Various Forms of Marketing Continues into 2015.

A number of my colleagues have recently asked whether the pace of innovation driving the marketing technology boom is subsiding or showing signs of fatigue. My answer—not yet, and I don’t think we should expect it to in 2015.
By almost any measure—including the growth in the number of companies focused on selling to marketers and the number and size of investments flowing into this category—the story remains as it has been over the last several years…MarTech is hot. Organizations large and small are adopting more marketing technology to identify, engage, acquire and manage their prospects and customers.
For example, ChiefMarTech reported there was over $3.3B of new venture capital and private equity invested in marketing technology companies in the first three quarters of 2015 (excluding M&A activity). There were six investment firms identified as having at least 25 investments in MarTech alone!
Want a more public and visual display of the incredible resources and energy going into this marketplace? If you happen to be in Silicon Valley—take a look out the window and check out the billboards!
In the last year, there has been a swarm of marketing companies advertising their products and services to drivers and passengers. It’s been fun to see Marketo LaunchPoint partners prominently represented among the outdoor displays. Marketing categories that have been the most visible include:

Mobile Marketing

The consumption of content on mobile devices continues to skyrocket and this channel continues to gain interest from both business and consumer marketers. Tracking mobile in-application behavior and providing mobile notifications are a just a couple actions marketers can leverage to deliver more compelling experiences to their customers.
Marketers looking to market on every channel their customers use now leverage text messaging (SMS) applications for customer outreach, appointment reminders, and mobile marketing.
Example: Twilio—seen on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley.



Twilio SMS makes it easy to leverage text messaging applications for customer outreach, appointment reminders, and mobile marketing.

Lifecycle Marketing/Customer Success

Organizations now recognize that the customer journey doesn’t stop once your prospect signs the purchase order. Sure you’ve engaged your audience from awareness, through consideration to purchase…but now it’s time to build a great relationship, increase the likelihood to renew, and convert your customers into advocates.
Modern marketers can easily segment customers based on their likelihood to buy or cancel their subscription, and can group customers based on feature usage and then personalize engaging campaigns.
Example: Totango—seen on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley.



Totango is used to segment customers based on their likelihood to buy/cancel, or group customers based on feature usage, then personalize smart campaigns.

Content Management/Collaboration

How organizations consolidate, manage, present and collaborate across an organization can make a significant organizational impact. Sharing files and information impacts productivity and can simplify the life of marketers and customers.
Businesses can now improve their collaboration and share content, and ideas from anywhere and on any device.
Example: Box—seen on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley.



Box’s flexible content management solution helps users securely share and access content anywhere, with the ability to provide oversight into how content moves within their organizations.
The list of MarTech billboards along the Silicon Valley’s highway 101 goes on and on to include events/webinars (On24), big data/analytics (Birst) and many more.
While VCs are investing their time and money into emerging MarTech companies, marketers are investing more of their time determining how to build your marketing stack to take advantage of all this innovation. 2014 was exciting and full of innovation, and in 2015 I look forward to more of the same exponential growth.

4 Steps to Tackle Data Quality and Velocity Issues.

 

Let’s face facts—marketers have become complacent with poor-quality prospect and customer data. According to a SiriusDecisions study, 25% of the average B2B marketer’s database is inaccurate and 60% of companies have an overall data health that’s “unreliable.” Because it’s the norm, we’ve created many manual workarounds as temporary fixes for a growing problem — a problem that’s costs us precious money, time and performance.
This complacency has many negative consequences. Satisfaction with the status quo hinders progress, and with ever-growing revenue goals, every marketer is looking for ways to improve their performance and the customer experience. So why are we so complacent when it comes to the data that drives our marketing efforts? And, what can we do to improve our data quality and therefore our results?
It’s no secret that marketers are investing heavily in technology to boost the ability to engage and delight customers. But though we’re well into the marketing automation movement that depends on the smooth and consistent flow of prospect and customer data, we continue to downplay, or even ignore, the data quality issues that can plague our systems.
This is a problem we need to address.
For example, my team at Integrate recently examined its customers’ lead generation efforts and found that on average of nearly 40% of lead data was identified as poor quality (report to be published in January 2015).
When unchecked, quality issues have two major ramifications on marketing and automation effectiveness:

1. Wasted usage and diminished systems ROI: Engagement marketing and lead nurturing tracks depend on imported lead data being accurate. If a lead contains an invalid email address, it inhibits our ability to deliver the our full value to engaged prospects. If the data contains invalid values (e.g., job title, purchasing timeline, etc.), it’s just wasting space—or worse yet, it effects the potential customer experience because they may be placed into the wrong track.

2. Decreased lead velocity and impaired relations with sales: Most marketing organizations are more diligent than simply allowing poor data to pass through the cracks and enter their marketing automation and CRM systems (though some inevitably slips through). Instead, they have individuals comb through lead files to scrub the data before it’s injected (of course, this usually doesn’t help with email validation). What is problematic with this process is that prospects are often more than a week old before they’re re-engaged by a nurture campaign or sales rep. By that time, prospect interest has cooled and conversion rates through the customer acquisition funnel suffer. This obviously strains the sales/marketing relationship.

These are significant consequences, but because marketers are moving fast and looking to the horizon, their intentions to prevent these consequences are typically cast aside and it’s back to business as usual. Fixing data quality issues once and for all doesn’t have to be an Everest-like trek.
So, what steps can we take to address data quality and velocity issues?

1. Understand where and how data sources converge

This will help you identify the best place/time to implement data governance procedures. The best way to do this is to take inventory of all marketing-related systems/applications as well as the processes in place to leverage them. Then, pinpoint the tactical stages in the data flow where verification and cleansing will provide optimal efficiency and effectiveness.

2. Implement a mindset of standardization

Data communicated in multiple formats prevents quick and easy analysis. Think of the difficulty involved with following a recipe that uses the metric systems when you only have standard measuring cups—it requires a lot of extra calculation and slows everything down. Ensuring prospect data conforms to a standardized format also enables the next step…

3. Integrate systems

This will help you capture, refine, leverage and analyze customer/prospect data. Most marketers have integrations between their marketing automation and CRM systems, but these technologies are often still disconnected from lead sources that are distinct from a company’s website or email account (for example, third-party media partners, events, ecommerce sites, content syndication channels, call centers, etc.). By ensuring a smooth, automated flow of data all the way up the funnel to capture leads prevents bottlenecks that slow velocity and allow prospect interest to wane.

4. Automate data verification and cleansing

Of course, if you directly inject data from lead capture straight into a nurture track, you bypass the crucial step of checking the data quality. Adopting and implementing software and processes that automate lead verification and cleansing at the point of captured-data convergence (identified in step 1) is the best way to ensure clean data is imported into your marketing automation and CRM systems in a timely manner.
High-performing marketers are implementing these steps to face the data quality hurdle head on, and early on—before it affects the ever-important customer experience. And for their efforts, they’re seeing greater conversion rates, increased marketing automation ROI and greater marketing-attributed revenue.
Technology has helped marketers personalize, and track efforts like never before, leading to higher customer engagement. But if we continue to generate bad lead data or spend days refining it before feeding it into our marketing and sales systems, we’re hampering our ability to achieve our core goal — creating delighted customers.

Ebook: Leveraging Psychology in Digital Marketing.

Marketing and psychology share a common bond—they both strive to understand the motivation, needs, desires and responses of individuals. As a discipline, psychology has studied and gained insight into how human psychology drives our consumer actions. Kath Pay, Marketing Director at cloud.IQ illustrates that as marketers, when we integrate consumer psychology insights into our programs we are able to speak to our buyers more effectively—moving them through their buying lifecycle faster.
Without reading and researching consumer psychology studies, marketers can incorporate the insights into their programs by leveraging these seven psychology concepts:

1. Persuasion Architecture

Persuasion Architecture is simply using design (in an email or on a website) to help guide the buyer to convert. In this case, conversion does not necessarily mean purchase, it can be clicking on a call-to-action, reading an article, or going to the website. To effectively use persuasion architecture, your design needs to ensure that it is as easy as possible for a buyer to follow the path to conversion.  You can do this two ways:

• Implicit Directional Cues: Less obvious visual cues that include line of sight, color, and shape and size of objects that imply prioritization through visual weight.
• Explicit Directional Cues: More obvious visual cues that often take the shape of a line, arrow or curve that explicitly guides the viewer to the call-to-action.

2. Emotion Driven Behavior

Despite being conscious of making a “rational” decision, most people subconsciously make purchasing decisions based on emotion. Then they rationalize their purchase by coming up with explanations after the fact.
So while it’s important to educate your buyers about your products and services, it’s also important to engage their emotions in your marketing. This can be done through images, storytelling, persuasive subject lines or compelling copy. A good example of this can be seen in many television commercials, that build a story around the product instead of doing a ‘hard-sell’. By emotionally engaging your audience, you improve your chances of converting buyers emotionally.

3. Social Proof

Social Proof is the concept that people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see others doing the same or are told others did the same. It’s basically the effect of peer pressure.
Social Proof can be used in a variety of ways—from encouraging purchase through peer evaluations, to using statistics to show buyers what actions other buyers ‘like them’ took, to suggesting a tipping amount—it can be an incredibly powerful way to prompt buyer action.

4. Scarcity and Loss Aversion

At the basic levels of human behavior, there are two main drivers—avoiding pain and experiencing pleasure. These are the key to every action that we as humans take and they shape the concept of scarcity and loss aversion.
When people are faced with either limited availability, or a limited opportunity to get they best deal, they are more likely to buy. This is why buyers act quickly when they are told that a product or special offer won’t last long. They want to avoid the pain of a lost opportunity and experience the pleasure of a getting a deal. Marketers can incorporate this principle into their marketing promotions with countdown clocks, and by using language that illustrates a sense of scarcity like ‘limited edition’ or ‘don’t miss out’.

5. Reciprocity

It’s human nature to dislike being indebted to others, which is the basis of the reciprocity principle. In order to effectively leverage this principle, marketers need to ensure that they offer their buyers something of real value.
Offering value makes asking for something in exchange feel acceptable to buyers. Often marketers will leverage this principle in their email list-building efforts—offering a discount code, or exclusive access to content in exchange for buyer contact information. By doing this, you not only gain information, you don’t annoy your buyer.

6. Commitment and Consistency

The principle of commitment and consistency declares that as human beings, we have a deep need to be seen as reliable and true to our word. Most people dislike saying one thing and then doing another, so if you can get a buyer to publicly commit to something, they are more likely to follow-through with it. For example, having a buyer commit to your brand in a small way, like a reward program or ‘liking’ or ‘following’ you on social media sites, makes them more likely to eventually purchase from you.

7. Anchoring

Anchoring comes from a cognitive bias known as a heuristic, which describes the human tendency to rely heavily on the first piece of information that you receive (the anchor) when making decisions. This strategy allows buyers to shorten their decision-making time and make decisions without stopping to think about every possible course of action.
When buyers need to choose between options, they look for a base from which to start—this is the anchor. An example of the anchoring effect in action is promoting a product on sale with it’s original price still listed. Buyers will see the original price and anchor it in order to evaluate how good the sale price is.

Agility Will Rule in the Era of Engagement Marketing.

I’ve frequently said that marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the past 50. And, I think it is going to change even more in the next 5. Change has become the new normal, and as marketers, we need to adapt. Today’s customers have a 24/7 mentality. And our success is no longer just based on how clever we are, but how adept we are at connecting with customers at the speed of today’s digital world.
When I’m on stage, I sometimes tell the story of my most recent move. I had a long list of things to do—like everyone else. There I was—in the passenger seat while my wife was driving—and I thought I would knock off one item off of my to-do list by trying to secure a mover. I searched on my phone, landed on some broker page, filled out my information, and off it went to 52 different moving companies. I got a call back in 5 minutes from one company. Then, over the next 2 weeks, I got 51 other emails and/or phone calls from the other companies. Which one do you think I gave the business to? The game was over before the other 51 companies even got to the stadium.
The internet never sleeps. When we go to bed in California, people are eating breakfast in Norway. When Birdman won the Academy Award for Best Picture, everyone knew it within a matter of minutes. Trending hashtags, viral videos, SnapChat—all of these provide ways for people to relay information within seconds. We have entered into a real-time marketing environment. Keep up or perish.

Marketers Don’t Create Customer Journeys…Customers Do

This is the world I keep talking about—the Era of Engagement Marketing. When we are on the receiving end of real-time information from customers, and from events around the world, marketers can’t afford to be last. Marketers cannot be deluded into thinking that they “map out customer journeys” and that customers dutifully follow those paths—on the marketers’ timeline. Anyone suggesting that is doing marketers a great disservice. For one thing, the idea of mapping a journey is so 2000-and-late, and…slow. Marketers must be able to have a conversation in real-time. I often will describe it in talks as the equivalent of mapping out your conversation flow before you go to a cocktail party. Try sticking exactly to that script. How do you think your evening will go? Why would someone think it any different in interacting with customers?
For the second thing, and even more importantly, customers create and guide their journeys—they have access to so much information, in so many places, that they are self-directed. Marketers have to be able to move with the discussion whenever and wherever their customers are—in real-time. We, as marketers, have to be always on—anticipating the start of the race and pacing ourselves to guide and react throughout the journey.
In the Economic Intelligence Unit’s conversation with Jim Stengel, former CMO at P&G, a different metaphor came up. If marketing used to be an assembly line, with marketers coming in at the end to figure out how to sell a product, they are now in a trading room, he explained. Marketers need to be able to respond to events as they happen. A much discussed example is how Oreo responded during the blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl with “you can still dunk in the dark.” It was quick, witty, and memorable. It seized the correct moment. Even a day later, and that response would have been DOA and utterly forgettable.
If you take a look at data from “The rise of the Marketer,” a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, you can see these ideas emerge in the numbers.

New Skills and Structures are Vital

If you recall from my earlier post about the survey, more than 80% of marketing executives believe we will need to restructure marketing to better support business. Think about it—in an always-on, Marketing First world, how will our current marketing departments measure up? Most marketing teams aren’t equipped yet to respond to information 24/7, let alone proactively be communicating in an integrated way 24/7 When marketers need immediate responses, they won’t always be able to act based on a pre-established plan or journey that they dictated for their customers to follow. They will need to think quickly, and respond appropriately, in the right channel, at the right time and with the right message—at scale. Last week’s post highlighted salient statistics on this score—that when CMOs and other marketing leaders were asked what skills were the top areas they needed to develop, the #1 answer, at 40%,  was “digital engagement”, and the #2 answer, tied at 40%, was “marketing operations and technology.” Furthermore, 38% of marketing execs are looking for strategy and planning skills in the next 3-5 years. Among companies that see an urgent need for change, the number is even higher, climbing to 44%. Marketing leaders are recognizing that living in a real-time world requires much stronger strategic thinking as we all seek to adapt.
As the way customers prefer to communicate evolves, marketers need to respond with speed and agility. And to do this, we need to invest in skills and technology that allow us to meet customers on their level, in real-time. In the next era of marketing—Engagement Marketing—agility will rule.

Marketers Will Define Company Strategy.

We’re living in a Marketing First world. If you haven’t yet experienced this shift for yourself—bear with me; it’s coming.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve dug deeply into the results of “The Rise of the Marketer,” a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, to highlight some of the study’s key insights. Last week, we explored the changing attitudes towards customer engagement. This week, I’d like to explore another finding from the survey—how marketers will play a larger role in company strategy. This is a huge development, and a dramatic shift in many organizations from how marketing was asked to contribute in the past.

Marketers Will Earn a Position on the Starting Line

In our survey, when asked if marketing would shape company strategies over the next three to five years, roughly 80% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it would.
As we heard in our previous conversation with visionary Seth Godin, marketers have historically been like runners in the final leg of the relay race. We take a product or service and determine how to help it reach the intended audience. But this approach is going to change. In fact, the race will be redesigned entirely, and it will no longer be a relay. Instead of being handed the baton, marketers will be in the race from the beginning, playing a greater role, and having more influence in setting strategy to determine which product, service, or market a company should even pursue.
Why is this happening? Because, the shopping and buying process has changed forever. Buyers have more information at their fingertips than ever before and they are using it to self-educate. They’re reaching out to companies later and later in their decision-making cycles. As a result, if a company hopes to engage and influence that shopper, they have to do it earlier. This new digital, social, mobile world, is the domain of the marketer. That means that marketing is the only function that has a chance to influence buyers before they have all but made their decisions—putting the marketer in the driver’s seat, or at the starting line—either way, it’s Marketing First.
Marketers everywhere should be excited about this. Across the board, marketing has the chance to play a bigger role in company strategy than ever before. Validating this fact, in our survey, “Strategy and Planning” was nearly tied for the top spot in terms of skills that marketers felt like they needed to develop in their organizations .
When you look more closely at the data, you can see this change emerging even further; marketing teams are doing far more, and they expect to expand their reach in the future. Here’s more from our survey:

• 75% of marketers believe they will be responsible for the end-to-end engagement and ownership over the customer’s lifetime—not just marketing, but support and continued engagement as well.
• More than 80% of marketers agree with the statement, “We need to change the structure and design of our marketing organization to meet the needs of our business over the next three to five years.”

When asked which areas of business areas marketing teams will drive in the next three to five years, the answers were also intriguing: The focus on advertising and branding will decrease compared to today. More than 70% of respondents indicated that marketers are currently focused in these areas. When asked if their focus would remain the same in the future, only about 40% believed they would even have a person focused there. Instead, marketers will put more energy, time, and effort into areas such as strategy, digital, and customer lifecycle engagement..

From Participating to Leading

In many ways, this is already happening. Marketers have been leading strategy for years in many organizations. And, it has been accelerating in recent years as marketers have become increasingly responsible for customer relationships, and, perhaps even more importantly, increasingly responsible for being the source of customer engagement data. The marketer knows the customer better than anyone else in this digital world. They are the keepers of customer data, which means they can spot trends before anyone else can—trends in customer behavior, needs, and interests. These are core components of a successful business strategy.

• Marketers Know Their Customers: Marketers share a deep intimacy with their customers that is simply unmatched by any other business function in a company. We understand what channels customers’ use, where they come from, and how their unique backgrounds contribute to their unique behaviors. This ability to resonate with customers is absolutely critical to business growth.
• Marketers Know How to Leverage Technology: It’s a digital-first world, and marketers have a stronger command of the most forward-thinking technology. We know and use the tools needed to better understand our audiences and reach them more effectively.
• Marketers Drive Revenue: With better technology and tools, marketers can effectively demonstrate our ability to drive revenue for our companies. With the data to prove our initiatives are driving revenue, we’ve earned a seat in the boardroom.

If you are the steward of the customer and you are driving revenue, you probably should have a strong hand in leading company strategy—don’t you think?
I, for one, am excited to see how this Marketing First world develops. How is this movement toward the next generation of marketing happening in your organizations? Do you have any insight or personal experiences to add? If so, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think.