is imperative that you: Do your research: It is necessary to understand who you are reaching out to and why that individual would care to engage in a conversation with you. We’ve all heard of the Why You, Why You Now (WYWYN) email—now it’s time to put it to use. Reach out to key decision makers and stakeholders: After you’ve done your research and crafted a thoughtful email, make sure it reaches decision-makers (C-Suite, VPs, Directors, etc). You don’t necessarily have to talk to those people, but if you catch their interest, it will trickle down. Look for employees to begin pinging your site and let the inbound engine get to work. Follow up: This may sound pretty simple, but you’d be surprised how effective this can be in getting a conversation with either a decision maker or an influencer. For a well-crafted email, I send two follow-ups on the same thread to ensure they received my note. Reuse the work you have already done (research and personalized emails) as talking points when you call to follow up. Now, let’s expand on the primary area of successful outbound prospecting: research. Research — The Key to Successful Outbound Prospecting The concept of researching harkens back to the good ol’ college and high school days of writing a well thought-out essay. Whether the essay was expository, persuasive, analytical, or argumentative, the most important aspect was to understand your topic. And what’s the best way to truly grasp your topic? Research it! The same could be said today when you, as a working professional, are trying to make connections with potential customers. You need to come off as knowledgeable about them (as much as you are about your product or service).So how can you increase your credibility in this respect?: Understand the space the company is in and any competitors that are already customers Know the role of the person you’re reaching out to and how your product affects them Leverage 3 rd party data for validation—graphics, images, and stats go a long way Remember to always ask yourself “why should they care?” If you can’t answer this, then the answer is “they don’t.”Here are my favorite “go-to” resources for research: Company’s and individual’s LinkedIn pages: These are a quick, one-stop shop to find who you should be reaching out to and what matters most to them (check the recent posts from the company and the individual prospect’s bio). Twitter page: This is the millennium’s version of “a little birdy told me.” It’s great for connecting with a prospect on a personal level on a topic that’s relevant to them. CrunchBase: Find succinct details on a company and its funding rounds. One of my favorite triggers for a newly-funded organization is to discuss the value its sister portfolio companies find when using our product. Company website: One quick glance tells you what your prospect is proud of. Be aware of what they are promoting! TechCrunch: Third-party articles highlight why your prospect is awesome. Be aware of how they are being promoted! Work Smart and Use Your Tools Now, as a fan of the “work smarter, not harder” mentality, I recommend using the tools you have available to you to track, prove, and recreate your successes. On this note, try: Using your marketing automation tools to track the success of your outbound prospecting: Are prospects opening your emails? Which emails performed best? Are individuals from your target company beginning to interact with your site? Saving your favorite emails and using them as templates: If your email to the CEO gets a response, use it again and personalize wherever you need to while keeping the value points from the original email. Remember: any response is a good response. An email that grabbed enough attention to elicit a reply is useful—even if it’s a “no.” If you get a “no,” ask them what is keeping your product from being top of mind today and when would be a better time to connect. You can use their response to help craft your next touch-point. Personalize, Personalize, Personalize Take the time to “be better” and go the extra mile in your outbound activities. We’ve all seen or heard of prospects who buy the product from the sales person they had the best relationship with. Know who your customer is and listen to them (both in what information they make available about themselves and in what they say). Make sure the person they want to buy from is you. I hope that these tips have been helpful. What advice can you share to make your outbound marketing and sales more effective? Please share your ideas in the comments section below!

This blog originally appeared on Forbes.com, July 28th, 2015 and was written by Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez Technology is no longer the tail that wags the marketing dog – it is the entire dog, nose to tail. There was a time in the not too distant past when digital was an add-on function in the marketing equation. Today, digital is at the core of everything we do in marketing. And that has profound ramifications for the business of marketing, the people who practice it, and the companies that rely on it to grow and succeed. Just as technology has transformed how companies market themselves and their brands, it is having a similarly momentous impact on corporate marketing organizations and the people who staff and manage them. For corporations to fully capitalize on the technology-fueled marketing revolution– or just avoid being left behind – they will need to completely rethink and restructure their marketing departments. Companies large and small are already starting to align their marketing departments with the new technology-driven business environment, but these changes are happening with less urgency than is warranted. Marketing should be a leading indicator in business (and technology), not a lagging one. So what does the tech-empowered marketing organization of the future look like, and what do you need to do to build one today? In my mind there are two big areas of focus: A Customer Mindset A study we commissioned earlier this year that found that 75% of CMOs and senior marketing executives expect to own the end-to-end customer relationship in the next three to five years. Assuming even more responsibility for managing the entire customer lifecycle, the CMO is now organizing the marketing function around the customer rather than around channels, internal processes and tools (e.g., no more separate email and social marketing teams). We’re also seeing centers of excellence emerging to connect common, horizontal functions and drive coordination around engaging the customer. This includes breaking down the old barriers between customer acquisition and loyalty. Suffice it to say that if you still have a separate digital group in your marketing department, you are probably headed in the wrong direction. A New Team For years the key players in the marketing department were the VPs of brand marketing, corporate marketing and product marketing. Who are the leaders in this new digital age? The term “content marketing” barely existed five years ago. Today most marketing departments have at least one executive whose sole job is to oversee the development and distribution of content to attract and engage customers. The modern marketing organization is increasingly being powered by an engine that is process-driven. This has given rise to a new role, the head of marketing operations,who isresponsible for driving that engine with the right blend of technology and data. I also believe we need to designate a head of listening. This individual would listen to what the customer really says and understand how she behaves via the web, mobile, social and the “real” world, too. Always advocating for the customer’s needs and wants, the head of listening would use these insights to empower the marketing team to respond in real-time, customer-by-customer, thus helping to build the long-term relationships that produce outsized revenue growth. Notwithstanding all of this progress, too many companies are not evolving fast enough. To paraphrase the great poet Chaucer, time and tide wait for no company. Forward-thinking corporations are moving aggressively to build customer-centric, technology-driven marketing organizations that are competing more effectively and poised to win the future. Is your company ready?

By Sean O’Neill Many industries felt the impact of our recent financial crisis, including automotive. Traditionally an integral part of our economy and culture, car sales in once strong markets are in decline due to lack of consumer confidence and changes in the way people buy. Today, more and more people conduct research online instead of visiting car dealerships. These changes in the way people buy have affected the marketing landscape across the board, not just in automotive. With industries such as media, retail, finance, and education, the internet has changed the way people buy and has also led to increased levels of competition. As a result of this surge of information available online, the average buyer now spends more time independently researching purchases instead of visiting more traditional shop-fronts like dealerships. Today, as consumer spend is returning, consumer marketers of luxury goods must do more to attract and engage buyers and maintain loyalty with their brand. For example, one report from management consulting firm McKinsey showed that for an average automobile purchase there are now as little as 1.6 visits to car dealerships compared to the average of five visits from buyers 10 years ago. This is reflective of the challenge for marketing luxury consumer products across the board, where customers are now on multiple channels such as social, web, mobile, and email. In this environment, the physical store has become less important for information gathering. Consumer marketers now need to be wherever their customers are, not just in-store. They need to tie up all those data points and go beyond simply collecting information about potential customers to really keeping these potential customers engaged with the brand over time. To adapt to this changing market, here are three actions marketers can take to maximize the potential for growth: 1. Get Timely Data Like all marketers, those involved in leasing cars, selling insurance, and taking out contracts over several years find a lot of potential for generating new business from targeted and timely messaging. As a consumer marketer, you can align your sales and marketing process in such a way that cross-channel visits are tracked, messaging is automated, and persona-based and timely alerts are sent to sales for follow-up. The best way to do this is by using a marketing automation platform. For example, a challenge like creating an automated process to reach out to lease holders can be solved with marketing automation technology. In this case solving that challenge means that opportunities to help customers find a new car when their lease was coming to an end don’t fall through the cracks. Instead, a marketing automation platform can automatically generate a lead for each lease approaching maturity and send an alert to the account manager involved. So by using the right technologies to analyze interest and interaction and by triggering the right flow of content to engage the buyer, you can significantly increase customer retention. 2. Engage in Linked Multi-Channel Marketing Across almost all industries we see that customers use multiple devices to research and connect with products and services. This is particularly relevant when it comes to consumer-geared businesses; however, aligning a consistent message across all devices—led by insight and tracking all of that data—continues to be a big challenge. In many large organizations, there is often a hodgepodge of different tools, all operating in their own communication silos. By using a full marketing automation suite and not simply a standalone email marketing system, you will create a consolidated approach where it’s possible to connect with potential customers across all of their channels and build a profile based off of all of their interactions. Having this profile in one place helps you communicate with your audience more effectively and personally, making it more likely that they will take action and purchase. Let’s use the example of an automotive dealer. Say it wants to run a campaign targeting those who have purchased cars within a certain timeframe, interested in upgrading their vehicle. The first thing is to send some information on why it would be beneficial to change and what kind of deals they could get. If the dealer relies solely on email, then the messaging might not be consistent when the buyer visits the dealer’s website or social media pages. And if the buyer accesses the content via mobile it should be optimized for mobile. So, the best thing for the dealership to do in this case is to provide consistent and engaging messaging to the user across all of these channels, taking into account the actions they have taken previously. Without linking up all of these channels into one system, the communications will not be personalized and consistent with buyer behavior. If the buyer has received an email and then clicked on the website and then shared a picture of a car with their social network, then they should receive messaging personalized for their stage of the buyer journey. This can only be accomplished by mapping the entire journey. Here’s how this journey can be illustrated: 3. Perform Enhanced Analytics Increasingly, emerging markets are where businesses are now experiencing growth, which means they must improve segmentation by splitting their database into the most meaningful audience for each campaign and deliver more location-specific information. Behavioral data, such as understanding click-through rates, keywords, time spent per page, and repeat visits, is a vital part of creating targeted messaging. With traditional markets slowing, it is more important than ever to find ways to entice potential buyers and upsell to your existing client base. You can do this by tracking both demographic and firmographic data and understanding the value of your content not just at a first touch but at a multi-touch level. First touch attribution is great at giving an indication on campaign performance and how many potential customers have been brought in due to that campaign, but this can give misleading data in today’s world, where buyers don’t engage straight away with the business. Instead, these prospects often touch multiple channels before they engage. So only multi-touch attribution can show marketers the true value of their content on influencing deals over time. Tying It All Together There are several ways to get timely data, implement a multi-channel strategy, and monitor buyer behavior, but by providing one system of record for all of your customer engagement, marketing automation software provides marketers with an easy, centralized way to gain insight into your customer journey. By showing you which content is working for you and what can be enhanced, this will help you decide the best strategies to optimize revenue and accelerate growth for your business. How are you engaging with your customer in a coordinated, cross-channel way? Where are you struggling? Please share in the comments below.

Columnist Sanjay Dholakia says marketers should take a page from MyFitnessPal, which has crafted its marketing strategy to think about users throughout the customer journey and across all channels. One of the great privileges of my job is the opportunity to meet smart CMOs and growth marketers on a regular basis and hear what they and their companies are doing to adapt in this new era of marketing. It occurred to me that I should try to be more intentional about regularly sharing some of those cool stories, and particularly, the insights they illustrate. One such organization that inspired me is MyFitnessPal, which is a customer of Marketo, my employer. For those of you who don’t know MyFitnessPal, the company is now part of Under Armour Connected Fitness and is the world’s most popular nutrition tracking app and healthy living platform. The idea behind MyFitnessPal is to help users meet their individual health and fitness goals. Screenshots of the My Fitness Pal mobile app. “Marketing Is Not About Acquisition” How’s that for a lesson and a head-scratcher? It almost turns centuries of dogma upside down, doesn’t it? One of my V8 moments listening to MyFitness Pal and its marketing leadership is that they saw the marketing function fundamentally differently. They saw it as the steward of the whole customer relationship — not just the engine to acquire customers. To be fair, marketing does still drive acquisition — but I wanted to make the extreme point. The truth is, MyFitnessPal has had little problem acquiring more customers; they’ve been the top health and fitness app on iTunes since 2010, attracting more than 80 million unique visitors worldwide in an incredibly short period of time. The key to value for the business, though, was about what happened to the users afterthey were acquired. Did they stay engaged with the app and the service? Did they spend increasing amounts of time with MyFitnessPal? Fostering greater interaction with users, and doing it at massive scale, was the hard part. Tara-Nicholle Nelson, VP of Marketing for Under Armour Connected Fitness, and the rest of the MyFitnessPal team realized that the app wouldn’t stick as a core part of users’ lives until they were consistently engaged in an ongoing relationship. As Nelson shared at our company’s user event in April, “Our whole business is marketing — everyone is in marketing. Everyone and everything has to be geared towards keeping that customer interacting with us.” That meant that content, customer service, product and, yes, marketing, all had to be working with that engagement in mind. It made me think that in our new world of digital marketing, we’ve learned that marketing is less an acquisition science, per se, and more about an engagement science. Success hinges on acquisition for sure, but more so on engagement and post-sale nurturing for repeat purchasing. And while Nelson as a functional leader isn’t directly responsible for all of those other functions, she is the quarterback, the architect of that holistic set of customer interactions. That’s indicative of a powerful shift in what marketing is — and is not. Customers Are Channel-less One of the other “aha” or V8 moments for me was that even though MyFitnessPal was a mobile app, the company realized that they needed to engage their users everywhere. That meant shifting from mobile-only communications to creating conversations across every channel. Nelson tells a story about going from sending three emails to regularly sending out tens of millions of emails. Surely, marketing automation technology was key to making that happen, but the bigger insight is the realization that you and I as users/buyers/consumers are now “channel-less.” We don’t think about ourselves as “different people” when we switch from mobile to email to social to the Web. Why, then, do companies communicate to us in these silos? MyFitnessPal offers a better model for how to do it. The team sends emails to people based on behavior they detect in the mobile app, building ongoing relationships with users. If MyFitnessPal wasn’t able to deliver more chicken recipes to someone when they know they’re logging dishes with chicken in them, that’s an opportunity lost. The Sound Bite MyFitnessPal has changed the way its team sees marketing. They see the function as the steward of engagement over the whole customer journey, and they think about a single customer conversation across all channels, not just one. The company says it’s since registered a surge in the number of monthly unique visitors to MyFitnessPal’s blog, which has soared to 9.5 million readers from almost nothing, and it’s logged a 22 percent increase in the number of users engaged weekly with the app. I think we could all learn something about the future of marketing from Nelson and MyFitnessPal.

By: Mike Telem Chances are you’ve already created many helpful blog posts, case studies, ebooks, and webinars in order to help educate your potential customers, so there is no need to convince you that content marketing works. But, one question remains: Are you maximizing their potential for lead generation across all of your channels? Today’s prospects independently research products and services before making a purchase, which creates numerous interaction touch-points. Now, organizations are starting to realize the importance of personalizing those touch-points and providing an engaging, valuable experience for each visitor. But realizing the importance is different than actually implementing a personalized experience. Let’s take a look at the 10 steps to help you build a successful personalization strategy: Step 1: Follow the 3 Ws of Personalization Think journalists are the only ones who live by Ws? Think again. Marketers have their own version—the 3 Ws to consider before launching a campaign: Who: Who are your key audiences, and what are the defining characteristics of your target audiences? Examine attributes such as geo-location, company size or industry, title/role, and the stage in the buyer’s journey. What: What are you personalizing? Determine which content assets are most valuable to your ideal persona, such as blog posts or case studies. Where: On which channel are you personalizing? (website, mobile, ads, etc.) Step 2: Choose Your Use Cases Wisely What goal are you trying to achieve with personalization? For example, you may be looking to generate new leads or nurture existing leads and further educate them.Start by choosing only two or three use cases that make the most sense or will have the most impact on your business. If you’re B2B, you can consider employing account-based marketing (ABM) to target specific companies, industries, or even personas that are “high-value.” However, for B2Cs, the focus can be on engaging consumers based on location, behavior, or past purchasing history or interactions with your brand. Step 3: Take a Closer Look at Your Use Cases After you’ve selected a few use cases to focus on, go one step further by detailing the specifics. For instance, for some companies this may entail listing account names or regions that are most valuable to your business. For others, you can zoom-in on a particular behavior or specific product interest. Step 4: Get Your Analytics in Place Before starting to run any campaigns, determine what you’re going to measure and how. To get started: Establish Analytics: This can help you understand how each key audience interacts with you. Set up your measurements to determine baseline metrics for the different verticals and audiences and start testing personalization campaign results to measure uplift. Create Segments: Track performance by checking how many visitors from each specific segment visit your website, how they behave on-site, and what type of content they prefer. Step 5: Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose Content marketing is the fuel that drives personalization success. Instead of creating tons of new customized content, make the most of existing assets by recreating particular sections, changing visuals, or modifying CTAs. The trick is tho repurpose what you have and tweak it to each particular segment.Once you’re equipped with all the assets, that’s where content recommendation engines (CRE), such as Marketo’s, step in. CREs identify all of the content you have, learn what works best for specific users, and then leverage this machine learning to predict and recommend the most relevant asset to each visitor. Step 6: Always Keep the Customer Journey in Mind In order to push prospects down the sales funnel, you’ll need to first map out your unique buyer’s journey. Based on your visitor’s stage, you’ll want to identify content that is the most relevant and suitable for that point. For example, with early stage buyers and prospects, hold off with case studies or gated content, and start with an asset that’s easier to consume, such as an infographic or blog post. Step 7: Use Web Nurturing to Draw Visitors Back You’re probably familiar with email nurturing, but what about web nurturing?Keep visitors coming back by serving personalized ads on social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn or other websites they frequent via remarketing ads. Adding web and ad interactions to existing email nurture campaigns can increase the effectiveness of your programs, and as a result, drive up conversions and engagement. Step 8: Super Charge Your Ad Performance with Data It’s not just about serving ads to prospects across multiple platforms—it’s about retargeting them with the right ads.Tools such as Marketo’s Ad Bridge make this simple; you can “reel” visitors back to your site by suggesting new and extremely relevant content to them even when they’re visiting other sites. Personalized ads are the most effective way to show prospects that you know exactly what they’re looking for—and that you want to help them find it. Step 9: Don’t Forget to A/B Test Your Campaigns! You know the drill; without A/B testing, you’ll never know what works (and what doesn’t) in your personalization campaigns. So, what kind of metrics should you be examining up close? Ads: Check click-though and conversion rates for ad placements. Use offline event analytics. Web Engagement: Did the personalized CTAs and content drive engagement, and lead to more page views? Did you convert more anonymous prospects into qualified leads? Sales Feedback: Consult with sales on the quality of the leads specifically from personalization campaigns. Once you collect the data, use it to optimize and improve future campaigns. Step 10: Create Reports to Help Your Sales Team Personalization is an excellent way to push prospects down the funnel, but once they turn into leads, it’s a marketer’s responsibility to turn them over to sales. Use the same segmentation capabilities to provide your sales teams with real time sales intelligence about their target customersThe best way to do this is to create reports from your campaigns, such as: Key Organizations: Are certain companies showing more interest in your website? Key Leads and Accounts: Have you identified specific decision makers in certain sales territories? Product Interest and Behavior: What was this lead’s main interest and what drove him to your website? What was the context of his interest? Content personalization is essential in 2015 (and beyond). In fact, DemandGen Report found that leads who are nurtured with personalized content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities. If you liked this post and are looking for a more in-depth tutorial on creating a winning real-time personalization strategy, download our recent ebook, 10 Steps for a Successful Personalized Web Engagement Strategy.

Author: Ellen Gomes According to Statista, there are approximately 1.2 million apps in the Apple App store and 1.3 million apps in the Android App store. So it’s no longer news that there is an app for everything, but it might make you wonder, “Do I need an app?” A question that’s often followed by the conundrum of what app to build, followed quickly by how to build an app and then “what’s my role in building an app?” Don’t let those questions or puzzlement be a deal-breaker or a barrier for you as a mobilemarketer. In this blog, I’ll walk you through evaluating how you can (and if you should) use an app to support your business and how to get the project moving along. Why Build a Mobile App? There are a ton of reasons, but let’s start at the top: mobile apps can support your business goal, whether it’s to extend your product, drive engagement, or support commerce. They provide an opportunity to drive deep engagement with your customers on the device that they use most (who else feels lost without their phone? I know it’s not just me…). Introducing a mobile app into your marketing plan is a critical and strategic move. It’s vital that you integrate its creation into your marketing strategy and that you’re involved in some of the technical aspects of the mobile app creation and implementation. As a marketer, it’s your job to ensure that the app includes multiple engagement touch-points that create a personal and relevant experience for your customers. Set Your Stakeholder Team So how do you get started? App marketing starts with creating a strategy that addresses and supports your mobile and organizational goals. The first step is evaluating whether a mobile app is right for your business, but to do that, you need to assemble a cross-functional team of stakeholders to determine whether an app will deliver the right type of value. First, you need to assemble your app team. This is often a large committee of involved stakeholders for key decisions, but you may also want to split into sub-groups focused on individual tasks. For example, maybe your engineering and user interface teams act as a sub-committee to project manage the development of your app, while marketing and sales works together to create an effective launch plan for your app. As you think about whom to include in your committee, here is a list of stakeholder groups you should consider: Executive Leadership (CMO, CEO): Supports the initiative with vision and buy-in. Marketing: Supports the initiative with go-to-market planning, app marketing strategy, and customer insights. Sales: If you have a sales team, make sure they support the initiative with customer knowledge and requests. User Interface and User Experience Experts: Support the initiative by providing app flow guidance and design expertise. Product: Supports the initiative by sharing data-based customer insights and market data. They may project manage the app build. Engineering: Supports the initiative by either building the app or helping source good developers to build your app. They may project manage the app build. Determine Your App Goals After you’ve defined your team, the next step is to reach a consensus and define your app’s goals. Defining the goals is important because it will shape how you make key decisions. To start, you and your team need to understand why you want someone to use your app. What is the purpose? The majority of apps boil down to trying to achieve one of these three goals: Acquisition: Your app provides useful functionality in exchange for the user providing contact information. These types of apps are typically promoted in the app store and via paid channels to drive downloads and subsequent sign-up. Engagement: The activities and associated actions in your app drive the user to engage with the app and your brand. These types of apps build relationships and loyalty. Conversion: The activities and actions in these apps may have components of engagement, but ultimately, they drive conversion. Get Started! Once you have determined the primary goal of your app, you and your stakeholder committee have important questions to evaluate and decide. These questions will shape how you go about the production, development, and promotion of your app. These key questions include: What type of app best fits your organization? How should you price your app? Will you design your app in-house or through an app design firm? What is your app development timeline? How will you take your app to market? How will you handle continued feedback and development of your app? I hope this gives you a good start in how to get started in evaluating if a mobile app is right for your business. Interested in learning more about creating your mobile app roadmap? Check out “A Mobile App Primer” for more info on how to get started. Have you created a mobile app? I’d love to hear about your process and how it was similar or different in the comments below.

By: David Cain B2B marketers are always on the lookout for the best way to support their marketing goals and make their sales teams successful. Typically that means leveraging a range of owned, earned, and paid marketing channels to amplify a product message and build as much awareness as possible across a wide swath of a target market in order to maximize the number of leads brought into the funnel and deliver the most sales possible out of the funnel. As a result, B2B marketers are intimately familiar with broad-reaching marketing tactics like online and offline advertising, PR, SEO/SEM, event marketing, social marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing and more, all designed to cast a very wide net and feed a sales team with a high volume of inbound leads. This broad-reaching approach to marketing can be an effective way to generate leads and sales BUT it’s not the only way to organize your sales and marketing efforts. In fact, based on the nature of your market, there may be a much more effective approach to achieve your goals—account-based marketing (ABM). What Is Account-Based Marketing? Account-based marketing is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the inbound marketing tactics I mentioned above. Instead of leveraging a set of broad-reaching programs designed to touch the largest possible number of prospective customers, an ABM strategy focuses marketing and sales resources on a defined set of targeted accounts and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each individual account. With ABM, your marketing message is based on the attributes and needs of the account you’re targeting, hence the name account-based marketing. So why would you consider focusing your marketing resources on a select group of customers with an ABM strategy? Sales and marketing teams typically select target accounts because they are “high-value”—they have the potential to generate more revenue and are strategically significant or influential in a market. You might sell products that are only relevant to a small set of target accounts (let’s say, for example, computers designed to run nuclear power plants). In this case your buyer is so specific that your target account list is obvious. But ABM often makes sense even when you can potentially sell your products to a much larger group of companies. You might have a large total addressable market that includes hundreds or even thousands of potential customers, but some customers are certainly more valuable to your business than others. And there is no doubt that optimizing your campaigns with individualized messages for each account will result in better campaign performance than a generalized approach. If you have a high-value prospect you’re trying to turn into a customer (or a high-value customer you are trying to sell more to) and you think that a personalized approach to marketing will be effective in achieving your goals, then ABM is right for you. Top 5 Benefits of Account-Based Marketing Benefit 1: Clear ROI Effective ABM drives clear business results. In fact, compared to other marketing initiatives, the 2014 ITSMA Account-Based Marketing Survey found that “ABM delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic.” Benefit 2: Reduced Resource Waste Because ABM is so targeted, it allows marketer to focus their resources efficiently and run marketing programs that are specifically optimized for target accounts. With ABM, you decide which accounts are qualified and then go after them. This can profoundly impact the way you think about sales and marketing and the types of programs you execute. Benefit 3: It’s Personal and Optimized ABM not only targets your sales and marketing efforts with laser precision to a specific audience, but ABM also entails personalizing your messaging and communications to specific accounts so that your campaigns resonate with these target audiences. In fact, according to Aberdeen, 75% of customers say they prefer personalized offers, which makes sense. Targeted customers are more likely to engage with content that is geared specifically to them, and is relevant to their business and stage in the buyer journey. And because ABM is inherently personal, your campaigns are automatically optimized for the right audience. Benefit 4: Tracking Goals & Measurement Is Clear When you’re analyzing the effectiveness of campaigns, whether email, ads, web, or events, it’s easier to draw clear conclusions, because you look at a smaller set of targeted accounts instead of a vast set of metrics and analytics that span your database. Benefit 5: Sales Alignment Is Easier ABM is perhaps one of the most efficient ways to align sales and marketing. This is primarily due to the fact that the marketer running an ABM program operates with a mindset very similar to sales—thinking in terms of accounts and how to target them, bringing them to the table, and generating revenue from them. Accounts are what sales people use to measure success, be it accounts in the pipeline or accounts won—for sales it’s all about accounts. The ABM marketer not only speaks the same language, but also works closely with sales to identify accounts and pursue them throughout the sales process. Key Steps of Account-Based Marketing If the above benefits resonate with you and ABM seems like a good strategy for your business, here are some key steps you need to take: Step 1: Discover & Define Your High-Value Accounts Use all the firmographic data and business intelligence you can find to help you prioritize your accounts. But remember, deal size potential is only one factor. You might select accounts based on other strategic factors like their influence in the market, likelihood to purchase repeatedly from you, or potential for higher than average profit margins. Step 2: Map Accounts & Identify Key Internal Players Now that you know your target accounts, you need to understand the way the account is structured and identify the critical players within the organization (e.g. decision makers and influencers). You might have this data already in-house or subscribe to services that can provide it. If not, consider having your sales team conduct the research or purchase this data from outside vendors. Step 3: Define Content & Personalized Messaging It’s important to put real thought into this step. Some define effective ABM as a web banner personalized with the prospect’s business name, which everyone loves but isn’t necessarily effective. Instead, an effective ABM strategy delivers deep and valuable content that addresses clear and significant business challenges the target account faces. Think about how your content, and ultimately your products and services, can address the target account’s specific business challenges in their industry. Step 4: Determine Optimal Channels We live in a multi-channel world and you will undoubtedly want to connect with your audience on many different channels (e.g. web, email, mobile, print…etc) in a coordinated way. But put some thought into your channel strategy because some channels are more effective for certain roles or certain industries (e.g. email is tough in the healthcare industry). You’ll also want to consider things such as opt-in rules in your region or other potential restrictions in your channel strategy. Step 5: Execute Targeted & Coordinated Campaigns Now that your content and messaging is ready to go, you need to make sure the influencers and decision makers in your target accounts see it. You can do this manually of course but technology is enabling marketers to coordinate and execute ABM campaigns at much greater scale and more efficiently than ever before. At Marketo we use our own marketing platform to support our ABM initiative. For example, we use our real-time personalization solution to serve content on our website designed specifically to resonate with key customers while we serve different content to our top prospect accounts. We employ a similar strategy with paid ads, leveraging personalized ad banners on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, using our Ad Bridge solution to serve ads specific to target accounts. Whatever your solution, make sure to coordinate campaigns across your channels to ensure a consistent voice and message. And work closely with your sales team so they can follow up on campaigns in a timely manner and with a consistent message. Step 6: Measure, Learn and Optimize As with any marketing initiative, it’s critical to test, measure, and optimize your ABM marketing campaigns to ensure they are effective and you’re always improving your results over time. Of course you’ll want to look at the results of individual campaigns (e.g. email open rates, click-thru rates, first-touch and multi-touch attribution…etc). But ABM isn’t about one campaign; it’s about pushing into a high-value account with a series of campaigns over time. Be sure to look at trend data to see how things are really going. Are you growing your list of known individuals (remember step 2?) within your target accounts over time? Are you generating web visits, campaign responses, meetings, sales opportunities, and, of course, deals and revenue at your target accounts? These are the metrics and signs of account engagement you’ll need to understand to assess the health of your ABM program over time. For more detail, check out the ebook we recently published, “A Recipe for Lean Account-Based Marketing,” for a deeper dive into account-based marketing and for information on how to get started quickly with ABM in your company.

By Tony Zambito It is a generally accepted notion that listening is vital to having positive and healthy interpersonal relationships. Listening is an essential skill for leaders in business, politics, sports, and in many different aspects of culture and society. As a country, we have had many leaders rise to the occasion upon their ability to listen and connect with people and their causes. For CMOs today, LISTENING to customers has become one of the key ingredients shaping their success in connecting brands with customers. Expanding the growth of their customer base is predicated, to a high degree, on having listening be an active part of their team’s DNA. Yet, many CMOs are struggling with connecting with customers. A recent ERNST & YOUNG study on the C-Suite perspective, only thirty-one percent (31%) of 800 C-Suite executives surveyed believed the CMO drives best marketing practices that are tailored to constantly changing customers. In other word, barely a third of C-Suite executives surveyed feel CMOs are listening to and understanding customers. To a large degree, CMOs are struggling with the concept of listening. Exactly what does it mean for an organization to listen? On an individual level, the concept of listening is graspable. While on an organizational level, it becomes quite murky. Active Listening To Customers Versus Big Data Signals With the rise of Big Data, we have seen a corresponding rise in the use of analytics. Analytics is popping up for a variety of channels. Measuring and spinning out data on activities in such areas as inbound marketing and social media. No doubt, CMOs today must develop technical prowess in making use of big data analytics to help inform their strategies and planning. On this point, however, CMOs need to avoid confusion and make an important distinction. A distinction between what constitutes monitoring signals versus active listening. In a rather misfortunate categorization, we have seen big data and analytics labeled as listening to the customer. This may not be a healthy way of putting it for CMOs. When it comes to analytics and big data, it is a process of monitoring signals. Digital signals can help relay information on patterns, responses, and trends. And, provide clues on concrete choices customers may make whether related to an activity or a purchase. What it lacks are context and language. Context and language are important. Active listening involves a sense of understanding as well as hearing speech and language within the context they are provided. Active listening devoid of hearing speech and language within contextual surroundings, to put simply, is really not listening at all. Qualitatively Hearing Customers To listen to the customer, as defined above, means developing ways to hear customers. Hearthe speech and language of customers in their contextual surroundings. To truly hear customers, CMOs will need to develop qualitative “hearing” programs to stay in tune with the constantly changing customer. How can CMOs then create active qualitative hearing programs? Here are a few suggestions: Make use of big data analytics to guide where deeper hearing needs to take place Conversely, make use of qualitative hearing interviews with customers to construct big data analytics design; in other word, know what to monitor and analyze Develop a committed program to qualitatively interview customers and prospective buyers annually or biannually; utilize third-party qualitative research expertise if not in-house Create user personas, BUYER PERSONAS, and customer personas to help develop a communications platform on user, buyer, and customer INSIGHTS Armed with qualitative hearing insights, draw correlations and connections to big data analytics With the use of a communications platform, play an active role in helping the organization to hear customers, making use of personas and analytics to tell the story of customers Keep the C-Suite informed on what marketing is hearing from customers and prospective buyers and help draw implications Help the C-suite and the organization see the connection of informed marketing strategies and tactics to both the monitoring of customer signals and the qualitativehearing of customers Bringing Innovation To Marketing For CMOs, here is why distinguishing between active listening (or hearing) and monitoring big data analytical signals can be a factor in C-Suite membership: in the E&Y survey mentioned above, only thirty percent (30%) of the C-Suite believe CMOs brings innovation into marketing practices. Innovation often requires deep insights, which can be translated into innovative opportunities and trajectories. In the next few years, we will continue to have a constantly changing customer impacted by new digital technologies and market forces. Thus, making innovation in marketing practices an important element of CMO success. To bring innovation to marketing practices, CMOs then will need to rely on both the informed signals of big data and the insights offered from qualitative hearing of customers. Without these, the ability to influence and help shape how organizations connect with customers can be like being in a dark room without a flashlight. Article by Tony Zambito Reposted with permission from Tony's website

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