ECOSYSTEM PERSPECTIVE

Transcription

1 THE ECOSYSTEM PERSPECTIVE BUILDING YOUR MARKETING STACK 1

2 INTRODUCTION: As a marketer, you probably know too well that buying has changed. Today s self-empowered, self-educating buyer makes major progress down the path to purchase before ever talking to sales, which means that marketing is responsible for more engagement and interaction with prospective buyers than ever before. To market effectively in this new world, you can t market in a silo. You need an engagement marketing platform that captures a complete view of the customer one that can listen and respond on multiple channels, whether you re marketing through , on your website, or on social. arming you with innovative solutions that help you engage in new buyer channels as they emerge. Put another way, to effectively engage and develop relationships with your audience in a multi-channel world, you need to immerse yourself in the new technology marketing landscape. It also needs to open doors to an entire ecosystem of solutions. The real power of a coral reef is not its beauty, but the powerful ecosystem that supports it. And, like a powerful reef ecosystem, a partner ecosystem offers symbiotic benefits that complement and extend your marketing platform, 2

3 INTRODUCTION: But today, there is also more technology than ever before to choose from. Luma Partners regularly updates their marketing technology LUMAscapes visual representations of the solutions, platforms, and tools available today. Here s what their most recent LUMAscape looks like: As you can see, there s an entire maze of digital marketing solutions how can you find your way through? Which technologies should be part of your marketing stack? Which solutions will truly help you engage buyers during the path to purchase? This ebook will help you build a framework for your own marketing stack, guiding you through the various categories of technologies you may choose to complement your core marketing platform. 3

4 WEB ANALYTICS / PREDICTIVE SCORING Great marketers are data driven. Data helps you do your job better, but it also helps you demonstrate the job you ve done. On the strategic end, data helps you to understand who your buyers are, what they want, and how to engage them. As you complete your activities, data helps you establish credibility throughout your organization by demonstrating the impact of your work. Web Analytics Depending on the sophistication of your marketing platform, you will have various levels of reporting on potential and current customers, including , web, mobile and social activities. But you may want to track detailed marketing metrics and analytics to optimize your activities. If you re looking for a deeper dive into website activity, a web analytics solution can play an important role. Web analytics help you optimize conversion rates on your key landing and website pages whether the conversion you re hoping for is a visitor viewing your demo, making contact with sales, or registering for your webinar. To optimize this, you ll need a solution that evaluates key engagement metrics, such as: Data on traffic to your website (and where that traffic is coming from) General engagement stats such as pages per visit, time spent on site, and bounce rate Specific actions that you want site visitors to complete, such as downloading an ebook Keywords used to arrive at and navigate your site You may also consider a solution that performs A/B tests, in which you try multiple variations of the same page to see which version works best. 4

5 WEB ANALYTICS / PREDICTIVE SCORING Predictive Scoring An engagement marketing platform can show you how well your campaigns have performed, how potential buyers and current customers are engaging, and how they have engaged with you in the past. By adding predictive scoring to your traditional scoring, you can get an even deeper insight into their intentions. Predictive scoring allows you identify the buyers who are most likely to become customers, and customers who are most likely to buy a second time by analyzing historical sales data, demographics, firmographics and behavioral data. This can be especially important if you have limited resources, as it will allow you to invest your content and campaign resources into the people most likely to convert. You can also identify where there is a good crosssell/upsell opportunity and target them with specific content and messaging. Check out web analytics and predictive scoring solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 5

6 CONTENT MARKETING If you want to effectively attract new customers and nurture them throughout the buying cycle, you will need a strong content marketing strategy. Luckily, there are plenty of solutions to help you create, organize, distribute, and measure your content. Web Content Management The content on your site is key to attracting, engaging, and converting new buyers and to keeping your current customers engaged. Buyers today expect personalized, immersive, and relevant experiences; to give them that, you might employ a content management system (CMS) that empowers you to easily add and update content. Ideally, this solution can personalize your content offers for each visitor, and can help you optimize and deliver your content on any device. Content Production If you have a small content team, you may need help creating new content. If that s the case for your organization, look for a solution that can provide a database of writers. Ask if they have writers with the expertise you need even if you re writing on a relatively obscure topic, you should at least find writers who are familiar with your space. Evaluate whether your prospective writers have the right foundation to create different asset types, including blog posts, ebooks, and webinars. Or perhaps consider using a solution that offers licensed content but make sure it passes your internal quality standards. Content Organization As you develop a growing library of content, you will need a tool that helps you organize your production process. Look at solutions with an editorial calendar that displays the owner, deadline, and destination of the content. Some solutions will also streamline workflows and approval, help you organize your existing content, automate publication, and even deliver your content assets into your sales reps hands this helps you scale your operation without sacrificing the quality of your content. Content Distribution If distribution is a challenge for your company, you ll want a tool that supports SEO best practices, can display your content in a variety of formats, and allows you to easily share content in the social channels that matter to your audience. Some solutions even help you promote your content. 6

7 CONTENT MARKETING Interactive Content If you re using your content engage in conversations with current and potential customers, you may want to consider interactive content. By inviting your audience to interact with you, you create a dialog between you and the people you want to engage. Look for a solution that helps you create, publish, and measure the impact of interactive content like ROI calculators, assessments, contests, surveys, interactive white papers and more. Content Measurement Sophisticated engagement marketing platforms will help you measure the number of times your content has been downloaded, and attribute that content to profits earned. Some content marketing solutions can give you further insight into how your audience engaged with the content. How long did they look at you content? What pages did they look at? Where did they stop reading? Look for a solution that can give you the metrics you need. Content Marketing Platforms If you are producing content for multiple personas, at multiple stages of the funnel, or for many product types, a content marketing platform can help you produce, organize, distribute, and analyze all of your content in a single platform. Content marketing platforms truly put the power in the hands of the content marketer and allow them produce content at scale, streamline their efforts, and tell the story of how their work is impacting revenue. When considering a content marketing platform look for a solution that has: Tried-and-true templates for content creation, built on best practices The ability to translate and reuse content, optimize for keywords, and improve your assets over time Lastly, make sure the content solution works seamlessly with your marketing platform. An engagement marketing platform allows your demand generation team to create landing pages and forms that tie to your content this is one of the most important ways that content fuels your marketing. So make sure the solution feeds anyone who views your content into your marketing platform, where you can score and nurture them. Check out content marketing solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 7

8 DATA: CLEANSE, DE-DUPLICATE, NORMALIZE, AND AUGMENT A healthy sales pipeline requires quality customer data, which you ll use to tailor your communications delivering the right message to the right person, and at the right place and time. False information, duplicated records, and inconsistent conventions can easily overwhelm your database. Bad data also means that you don t truly understand your customers, which can easily lead to inaccurate communications. Here are the four functionalities offered by customer data solutions: Cleanse A dirty database affects all of your core marketing activities including delivery and open rates. Unfortunately, people frequently enter false information into forms, so if you have forms, you may well have inaccurate data. A data cleanse solution can help you scrub your database regularly. Look for data cleanse solutions that will help you identify fake addresses, as this will help you improve nearly all of your metrics. De-duplicate Sometimes a potential buyer (or a customer) will be entered several times into your database, creating a duplicate record. This is to be expected if you are frequently engaging your audience on a number of channels, but it can negatively affect your scoring, and will prevent you from seeing the whole picture of your customer. A de-duplication solution, which de-dupes on a variety of attributes, takes care of this issue helping you maintain a single authoritative record for each individual. 8

9 DATA: CLEANSE, DE-DUPLICATE, NORMALIZE, AND AUGMENT Normalize Once you clean and de-dupe your database, you also want solutions that will normalize your data, which means organizing it to most efficiently build your marketing lists. If you re targeting director-level customers, for example, you ll need a way to account for the many ways directors might self-identify on your forms you would want a Senior Director, a Sr. Director, or a Dir, to all be included on your list. Normalization solutions can help you identify any variation of a term, making it easier to build complete, targeted lists inside your marketing automation solution. Augment A data augmentation solution enables you to collect valuable information about the contacts in your database, without asking buyers to fill out lengthy forms. Shorter forms means a higher percentage of people will fill them out, and the additional data will help you improve scoring, send more relevant messages, and achieve higher deliverability and response rates. When considering data augmentation solutions, think about your ideal buyer profile what are the qualities of these buyers? You might want to know about attributes such as a person s age and gender, company size, revenue, organizational structure, location, job title, other technologies used, and more. Some data augmentation now lets you tap into information in social profiles for example, you could augment your profiles with data from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Check out data solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 9

10 EVENTS & WEBINARS When done well, events leave a unique and lasting impression on attendees, and they can be incredible drivers at the bottom of the marketing and sales funnel. Whether in-person or virtual, events allow your audience to experience your company s personality and product firsthand. If event marketing is an important part of your strategy, you may want to consider solutions built for webinars, virtual events, and in-person events. These solutions can help you register, check-in, and engage attendees during the event; help your attendees network with one another and rate the event; and (most importantly) can help you collect and track the resulting data. As you evaluate event and webinar solutions, here are some things to consider: How seamless is the process? From registration to checkin and engagement throughout the event how painless is the event experience? Are any networking capabilities built into the solution? Does the solution allow attendees to connect and get to know one another. At a live event, this might be in the form of an event app. What data points can you track? For example, can you track which sessions they attendees saw, any feedback they provided, and any interesting moments they had with your sales team. Also consider how data from these events will be passed into your marketing automation solution. This process should be automated and streamlined so you can send timely follow up communications. Check out event and webinar solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 10

11 LIFECYCLE MARKETING SOLUTIONS The role of marketing doesn t end once a potential buyer has become a customer. Delivering a customer experience that exceeds expectations is key to converting customers into advocates, who help drive referrals and sources of future revenue. This means you can t simply narrow your focus entirely on customer acquisition equal (if not more) investment must be made in nurturing current customers. Solutions that build communities help your customers get the most from your products, as do solutions that provide insight into the way your customers use them. Advocacy solutions can help you convert happy customers into word-of-mouth advocates for your brand; and loyalty solutions help you reward those customers for their continued business. Communities While you may already invite customers to be part of your closed user community, they may also benefit from open communities that enable them to ask questions, pose problems, and share ideas with their peers in an open format. Through peer-to-peer interaction, your customers will get more value out of your products. Look for a solution that allows you to moderate discussions, integrate with social media platforms, manage content, collect feedback, and promote experts and highly active members. Also look for a solution that ties into your marketing platform, efficiently adding new names (and their behavioral information) to your database. Customer Usage Analytics How (and how often) do your customers use your products? The answer will help you engage with your audience in a relevant way signaling when to expect a follow-up purchase, when a customer is likely to renew, or when a customer is in danger of churning. Customer usage analytics solutions can give you a comprehensive view of your customers, and can be integrated with your marketing platform allowing you to market in a relevant way. For example, you might send an at-risk customer helpful information to get them back on track; conversely, you might send your healthy customers a request for a referral, or rewards for their high level of engagement. 11

12 LIFECYCLE MARKETING SOLUTIONS Advocacy Marketing Customer advocates are a powerful source of marketing. Luckily, there are solutions that help you build communities around your most vocal and passionate fans. Look for a solution that can automate the referral process; motivate advocates to share content on social media and to post product reviews and ratings; and tap into your advocates for feedback on upcoming campaigns, promotions, and product releases. Loyalty and Rewards Customer relationships are a two-way street. You shouldn t just think about what your loyal customers can do for you how can you sustain and acknowledge that loyalty? Some solutions allow you to recognize customers beyond the transaction, to create truly rewarding interactions, and ultimately encourage multiple purchases. Loyalty solutions let you track each customer s purchase history, reward those customers with points, and then cash their points in for discounts and prizes. Check out customer lifecycle solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 12

13 MOBILE MARKETING The dramatic growth of iphones, ipads, Android phones and Windows tablets means that more and more business users and consumers are consuming content on a mobile device. The modern marketer needs to have a plan for how to reach these potential buyers when they use their mobile device. Depending on your goals there are a variety of mobile technologies to consider. Responsive Design Consumers are spending more time than ever before on tablets and smartphones, which means that marketers by necessity must make their campaigns responsive. Responsive design means that your site, online content, and campaigns are optimized for a mobile user experience. Without this your visitors are forced to scroll in all directions and zoom in and out to get online content in focus, and in most cases, this leads to frustration and abandonment. When your campaigns are responsive they are easy to view, navigate and your content is easy to read on a small touch screen display across a wide range of mobile devices. Text Messaging/SMS Another great way to capitalize on the mobile phenomenon is to integrate text messages into your campaigns. Text message marketing can be very helpful to your audience when done correctly. For example, sending webinar and conference reminders and confirmations is a great place to start. Mobile App Solutions If you re interested in developing a mobile app, consider how an app might be a true value-add for your consumers. For example, if you can streamline interactions with prospects and customers or improve engagement with an app, it may be well worth the investment. Today you can take advantage of numerous solutions that will help you quickly develop mobile apps for a winning mobile strategy. 13

14 MOBILE MARKETING Push Notifications/Mobile Marketing Automation While the effectiveness of inbound marketing means you are pulling more and more people to your site, there is still a time and place for pushing messages. This is especially true on the mobile platform where push notifications are an opportunity for brands to connect with and add value to their audience anytime and anywhere. Helpful push notifications let you know when you have a message, when there is an accident on your commute home, or when you ve received payment. If you want to implement push notifications, look for a solution that lets you automatically send personalized and hyper-targeted messages to improve relevance and increase the likelihood of engagement. Mobile Wallet Mobile Customer Acquisition When it comes to engaging and converting prospects on mobile devices, you want to employ many of the same tactics as you do in other channels only optimized for mobile. The ideal solution lets you call upon the device user s web and mobile behavior to create a unified customer profile so you can easily segment and personalize your interactions. Find a solution that lets you conduct A/B testing so you can zero in on the most effective messages. And make sure you can deliver messages at the times of day that the recipient will be most receptive. Check out mobile marketing solutions that complement your marketing platform here. In today s world, you need to think about how to get your share of the digital wallet. Fortunately you can take advantage of solutions that allow you to do just that. Specifically, mobile wallet solutions make it possible to create, distribute and manage mobile coupons, offers and loyalty cards. You can even run integrated mobile wallet campaigns across devices and distribution channels, including , SMS, push, online, direct mail and in-store. And when consumers are in close proximity to your physical stores, you can leverage dynamic, location-aware wallet content to drive in-store traffic and higher conversion rates. 14

15 ONLINE ADS & CAMPAIGNS Online ads and campaigns can play an important role in expanding your audience reach, increasing demand, and accelerating the sales cycle. With that in mind, look for solutions that help you target your ads and campaigns to the most fitting prospects. Display Advertising Display advertising, a very common part of the online marketing mix, is usually a graphical ad featured next to editorial content on your own site, or on other 3rd party sites. While display advertising expands your reach and exposes a new audience to your brand, it s important to do so in a targeted way. Look for a solution that allows you to target your audience based on business demographics such as industry and company. If you d like to market to potential buyers at specific companies, you ll want a solution that can identify and target specific accounts known as Account-Based Marketing. Some solutions also allow you to incorporate video or interactive content into your ad, which may help engage buyers who would normally tune ads out. Retargeting Retargeting shows your ads to people who have previously visited your website, and can be very finely tuned for example, if a buyer looks at a particular product on your site, you can highlight that specific product in your ad. Whereas display ads are terrific for top-of-funnel acquisition efforts, a retargeted ad will help re-engage those who have already visited your site. Retargeting ads can encourage a user to make a repeat purchase, review items in their shopping cart, register for an event, or download a piece of content. Some solutions even augment information you already have about your site visitors with additional data, or allow you to tap into engagement on social media. This kind of information will help you to display the most relevant, contextual messaging possible in your ads. DSP/DMP If you do a lot of online advertising, you may need to leverage a demand-side platform (DSP) or data-management platform (DMP) to get the most from advertising at scale. A DSP or DMP provides additional third party data about your prospects and allows you to identify and build an online audience for your ads. For instance, through a DSP or DMP, you can append data to your customer database records to build richer profiles that enable better targeting. You can even track interactions with your ads, retarget your ads, and do look-alike modeling to zero in on your best, most engaged prospects and customers. Check out online ads and campaigns solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 15

16 SOCIAL MEDIA Social media marketing is a must if you re looking to reach, engage, and convert prospects and customers. Fortunately, there are numerous solutions to help you enhance your knowledge of customers, engage influencers, and drive awareness and leads through social. Social Publishing Publishing on social is often a full-time job especially if you re engaging with audiences on multiple social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Social publishing solutions help you plan, coordinate, and schedule the content you publish on social. Such a solution may also allow you to shorten URLs, include images with your posts, and customize your content for different social channels. Social Listening Don t overlook the value of information shared on social mining this data can give you important insight into your audience s needs and intentions. With the right tool, you can listen to conversations on social media by tracking keywords, terms, and influential people in your industry. In turn, you can better identify, understand, target, and engage prospective buyers and influencers at just the right time with just the right information and offers. Social ROI Social marketing can be a big investment, so you need to prove its value. Look for a solution that can help you analyze content interaction and consumption through social channels, and establish the value of any leads you generate as a result. With the right solution, you can draw correlations between social media programs and new leads, pipeline, and revenue. Your solution should also integrate with your marketing automation platform ideally, you should be able to pass leads and engagement data from your social marketing solution to your marketing automation platform. Check out social marketing solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 16

17 VIDEO MARKETING Video marketing can be an important way to influence potential buyers and to continually engage current customers. A video marketing solution can help scale your video efforts, aiding with video production, distribution, or analytics. When it comes to distribution, evaluate how solutions will help you capture leads, and how these leads will be passed to your marketing automation solution. Users of video marketing look for key metrics such as the length of time a viewer watched a video and where drop-off occurs. Over time, these metrics help improve the effectiveness of your videos as you glean insight about which videos work best. For example, if you see lots of viewers dropping off at the start of your video, you probably need to rethink the intro. Or if people don t stick around for the conclusion, you may want to shorten the video. Finally, look for a solution that helps you track engagement, so you can accurately score your leads and pass them along when the time is right. If someone is watching a video about your product s pricing or how your product integrates with existing systems, it may indicate a sales-ready lead. Ideally, you should be able to pass these metrics into your marketing automation solution to help you capture interesting moments and to update lead scoring. Check out video marketing solutions that complement your marketing platform here. 17

18 CONCLUSION: TAP INTO THE POWER OF A MARKETING TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM To engage your potential buyers and current customers, you need to educate and nurture them across channels, using a variety of strategies. Your marketing platform provides the foundation for this engagement, but your ecosystem opens doors to unlimited innovation and possibilities. Ready to engage prospective customers throughout the buying and customer lifecycle? Visit launchpoint.marketo.com to research and find the solutions you need to expand your opportunity to build powerful and lasting customer relationships. 18

19 Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading marketing software for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, Marketo s customer engagement platform powers a set of breakthrough applications to help marketers tackle all aspects of digital marketing from the planning and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that can be optimized in real-time. Marketo s applications are known for their ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation, a thriving network of more than 250 third-party solutions through our LaunchPoint ecosystem and over 40,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in Europe, Australia and a joint-venture in Japan, Marketo serves as a strategic marketing partner to more than 3,000 large enterprises and fast-growing small companies across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit marketo.com. marketo.com 2014 Marketo, Inc. All Rights Reserved Designed by SCORCH