Use Behavioral Marketing To Up The Ante In The Age Of The Customer

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1 A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Silverpop Use Behavioral Marketing To Up The Ante In The Age Of The Customer A Winning Strategy And A Path To Higher Gains May 2013

2 Table Of Contents Executive Summary... 2 Welcome To The Age Of The Customer... 3 Marketing Must Catch Up To An Already Evolved Buyer... 4 Marketing Automation Is Now Table Stakes... 6 Strategy And Execution Draw The Winning Hand... 8 Behavioral Marketing Improves The Odds Key Recommendations Appendix A: Methodology Appendix B: Demographics/Data Appendix C: Endnotes , Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. For additional information, go to [1-LRM63J] About Forrester Consulting Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organizations. Ranging in scope from a short strategy session to custom projects, Forrester s Consulting services connect you directly with research analysts who apply expert insight to your specific business challenges. For more information, visit Page 1

3 Executive Summary Today s buyers control the buying process far more than today s vendors control the selling process a phenomenon that affects both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers. Buyers seek the information they want online, on the Web and in social channels, as well as in that persistent nondigital venue commonly known as the real world. Today s buyers are demanding. They expect sellers to know where they ve been, what they ve seen, what they ve accepted or rejected whether that behavior happened on their tablet, via their smartphone, or at the local branch office. Frankly, today s marketers are struggling to keep up. In March 2013, Silverpop commissioned Forrester Consulting to research how marketers are leveraging automation in their customer engagement processes. In our research, we tested the hypothesis that the automation of marketing processes generates significant insight into the context and intentions of customers and prospective customers and that marketers who harvest and leverage this insight in customer engagement activities will see improvements across a number of key marketing performance measures. Through in-depth surveys with 157 marketing professionals in the US, we found that most marketers are simply using marketing automation to scale and standardize marketing processes. However, a small vanguard is using automation to transform marketing practices with a focus on customer behavior across multiple engagement channels. We found that marketers who have adopted behavioral marketing practices have realized business benefits ranging from higher return on marketing investment (ROMI) to higher contributions to sales pipelines and revenue. Key Findings Forrester s study yielded four key findings: Marketing automation enables marketing success. Marketing automation is broadly deployed to manage core marketing processes from campaign development to lead management. But top performers seem to be leveraging their tech investments differently, executing a higher number of more focused campaigns and setting higher targets. Both B2B and B2C marketers have accepted multichannel marketing as common practice. Marketers are familiar with the concepts and practices of multichannel marketing. One-quarter of our survey respondents assessed themselves as mature practitioners of multichannel marketing. Another 39% were in transition. Only 7% of respondents had no plans to implement multichannel marketing. Behavioral marketing is a slightly less mature practice. Only 17% of our survey respondents assessed themselves as mature practitioners of behavioral marketing. But early adopters perceive significant benefits to becoming more buyer-centric. Significantly, a higher percentage of behavioral marketers grew revenue faster than plan (53% versus 41%) and contributed more than half of the sales pipeline (20% versus 11%). Practitioners of behavioral marketing have significantly different practices. Those marketers who self-assessed as mature reported significant differences in their approach to marketing: They have more fully implemented marketing automation, run more campaigns, and run a greater variety of campaigns. Page 2

4 Welcome To The Age Of The Customer A few years back, Forrester posited that we ve entered a new era the age of the customer. A review of the competitive frameworks of the past 100 years reveals how the age of the customer is different (see Figure 1). One by one, the sources of differentiation have been commoditized. Now, every company can tap into global factories and global supply chains. There s no advantage (or perhaps even need) for a huge IT infrastructure; lean startups are realizing that the cloud provides all of the computing resources they need. The only remaining (and sustainable) source of competitive advantage is being the customer s first choice. The new power of the customer mandates an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with, and serving customers. Figure 1 Customer Obsession Is Key To Success In The Age Of The Customer Source: Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer, Forrester Research Inc., June 6, 2011 Companies have always, to a greater or lesser extent, called themselves customer-centric. But this is different. The age of the customer requires us to go beyond customer-centric thinking to customer-centric operations. In the age of the customer, three elements are essential to success: a customer-obsessed approach to defining the business and marketing strategy; an in-depth understanding of customers behaviors and needs; and a customer engagement strategy that is calibrated to those behaviors and needs. The onus is on marketing leaders to integrate intimate knowledge of customers into marketing activities that serve the needs of customers as they move through the process of picking their first choice vendor. Page 3

5 Marketing Must Catch Up To An Already Evolved Buyer Today s buyers (both businesses and consumers) are a take-charge bunch. They seek out the information they need to move themselves along their path to a purchase (see Figure 2). Although it varies greatly with product complexity and market maturity, today s buyers might be anywhere from two-thirds to 90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to the vendor. For many product categories, buyers now put off talking with salespeople until they are ready for price quotes or delivery terms. Buyers are finding the information they need in an ever-expanding array of content types (from infographics to video to white papers) in an ever-increasing number and variety of online and offline channels and they re accessing the online channels from an increasingly diverse array of devices. Figure 2 Today s Buyers Control Their Own Multichannel Journey Source: The New Physics Of Lead-To-Revenue Management, Forrester Research Inc., March 28, 2013 This changing buyer dynamic changes the role of marketing in several fundamental ways: Marketing owns a bigger chunk of the selling process. In many companies, marketing s role in the sales process has been to create revenue opportunities by driving traffic to a website or developing a sales-ready lead not to advance or close deals. Guiding the buyer through the early stages of the buying process (traditionally the role of sales) requires completely different thinking. An outside-in approach, calibrated to your buyer s wants Page 4

6 and needs, shifts the focus from content that details features and benefits to engagement that informs, persuades, and convinces. Marketers must engage consistently over multiple channels. Buyers notice misaligned messages. We asked survey respondents to assess their own multichannel marketing maturity and found that B2C marketers are much more prepared than B2B marketers to engage multitouchpoint customers with a multichannel approach. 1 Sixty-nine percent of the B2C marketers reported that they were either mature multichannel practitioners or were transitioning to that state. B2B marketers have some ground to make up; only 59% indicated a similar level of maturity (see Figure 3). Marketers must provide relevant content. As buyers move through a buying journey, they seek answers to different questions that stand between them and a decision. The speed of purchase decisions is predicated on the delivery of relevant marketing activities, messages, and content at each stage of the buyer s journey. To accomplish this, marketers can trigger appropriate messages and offers based upon demonstrated buyer behaviors. But when we asked survey respondents to assess their maturity with behavioral marketing, only 17% rated themselves as mature practitioners. Once again, B2C marketers were slightly ahead of the game: 20% rated themselves as mature practitioners and another 41% as in transition, compared with 16% and 25%, respectively, for B2B marketers. 2 Figure 3 Multichannel Behavioral Marketing Is An Emerging Practice Base: 157 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US (percentages do not total 100 because of rounding) Page 5

7 Marketing Automation Is Now Table Stakes Forty percent of our survey respondents reported that they were somewhat aggressive or at the forefront when it comes to technology adoption. Another 32% said that they adopt technology in sync with wider marketplace adoption. Only 18% said that they typically lag behind the mainstream in their adoption of technology. Forrester defines marketing automation as: Tooling and processes that help generate new business opportunities, improve potential buyers propensity to purchase, manage customer loyalty, and increase alignment between marketing activity and revenue. 3 Marketing automation introduces operational efficiency, scalability, and quality into the marketing process. Automation makes the marketing team more productive, more effective, and improves the customer experience through consistent execution. So the uptake is not all that surprising. When we asked our survey respondents about their use of specific marketing automation technologies, we discovered consistently broad deployment across all company sizes and business models, with just a few things of note: Small businesses are investing nearly on par with larger companies. A new model of the successful small business has emerged. The new reality is far different from the owner-operated local enterprise of Norman Rockwell s America. Small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) have dramatically adapted their marketing practices to changing buyer behaviors where the journey for nearly every purchase (business or consumer) begins with a web search. The new generation of top-performing SMB competitors has embraced online marketing with both arms, as demonstrated by their marketing investment levels (see Figure 4). Figure 4 Small Business Marketing Automation Investment Keeps Pace With Larger Firms Base: 157 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US Page 6

8 B2C marketers have an automation advantage over B2B companies. B2C marketers reported a higher level of automation in all but one marketing automation category (see Figure 5). More than half of the B2C marketers claimed to be somewhat aggressive or at the forefront of technology adoption. B2C marketers also have a better relationship with their IT support: 56% reported having an excellent or good relationship with IT, versus only 46% of B2B marketers. B2C marketers are decidedly more social. In particular, B2C marketers are using social media management technology far more than their B2B counterparts (83% versus 57%). B2B marketers consistently underestimate just how social business buyers are. Forrester s research finds that 86% of business buyers engage in social activity for their work; 55% cite online communities and forums as influencers on their decisions. 4 B2B marketers are more likely to nurture customer relationships. The one category where B2B marketers are more heavily invested than B2C marketers is in the category of lead management systems. Many B2C marketers don t take advantage of technology to engage with customers systematically throughout a longer buying cycle or throughout the entire customer life cycle. In fact, digging into the campaign strategies of our respondents, we learned that 44% of B2C marketers had no plans or intention to implement lead nurturing campaigns, while 71% of B2B marketers are either executing lead nurturing campaigns today or plan to start doing so within the next 12 months. Figure 5 B2C Marketers Have Adopted Technology More Fully Than Their B2B Compatriots Base: 136 B2B and B2C marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US Page 7

9 Strategy And Execution Draw The Winning Hand If marketing automation is table stakes, then advantage accrues to the marketer who better uses that technology to generate new business opportunities, improve potential buyers propensity to purchase, manage customer loyalty, and increase alignment between marketing activity and revenue. That means that real advantage is derived from marketing strategy and execution. In our survey, we asked a number of questions about automated marketing campaign strategy and execution. 5 To divine the nuanced difference between winning and losing strategies, we looked at the data through a number of different lenses, including: top performers, defined as those whose companies exceeded their growth goals the prior year; behavioral marketers, defined as those who claimed to be mature or transitioning to the practice; early tech adopters, defined as those who reported themselves to be at the forefront of technology adoption; and customer type, which allowed us to see the differences between B2B and B2C marketers. We found striking differences in the state of marketing practices: The use of automated campaigns is widespread but not universal. Nearly one-third (29%) of respondents reported that they are not executing any automated marketing campaigns. There was only a slight variance on this point between B2B marketers (at 27%) and B2C marketers (at 31%). However, only 21% of top performers and 16% of the behavioral marketers do not execute automated marketing campaigns. The bar for automated is set pretty low. Nearly half of the marketers reported that less than 10% of their outbound communications were triggered by something other than manual intervention. The most frequently mentioned triggers were behavioral (see Figure 6). Only 12% of our behavioral marketers, and 14% of our tech early adopters, reported that more than half of their outbound communications were triggered by their automation system. There s clearly a lot of headroom for the automated marketer. Automation helps marketers scale campaign execution. On average, two-thirds of marketers execute more campaigns after moving to an automated campaign strategy. B2B marketers and B2C marketers were both close to this average at 65% and 62%, respectively. When we sliced the data through our analysis lenses, we saw that 72% of top performers, 71% of the behavioral marketers, and 73% of the early tech adopters are running more campaigns. Marketers are evolving a more varied campaign portfolio. We asked marketers about their use of six different campaign types (see Figure 7). We found that, overall, marketers are executing a balanced mix of campaign types, each of which has different objectives and targets. The campaign mix has gotten more balanced compared with the data from a Forrester study commissioned by Silverpop in 2012 (see Figure 8). 6 The year-over-year results show significant increases in the number of respondents who reported using customer data-gathering campaigns (13%) and lead nurturing campaigns (10%). A higher percentage of B2C marketers reported using every type of campaign with the exception of lead nurturing. Behavioral marketers executed a more varied campaign slate as well (see Figure 9). Page 8

10 Figure 6 Behavior Is the Most Frequent Trigger For Automated Marketing Campaigns Base: 157 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US (multiple responses accepted) Figure 7 A Balanced Mix Of Campaign Types Are Part Of The Strategy Base: 112 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US that use automated campaigns (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding) Page 9

11 Figure 8 Marketers Are Expanding Their Campaign Portfolios Base: 112 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US that use automated campaigns *Base: 133 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US that use automated campaigns Source: Commissioned studies conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Silverpop, May 2012 and May 2013 Figure 9 Campaign Mix Strategies Vary With The Profile Of The Marketer Base: 112 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US that use automated campaigns Page 10

12 Marketers are starting to measure what matters. One bright spot in our year-over-year comparison was the change in perspective on marketing performance measurement. Marketers seem to be evolving a more holistic set of measures and metrics. In 2012, nearly all marketers were measuring response rates, but far fewer were measuring business impact metrics like customer lifetime value. In 2013, while marketers still hold a healthy regard for response rates, far more respondents reported a varied measurement mix that included lead nurturing and customer retention (see Figure 10). Figure 10 Marketers Are Evolving A More Balanced Perspective On Performance Management Base: 112 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US that use automated campaigns *Base: 133 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US that use automated campaigns (multiple responses accepted) Behavioral Marketing Improves The Odds Despite all of the improvements we ve seen in automated campaign execution, most marketers are still not capitalizing on the value of behavioral insight. Marketers have shown us that they re increasingly capturing this data, but our survey found limited use of preference, propensity, and influence data to shape campaign strategies. When we looked into the survey responses of the emerging behavioral marketers to understand their motivations, habits, and performance results, we found that: Buyer behavioral data remains the greatest untapped marketing asset. On average, only 45% of marketers are capturing and consolidating customer behavioral data from multiple channels in a single database. Significantly, Page 11

13 only 60% of respondents who called themselves mature behavioral marketers consolidate behavioral data. In the age of the customer, competitive advantage is increasingly derived from customer knowledge. With intelligent leverage of customer behavioral data, and the knowledge it drives, marketers can provide targeted content and offers that serve to both improve buyer engagement and increase conversion rates. Revenue impact and customer experience are the twin drivers of behavioral marketing. We asked respondents to assess the potential gain if they were able to take specific actions with prospective customers based upon those customers behavior across different channels. Return on marketing investment (ROMI) and customer satisfaction and loyalty topped the list of perceived benefits. Reducing sales cycles and customer acquisition costs were at the bottom of the list of perceived values (see Figure 11). Behavioral marketers are getting better results. It s clear from our survey results that even the most advanced behavioral marketers still rank as neophytes but the early results are promising, as the behavioral marketing vanguard is performing better than its peers. We asked B2B marketers to report the contribution that marketing was making to the sales pipeline (see Figure 12). Behavioral marketers performed slightly better than their peers (34% to 26%). We asked B2C marketers to report the percentage of revenue that can be attributed to automated digital programs (see Figure 13). Behavioral marketers performed slightly better than their peers (26% to 21%). Figure 11 Perceived Advantages From Behavioral Marketing Base: 157 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US (some response categories have been omitted) Page 12

14 Figure 12 Behavioral Marketer Impact For B2B Marketers Base: 120 B2B marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US Figure 13 Behavioral Marketer Impact For B2C Marketers Base: 130 B2C marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding) Page 13

15 KEY RECOMMENDATIONS We have entered the age of the customer. Marketers must evolve to meet the expectations and demands of empowered customers. If you have not already transformed your customer engagement processes into integrated, customer-centric processes, you are behind the vanguard. As you strategize and plan to become more customer-centric, you must: Create a culture of customer obsession. The full promise of behavioral marketing is only realized when all interactions with a customer are calibrated around their current context and historical interaction with your company. Tackling different types of data and aggregating for collective insight is an essential characteristic of any behavioral marketing program. Establish a common language across channels and touchpoints. Channel, product, marketing communications, and sales silos have often evolved their own dialects of a common language. Careless use of language may not confuse the customer completely, but it will ensure that key value points are not amplified. Something as simple as a corporate glossary of customer-facing terminology can remediate this communications problem. Stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking engagement. Customers will engage with marketers who meet their needs their changing needs for different information and options during the buying journey. Marketers who continue to build campaigns, and make offers, around products and product features will be perceived as tone-deaf to today s informed buyer. Learn from best-in-class marketers on the other side. Today s business buyers behave more like consumers: They browse on their tablets, seek advice in social channels, and shop around for options. Today s consumers are less impulsive, taking a studied research-based approach to smaller and smaller decisions. B2B marketers can learn some things from B2C marketers practices such as incorporating social media into the marketing mix and engaging on mobile devices. B2C marketers can learn from B2B marketers about content marketing and nurturing buyers through complex decision cycles. Find a trusted IT advisor. Marketing is and should be inexorably bound up in technology, as the majority of customer touchpoints are digitally enabled and the digital landscape of customer experiences is evolving at a breakneck pace. Marketing execs need a trusted IT advisor. Many CMOs will rethink their relationship with IT, some will turn to an external service provider, and others will create a shadow IT organization in marketing operations. Whatever the source, find your IT champion. Build the technical infrastructure to support dynamic, cross-channel conversations with customers. It s simply not possible to manage the delivery of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers, and products, across digitally enabled customer touchpoints when marketing tasks are semiautomated with a series of unintegrated software tools. Page 14

16 Appendix A: Methodology In this study, Forrester Consulting conducted an online survey of 157 marketing professionals at the manager level and above who focus their marketing efforts on the United States in order to evaluate marketers knowledge of and attitudes toward multichannel marketing, behavioral marketing, and automated marketing. The study was conducted in March and April Appendix B: Demographics/Data Figure 14 Survey Demographics: Company Size And Audience Base: 157 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding) Page 15

17 Figure 15 Survey Demographics: Marketing Responsibilities Base: 157 marketing professionals focusing marketing efforts on the US Appendix C: Endnotes 1 In the survey, we defined multichannel marketing as an integrated approach to engaging customers and prospects across many channels to improve the sales and revenue effectiveness of those interactions. 2 In the survey, we defined behavioral marketing as collecting information regarding customer and prospect behavior and then using that information to influence marketing campaigns. 3 Marketers serving buyers that make high-consideration purchases need to communicate with those individuals at every stage of their path to purchase. To manage this depth of engagement at scale requires marketing automation. Source: B2B Marketers Must Better Prepare For Marketing Automation, Forrester Research, Inc., April 26, Source: Q US And European B2B Social Technographics Online Survey For Business Technology Buyers. 5 We defined automated digital marketing campaigns as digital communications executed via predetermined business rules versus manual processes. 6 Source: Automation: Redefining Marketing s Game Plan, a Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Silverpop, Silverpop website, May 2011 ( earlier/silverpop_redefining-your-marketing-game-plan.pdf). Page 16