Your Marketing Makeover - eTrigue · • Use of advanced features such as lead nurturing and lead scoring (assigning points based on behavior and content intake… page views, downloads,

YOUR MARKETING MAKEOVER

Refresh Your Strategies with Tactics that Get Noticed

2

Foreword

Introduction

Part 1: How to Tell If Your Marketing Is Stuck in QuicksandCommon Flags of Ineffective eMarketing

Inadequate Capture of Lead Intelligence

Failure to Treat Data as a Strategic Asset

Not Setting and Tracking New Marketing Metrics

Open Rate/Click-Through Declines and Other Signs of Trouble

The Lack of Marketing and Sales Alignment

Part 2: The Marketing MakeoverRunning Intuitively Better Campaigns —Specific Tasks to Change

Keeping It Simple

What’s in It for Us?

Part 3: The Payoffs of Marketing Automation vs. Outdated MethodsSMBs Can Now Have Their Cake and Eat It Too

Changing the Pipeline Picture

Turning Silos into Workflows

Marketing’s Future State

Conclusion: Ending Marketing Monotony

Table of Contents

3

Foreword

Foreword

The marketing wake-up call

The explosion of digital channels has fundamentally changed the way buyers engage with solution providers. Yet, many marketers are still supporting their strategies with the same tools they used five to ten years ago.

Research shows marketers are struggling with campaign execution across multiple technologies and technologies. The reality is organizations using disparate systems and reporting tools are consistently struggling to get a single, unified view of their customers and prospects.

Without the ability to measure and track campaign response across channels, marketers simply won’t meet the needs of their internal customers (sales) or be responsive to the pains and interests of their prospects.

As the theme of this e-book points out, taking the “same old” approach to marketing is not only frustrating, but it is hazardous to the long-term health of companies and their brands.

Andrew Gaffney Editor, DemandGen Report

“Without the ability to measure and track campaign response across channels, marketers simply won’t meet the needs of their internal customers (sales) or be responsive to the pains and interests of their prospects.”

4

Introduction

IntroductionEver see the movie Groundhog Day? The main character wakes up each morning and relives the same day endlessly. He’s “stuck.” Many marketers can relate. You keep building campaigns the same way, with the same old set of disconnected tools, sending email campaigns to the same list of contacts, and getting the same paltry response rates.

It’s the way we’ve always done it. Occasionally, marketers are still able to find that needle in the haystack when a hot prospect attends a webinar and requests an immediate demo or fills out a web form. But more often than not, marketers are still doing things the old way, spending their days manually sorting through different reports for website analytics to email open rates to webinar registrants. With limited insight into the buying preferences of their prospects, they spend an unending stream of days listening to sales complain about a chronic shortage of leads, and that the poor quality of leads supplied limits their ability to close deals.

It turns out Groundhog Day isn’t just a good movie; it’s a good metaphor for BtoB marketing.

Companies get “stuck” too

Tools and tactics they’ve grown comfortable with lose their effectiveness. This has become especially true for thousands of small-and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that market with a variety of disconnected tools hung around a bulk emailing service that kicks out basic reports on opens, clicks, opt-outs, etc. This familiar setup involves heavy use of isolated Excel spreadsheets to power various different tools and evaluate email campaigns, website traffic, webinar attendees, and social activity.

It’s understandable that many businesses assemble this kind of hodgepodge—mostly due to limited budgets and a belief that better systems are out of their reach. But this approach quickly becomes a tangle of manual processes and muddled metrics. The mass email batch and blast, spray and pray approach often does more harm than good as the contacts in marketing databases decay, causing efforts to spiral into irrelevant communications being sent to uninterested people. In a sophisticated, highly connected business world, these outdated marketing methods are less and less tolerated, as senders suffer from major inefficiencies and possible damage to revenues and reputation.

But top-performing companies have gotten wise to this obsolete approach. Many are now breaking out of marketing monotony by automating and integrating with systems that unify all email, web, data and related features into a single view. Marketing automation systems, once perceived as only accessible to large corporations, now feature pricing comparable to higher-end email systems and interfaces simple enough for small marketing teams to master without IT support.

“Companies consistently outperforming peers are 5x more likely to invest in marketing automation.”

—Gleanster Research

5

Introduction

This new way of creating a dialogue with prospects is being used to escape marketing and sales disorder. Shrewd companies of all sizes have grasped this fact and taken action. SMBs have shown some of the most impressive results. They are increasingly dropping outdated models and methods, replacing them with marketing automation functionality that focuses on:

• Highly efficient creation, posting, and alteration of more intelligent campaigns

• Integration of the entire media mix (emails, landing pages, downloads, webinars, social, phone, direct mail)

• Superior metrics revealing the preferences and needs of prospects

• Use of advanced features such as lead nurturing and lead scoring (assigning points based on behavior and content intake… page views, downloads, etc… until they’re receptive) which has helped create greater relevancy with prospects and better alignment between sales and marketing

• Improved pipeline performance with clear tracing back to marketing’s contribution to revenue

Getting out of a marketing rut means supplying useful information to the right people, when they want it, how they want it, to make their job easier. But it requires change, and change can be tough.

This e-book examines how even small marketing teams can remove the monotony of day-to-day campaign management.

Part 1: How to Tell If Your Marketing Is Stuck in Quicksand

Part 2: The Marketing Makeover

Part 3: The Payoffs of Marketing Automation vs. Outdated Methods

Percentage of Top Performers “using” or “planning to use” marketing automation from 2012 to 2015.

Gleanster Research 2012 Marketing Automation Survey

84%

6

Part 1:How to Tell If Your Marketing

Is Stuck in Quicksand

PART 1:How to Tell If Your Marketing


7



Common Flags of Ineffective eMarketing One of the hurdles marketers face today is the demand for deeper intelligence and reporting. More and more they are being challenged to explain how many leads were brought in during a given period, and the sales readiness of those leads. But a great many marketers have trouble answering such questions, as they’re still patching together campaigns with basic email services and hang-on systems offering little in the way of transparency, tracking accuracy, prioritization, or the ability to convert.

Since industry estimates suggest more than 1/3 of contact databases are often out of date, the reality is that email campaigns are typically being sent to a high volume of inaccurate or dead contacts. This not only flattens marketing effectiveness and harms pipeline, but it can also lead to SPAM blacklisting—a fate that is very difficult to escape.

Progressively higher content relevance and better timing of emails (along with refreshed data) are core elements for avoiding negative outcomes. Popular bulk eMarketing tools, however, reduce marketer control over what is sent, to whom, and how often. Metrics they report offer no clear path to creating better campaigns.

Luckily, by looking for certain early warning signs, marketers can gauge if they are falling into a marketing rut. Once confirmed, there is a choice to make: continue with hit or miss email blasting, or acquire functionality that brings order and effectiveness to eMarketing efforts. The following pages show some common indicators of trouble with manual marketing engagement.

“The path of least resistance often generates the highest return for Top Performers.

Contrary to popular belief there isn’t a huge learning curve on adopting marketing automation and extracting measurable value from the system. Core capabilities like segmentation, personalization, drip/trigger campaign configuration, CRM integration, and simplicity of design drive incremental value for Top Performers.”

—Gleanster Research

Marketing is Transforming

• Customers now have the power over communication; especially in BtoB

• It’s tougher than ever to identify and reach actual buyers

• Greater accountability is expected from marketing

• Marketers are expected to work cross-functionally, especially with sales

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Inadequate Capture of Lead IntelligenceThe “insightful use” of marketing automation extends beyond email and title records that can be verified, to the observation of anonymous website visitor activity. Sometimes called “tracking the ghosts,” anonymous website visitor I.D. using a single integrated system employs multiple data sources to reveal the identity of organizations in buy mode. It also reveals individuals inside buy-ready organizations that are stealthily researching vendors. When these buyers finally do self-identify, marketing automation fills in their entire history by combining anonymous visits with self-identifying data. This 3-D view can only be achieved with marketing automation.

In this way, marketing automation can cause qualified hot leads to materialize with abundant historical and behavioral data. Bulk email systems don’t record the digital footprints of website visitors no matter their activity. So, reliance on batch n blast email systems—even the best of them—costs organizations untold numbers of qualified leads.

Failure to Treat Data as a Strategic AssetThorny issues around “dirty data” have plagued marketers for decades. Digital marketers once thought centralized sales force automation systems alone would solve the problem of lead data inaccuracies. But ironically, they’ve only grown more complex. The all-too-typical breakdown occurs when marketing and sales work from conflicting records within the same accounts, or with entirely dead records.

Data hygiene is a cornerstone of the SMB marketing automation adoption trend. It is perhaps most urgent within mid-sized businesses that have acquired contacts in the tens of thousands. Any company that’s been through the ordeal of manually sanitizing bulk email contacts only to find that lead and prospect data decays at a rate of roughly 4% per month, or about 35% per year, are open to better solutions.

Megan Heuer, Research Director at SiriusDecisions has summed up the enormity of this issue, saying, “Marketing Leaders will have to look at data as a strategic asset and take specific, measureable action to treat it as such. How much can be accomplished with marketing automation depends on the quality of data and the marketing function’s ability to make insightful use of it.”

Example of a marketing automation systems detailed report on a single prospect’s individual activity.

Percentage of Top Performers (compared to 39% of everyone else) that use conversion rate on marketing-sourced leads as a performance metric for marketing automation.


62%

9



Not Setting and Tracking New Marketing MetricsPlacing that study in a relatable context, it was only about five years ago that email eclipsed postal direct mail as the primary method of business communication. That move made sense, as direct mail costs are higher and tools for measuring offline communications are fraught with blind spots. Similarly, mobile may soon unseat email, which is another reason marketers need deeper intelligence and integration.

While the convenience of sending messages to a database of email addresses seemed powerful in the early days of eMarketing, most marketers quickly realized they needed the ability to segment their prospects. BtoB marketers with longer sales cycles need the ability to nurture prospects over time with a series of messages that help to educate and accelerate prospects into buyers.

Open Rate/Click-Through Declines and Other Signs of TroubleAmong the best indicators that delivery methods/messages aren’t working are declining open rates and click-throughs. When content is outdated and irrelevant, email open rates often plummet between 10% and 20%. Click-throughs can decay as much as 40%. “One of the problems with using just the mass emailing and reporting tools is they don’t tell you early enough that your messaging has become stale,” says Martin Schneider, Research Manager, 451 Research. “If you’re at a 40% rate of decline, you’re weeks or months behind diagnosing the problem.”

Bulk email has even harder to fix aspects, according to Gleanster Research:

• Blacklisting (if it’s not relevant it’s SPAM)

• Endemic marketing waste (communications that consistently fail to build a credible, trusted relationship with prospects)

Percentage of Top Performers (compared to 42% of everyone else) that use close rate on marketing-sourced leads as a performance metric for marketing automation.


71%

10



The Lack of Marketing and Sales AlignmentAmong the most fundamental tenets of good lead management today is creating a set of rules and time-sensitive behaviors agreed on by marketing and sales teams. Commonly called Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the two departments, small and medium-sized businesses that use SLAs are taking a productive page from the enterprise playbook.

In principle, a marketing/sales SLA is a remarkably simple common sense approach to business. Both teams mutually agree on what a qualified lead is; at what point marketing injects a qualified lead into the sales CRM; what action should be taken; and in what timeframe.

As a practical matter, an SLA requires the right equipment for the job. In the main, bulk email tools do not sync up to sales force automation systems. That gap presents an immense obstacle to interdepartmental cooperation. Marketing automation systems are built to sync up with a sales CRM, enabling data sharing, the setting of real-time alerts that cross from marketing to sales when lead/prospect behavior has attained an agreed upon buy readiness status, and a clear path for sales follow up.

“More than 80 percent of the buyer’s purchase process is completed before a sales person is even involved.”

—Christine Crandell New Business Strategies

A consistent methodology helps uncover buyer intent and align marketing to meet buyer expectations. New Business Strategies® www.christinecrandell.com/expertise/sellers-compass/

The Sellers Compass™

is NBS Consulting Group’s methodology that clients implement to enable, engage, and establish enduring, profitable relationships with their prospects and customers.

http://www.christinecrandell.com/expertise/sellers-compass/

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Part 2:The Marketing Makeover

PART 2:The Marketing Makeover

12


Running Intuitively Better Campaigns—Specific Tasks to Change

Mapping a path out of batch and blast to marketing automation

With makeovers, it’s wise to evaluate your current state and then look into what needs to be done to improve the situation. In eMarketing, this means the informed creation of smarter campaigns that resonate with distinct audience segments. But this can only be accomplished by adding integrated reporting and intelligence to track prospect activity across touch points, and responding appropriately.

SMBs in particular need the ability to build smart campaigns and make fast changes using finer metrics to get messaging on target and create more sales opportunities. A recent study by Techaisle found that SMBs who have adopted marketing automation are achieving these goals. Study highlights include the following:

• Of SMBs using marketing automation, 49% say they are better able to manage sales leads and 46% have seen an improvement in demand generation

• 42% of the SMBs surveyed say automation has improved marketing ROI

• Of the 16 features available in a typical marketing automation solution, SMBs use an average of 7.7, and plan to add another 3.6 during the coming year

Basics of a good marketing makeover

“With marketing automation, you can start to plug the holes in the pipeline, especially where sales is engaged with opportunities that are not yet ready to buy. If these fall through the cracks, it’s an opportunity lost,” says Ian Michiels, Chair, Research Advisory Board, Gleanster Research. “Marketing automation allows companies to put long-term touch nurturing programs in place to make sure those leads you paid to generate don’t go to a competitor just because they aren’t short-term opportunities.”

• Putting in place a series of base level campaigns, with the ability to really start monitoring them (form-driven “drip” campaigns that can be generic, top of the funnel, primarily for lead gen, adding in progressive personalization)

• Creating a few nurturing campaigns for certain verticals, or for a particular target audience (connects email, landing page, and content to specific buyer types/stages; primarily for converting leads to prospects)

• Setting lead alerts so sales teams are immediately notified when a prospect responds to a targeted offer or visits distinct web pages

“With marketing automation, you can start to plug the holes in the pipeline, especially where sales is engaged with opportunities that are not yet ready to buy. If these fall through the cracks, it’s an opportunity lost.”

—Ian Michiels Gleanster Research

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Keeping It Simple For the SMB sector, marketing automation brings a freedom which enables a marketer—not an IT staffer assigned to marketing—to structure campaigns that are sophisticated in terms of versioning, and timing, and have the ability to market around people’s work and lives. It enables an intuitive workflow that’s suitable and effective. That’s what marketers want. They’re not necessarily techies.

Automation tools that cater to SMBs have other benefits. They don’t drain IT resources because they’re built for marketer ease of use. They allow marketing to stop buying lists and instead generate lists organically. Organic lists and personalized content increase relevance, conversions invariably rise, and ultimately sales and revenues increase.

On the conceptual level, legions of marketers are realizing they need to exit the world of multiple, incongruent tools for an integrated platform. This involves adopting a marketing automation system and simply getting started to rack up early wins. Once organizations see how content relevance, timing, and engagement quality impact sales, they want to reproduce it more often and with far greater control.

As companies experience what one campaign can achieve using an integrated approach they crave more. When leads, prospects, and even existing clients increase engagement due to a marketer’s more useful content, it hints at untapped potential.

To prove and demonstrate the benefits of integration, The DemandGen Report polled marketers with automation systems about rating various aspects of its impact across operations. When asked, “What was the greatest perceived value/ROI from your marketing automation solution,” respondents gave the following rankings:

• Measurement/tracking of campaign results, more efficient marketing spend – 41.7%

• Reduction in resources required to create and facilitate marketing campaigns – 20.8%

• Increased flexibility of marketing department to react to opportunities, shifts in the space – 14.2%

• Better prioritization of sales organization through lead scoring/intelligence – 23.3%

41.7%14.2%

20.8%

23.3%

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Aligning Critical Capabilities to Top Two Value Drivers for Top Performers

What’s In It for Us? MA Adopter Common Attributes (Gleanster Research)

• Top performing organizations are four times more likely than everyone else to adopt marketing automation tools

• Depending on the state of existing processes, marketing automation can be rapidly adopted or, at times, it demands a little transition management to get everyone bought in (marketing and sales)

• Top reasons to implement (according to 79% of Top Performers) is increased relevance and greater communication/cadence between marketing and sales

“Marketing automation allows companies to put long-term touch nurturing programs in place to make sure those leads you paid to generate don’t go to a competitor just because they aren’t short-term opportunities.”

—Ian Michiels Gleanster Research

• Segmentation• Drip and Trigger Campaigns• Behavioral Analytics• Analysis and Reporting

• Trigger Campaigns• Behavioral Analytics• Sales Alerts (via Email and CRM)• Campaign Design

Enabling CapabilitiesTop Performers Value Drivers

87%

81% Adjust campaign tactics based on performance

Target campaigns to audience segments and individual consumers

Gleanster Research shows that Top Performing organizations almost unanimously focus on the relevance of communications. (Source: Gleanster Research: 5 Marketing Automation Capabilities Top Performers Can’t Live Without”)

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Part 3:The Payoffs of Marketing Automation

vs. Outdated Methods

PART 3:The Payoffs of Marketing Automation


16



SMBs Can Now Have Their Cake and Eat It Too The goal of marketing is to enter into a communications cycle that is iterative, with many touches and points of entry. Bulk email tools in wide use today were not built for this level of sophistication.

Marketing now requires systems that offer the subtleties of lead scoring, lead nurturing, and conversion. A good SMB marketing automation platform, however, can “understand” and adapt to top and mid-funnel relevance before it starts sending leads over to sales as opportunities. This intelligent lead flow is vital for brand building and growth. But again, even the best of the email-only tools can’t do this.

“When you look at the growth numbers of the marketing automation solutions that have been designed for SMBs we’re really starting to see more marketers gaining an awareness that they need to mix content, they need to mix workflow, they need to have message relevance and smart segmentation,” says Martin Schneider of 451 Research.

Traditionally, Schneider says, marketing avoided this kind of capability because it comes with a much higher degree of accountability. But digital marketers have now gotten behind the idea of greater accountability, because it provides the opportunity to link message to revenue. This deconstructs old belief systems like, “if sales are up marketing gets ignored, and if sales are down marketing gets blamed.” With marketing automation measurements and tracking, when sales are up marketing is rewarded, and if sales are down marketing helps to fix it.

Tip: Go Easy on the SellingIn the most recent DemandGen

Report Content Preferences Survey,

75% of respondents tell

solution providers creating content to

“curb the sales messaging.”

Research findings indicate a need for

marketers to reevaluate their content

strategies to ensure that prospects

understand the value for their

business and objectives, rather than

resorting to obtrusive, ineffective

sales-speak. More than half (55%) of

respondents advise solution providers

to “focus less on product specs and

more on value.”

Marketing Automation Features Utilized by Top Perfomring Organizations

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%Sales Alerts CRM Integration Campaign Design Drip and Trigger

Marketing

37%46%

53%67%

Segmentation

78%

Gleanster Research suggests that the most critical marketing automation features for Top Performing organizations are also some of the most basic features. (Source: Gleanster Research: 5 Marketing Automation Capabilities Top Performers Can’t Live Without”)

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Changing the Pipeline PictureRanking their biggest demand generation and lead management priorities, marketers provided the following operational insights:

• Increasing volume of leads – 45.5%

• Increasing amount of qualified leads – 81.8%

• Improving conversion rates at different stages of our pipeline – 50.0%

• Improving close rates on opportunities – 50.0%

Tip: Target Effectively“Selecting contacts according to the

actions they’ve taken, level of

engagement and demographic profile

helps us communicate the right information at the right time to

the right prospects. We gain a

higher success rate for our marketing

efforts than with mass batch-and-blast

emails, and know immediately if our

communications are on target.” —Loni Borromeo, Athens Administrators

Clearly, qualified leads that convert much more readily into prospects and closed deals are now recognized as the most urgent task facing marketing teams. With former barriers like cost and complexity now removed, many SMBs are adopting marketing automation technology to track and close more business.

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%Increasing

Lead Volume

45.5%

Increasing Qualified Leads

81.8%

Improving Conversation Rates

50.0%

Improving Close Rates

50.0%

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Tip: Audience Segmentation With so much data available these

days, marketers must be smart in deciding exactly how to segment and target their audience

to achieve the best return on investment. Because buyers are

increasingly empowered, the demand

for personalization and an enhanced

user experience is a key decision

driver. There are infinite ways to

divide and target an audience.

The rationale for segmenting is to

target an audience according to what

they need, how they acquire the

solution to the need, and what will

deliver the best ROI from marketing.

Turning Silos into WorkflowsWhen email, data, web assets, and content are in separate silos, integration is practically nonexistent. Email messages are designed using the email tool; recipients for each message are manually extracted from multiple unconnected data sources (internal CRM contacts, external list providers, website inquiries imported as Excel or another file type); web pages are created and changed with an HTML application; and content itself is executed in various formats (text, video, webcasts).

These collections of unrelated systems and sources offer no way to gather and measure metrics across the board to draw meaningful comparisons. For these reasons the use of outdated manual eMarketing tools and processes can put organizations at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Conversely, when all of these elements can coexist within a cohesive marketing automation environment, SMBs move to a “single version of the truth” business model that’s prized even up to the enterprise level. As prospects set the cadence of the buying cycle with their behavior, marketing automation triggers and alerts enable appropriate responses at any stage of the buyer’s journey.

Integrated marketing automation platforms also require far less manual labor than the mixed platform approach. And the functionality of these solutions can be rolled out in components, setting a pace that aligns with the capabilities and needs of SMBs. For example, Gleanster Research has found that 80% of Top Performing companies used out of the box marketing automation functionality when getting started, taking a “walk before we run” optimization approach.

Workflows also benefit enormously from the introduction of marketing automation. The basic shift of having sales call on prospects that have been tracked and scored for sales readiness (and not calling on those who aren’t sales ready) has a transformative effect on organizations. This is possible because marketing automation can deduce behavior, giving insight and context to campaign data.

Especially within a unified system, email clicks, website visits, and content consumption reveal buying patterns. In turn, the organization can use these patterns to attach lead scores that predict likely buyers. These are prioritized within the CRM for sales attention.

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Marketing’s Future StateResearch from The DemandGen Report and other sources finds strong indications that BtoB marketers want features not found in basic email platforms. At the same time, marketing automation vendors are fielding new product offerings tailored for SMBs by eradicating former barriers, including price and technical complexity. The beneficiaries are a wave of SMBs abandoning transitional email technology and misaligned tools for an integrated approach that radically improves pipeline velocity.

Case studies for this kind of landmark enablement and resulting demand can be found only a few years ago when companies like Verizon and Comcast were trying to sell business Internet services. Not only were there many companies not marketing online, there were companies that weren’t online at all. The SMB sector now faces these same infrastructure challenges, and the sector is using marketing automation to solve them.

With these issues serving as a backdrop, research firm Sirius Decisions took the temperature of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) regarding near future outlook and requirements. In a poll from its 2012 summit, Sirius Decisions found CMOs solidly aligning behind the features and functions that marketing automation offers. Sirius Decisions summarized its findings as follows:

• The need for greater ROI What is particularly interesting about this being the top priority of CMOs is why it has become so important. During our interviews, many of these leaders commented on the progress their organizations have made in demand creation and the ability to measure marketing’s impact. This progress has fueled greater need for demand generation—because its impact can now be measured—as well as improved measurement of branding and an insatiable appetite for the assembly of marketing measurements into a meaningful dashboard. The result has been an increased investment in marketing operations. Ops roles have expanded from pure marketing measurement to providing insight into KPIs and metrics, marketing technology, and data management.

Tip: Favorite Formats In the most recent DemandGen Report

Content Preferences Survey, 88% of

respondents cited white papers as

the top choice of content type

to research a business topic or solution.

But more visual formats, such

as webinars (72%); videos (44%); and

infographics (38%) also were cited as

emerging formats for research.

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Key Campaign Considerations

• Timing and cadence are key; decide on a frequency of communication and stick to that cadence

• Map drip marketing messaging to the prospect journey to ensure that relevant information is sent at the right time

• Develop an understanding of key buying indicators to help in crafting messaging

eTrigue® DemandCenter® features a drag and drop campaign builder that makes campaigns more effective.

Whether you’re sending a quick message to existing customers on-the-fly or building multi-step campaigns designed to nurture prospects, eTrigue makes the development, proofing, and scheduling process convenient and trouble free.

• Expanding digital marketing The role of digital marketing in BtoB markets continues to expand. CMOs see this in a changing marketing mix, the use of technology in most marketing efforts, and a need for social media throughout the buyer’s journey. Yet, while the importance of digital marketing has significantly changed, the marketing skills to enable the strategy have not. This has resulted in expanding roles in the demand center—providing a center of excellence for field marketers, web marketing skills that far exceed a single web marketing role, and the emergence of social media expertise as an essential core marketing skill enabled by a social operations center.

• Breadth of products The third priority is to rapidly move to solution marketing—away from product. Most CMOs commented that they have new business models in their portfolio (e.g. cloud). They also noted the need to deal with more offerings resulting from recent acquisitions, as well as with buyers who are well informed about their products but not as knowledgeable on how their organizations will specifically impact the buyer’s business. As a result, CMOs are investing more in solution marketing and marketing content. A new emerging role is that of the “content strategist,” which we define by the following characteristics: centralized accountability and responsibility, broad oversight and authority, and a range of strategic responsibilities.

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Conclusion

Conclusion: Ending Marketing MonotonyJust as the main character in Groundhog Day comes to realize that he must abandon familiar (and even occasionally successful) old ways for new behaviors centered on the needs and perceptions of others, marketers are having their own epiphany. Though at odds with his prior “push” style of dismissing external factors, the character modifies his behavior by listening and responding to the needs that confront him. The breakthrough was an acquisition of new skills, an unapologetic separation from his former approaches, and a step-by-step rethink of how to thrive in a new climate.

The same applies to marketers tied to a mélange of disparate systems that in most cases stop working long before their limitations are discovered. For SMBs seeking competitive advantages to fuel a new era of growth, the days of scattershot bulk emailing and system clutter are ending. Replacing that model is the clean, fast, high-visibility, granular detailing of marketing automation integration and the intelligent campaigns it delivers.

Tip: Is It Relevant to the Reader? Is your content targeted to a specific group (like IT Directors)

or is it serving up a general message

to anyone who might read it? What are

the major problems for each audience?

How does your solution help these

people achieve their business objectives or overcome their

challenges? “What’s in it for me and

why should I care?”

If you understand your prospect’s point

of view, you can speak to their problems, offer solutions, and

provide the business value and proof

points for your solution. Outbound

communication focused only on product

features is best left to data sheets.

This e-book looks at seven types of campaigns that will help you build successful demand generation programs.

To download your copy, please go to: www.etrigue.com/landing/Campaign_Groove_ebook_dpf_YMM.asp

Further Resources: How To Get Your Campaign Groove On

http://www.etrigue.com/landing/Campaign_Groove_ebook_dpf_YMM.asp

http://www.etrigue.com/landing/Campaign_Groove_ebook_dpf_YMM.asp

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Conclusion

About eTrigueeTrigue is the ease of use leader in innovative marketing automation solutions that allow marketers of all skill levels to build and execute world-class demand generation campaigns. By automating the processes used by sales and marketing, eTrigue makes it much easier to provide highly qualified leads to sales, helping drive more revenue with less effort.

eTrigue marketing automation makes it simple for marketers to create, execute and track powerful multi-channel demand generation campaigns and email marketing campaigns, all with online tracking. eTrigue takes advanced marketing automation to the next level, enabling anyone to develop, execute and track highly flexible demand generation programs—without the need for dedicated marketing or IT resources.

About DemandGen Report DemandGen Report is a targeted e-media publication spotlighting the strategies and solutions that help companies better align their sales and marketing organizations, and ultimately, drive growth. A key component of our coverage focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable companies to better measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation efforts.

main: 408.490.2900 toll-free: 800.858.8500 www.etrigue.com

eTrigue, DemandCenter and the eTrigue logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of eTrigue Corporation. “Intelligent Demand Generation” is a trademark and “Marketing Automation for the rest of us” is a registered trademark of eTrigue Corporation, © 2017.

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Documents

Your Marketing Makeover - eTrigue · • Use of advanced features such as lead nurturing and lead scoring (assigning points based on behavior and content intake… page views, downloads,