Monday, October 16, 2017

Change Agent: Scaling Account Based Marketing in a 21st Century




Presented by: Matthew Preschern

Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
HCL Technologies







SESSION ABSTRACT


A company’s brand proposition and means of customer engagement have been transformed by the shift to digital, including the tremendous influx of data and a business environment that is mobile-first and always on. Customers expect personalized, experience-driven interactions for engagements that come at micro moments and require a brand to be nimble and active in encouraging next steps. 

The key to using data to encode insights and deliver this level of customer experience can be found in account-based marketing. A well-conceptualized ABM plan when designed and executed in partnership with sales can be a strategic differentiat or and a trigger for exponential growth.


The true power of ABM lies in the programmatic choices, both in-person and in the digital space. Participants learned how the elements of an account based marketing approach can allow a powerful customer-to-brand connection and examined the ways in which account based marketing can bridge the analog and digital elements of marketing for a cohesive experience.


KEY TAKE-AWAYS

  • A framework for account-based marketing
  • An understanding of the elements of a successful ABM program, including customized customer experiences
  • Insight on ABM as a means to trigger double-digit growth coupled with reinforced brand equity
  • A guide for using the data collected to endear customers and drive
    brand awareness

OVERVIEW
  • Client challenges: Message clutter, lack of personalization, lack of trust in other companies
  • Marketing challenges: Micro moments, individual to individual, mobile first, connect emotionally, always on, multi-channel, experience driven
  • The world is moving towards more personalization in the purchasing process

Account Based Marketing: Augment business traction and be a “strategic partner” to the client, enable, up-sell and cross-sell, infuse thought leadership, and create and leverage loyalty

Key Question: How do you arm your sales team with this account based marketing information? How do you get them to allow you to get involved when sales tries to “own” the account planning process?

  • Sales should own the execution of interaction with client, that’s a good thing
  • Convince them to engage in a thoughtful manner while planning
  • Accounts will grow if both are involved in the planning; however, relinquish power when it is time for the sales team to execute with the client

TAKE-AWAY

“Alice in Wonderland” lesson
  • If you don’t know where you are going, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re running – don’t deploy everything
  • Utilize best marketing tactics in concerted effort, deploy some technology, research accounts, and take your time so you know you’re making the right decision
  • Don’t waste time and money because you didn’t research accounts or clients fully

IMPLEMENTATION GUIDELINES

What to consider in account selection:
  • Current competition landscape
  • Account maturity – right engagement ecosystem of sales, delivery and marketing
  • Do you have a coach or advocate in the account you are serving?
  • Business potential – wallet share versus potential wallet share
  • What specific accounts are you going to target, and why should you go after those particular accounts?
  • Very strategic – who are the decision makers in the other companies?
  • Are you getting a large part of their wallet share – are they buying just one of your products-or more?

BEST PRACTICE

Map marketing activities into three buckets
  • Demand generation
  • Brand awareness
  • Thought leadership
  • Determine tactics and information shared in order to “move down the funnel” 
  • Create a custom plan and utilize what works as you get more involved with a client
  • Identify target accounts and prospects
  • Identify digital channels –> optimize –> measure

ACTION ITEM

You need a framework for how you will act on each account:
  • Client engagement framework
  • Craft an account level campaign plan
  • Measure and monitor
  • Utilize both relevance charts as well as organizational charts
  • Plot an ecosystem chart of key external influencers
  • Create a RAG map for all stakeholders
  • Craft a plan specifically to expand new/unknown decision makers and influencers
  • You need to combine relationship map with account selection
  • Very quantitative analysis -- you need to know hard numbers and revenuestreams to fully understand what share of the client’s wallet you are receiving (i.e. is there the potential for more?)

FINAL THOUGHT

Move slowly at first, gain traction before diving “all in.”

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Seven Reasons an Omnichannel Strategy is Crucial for Your Business




By Spandana Lakkamraju
Global Omnichannel Manager
Digital Marketing

Cisco






Omnichannel is possibly the most misused term these days. No matter how you describe it though, you probably have at least one aspect of omnichannel down. It is also worth noting that the digital and physical worlds are colliding. We all live and breathe it today. Half the time we live on the internet and the other half in the physical world.

Information is at our fingertips today as it should be for us to keep progressing. So for the sake of this progression, we need to make brilliant transformations in marketing today. In order to deliver real transformation, it’s extremely important to make a true omnichannel strategy a part of your overall corporate marketing strategy. Here’s why:

1. Revenue: A Seat at the Table

Marketing is starting to take on bigger quotas and bookings goals. It’s evident that online research is where people start when they begin their buying journey. Omnichannel can help bridge the gap in terms of funnel conversion and aid in new avenues to generate revenue. Beyond that, if you are considering going direct with an e-commerce platform, having an omnichannel strategy with built-in, in-app notifications will significantly drive sales. 

2. Real-Time Optimization


How many of you are having conversations around goals right now? The company sets its annual targets, and you are asked to create a road map for the rest of the year. Where do you start? If you have an existing inbound practice, you can base it on your current run rate and reverse waterfall. How do we bridge the gap if the two numbers don’t match? You guessed it! 

In an omnichannel world, you can go into specifics. If you set up ‘always-on’ campaigns, you’ll know on an average how many leads you can bring in a week or a month. On top of that, you can set up growth rates and optimization goals to drive real time results.

3. Unified Goals and Cross-Team Collaboration 

One of the best things about omnichannel,is that it gives the entire marketing organization unified goals. How many times have we set up a brand campaign with awareness goals and not been able to show conversions? In an organization focused on omnichannel, all teams work together to feed into each other’s goals. The customer journey becomes a relay match, the teams in the marketing organization work together to deliver a delightful customer experience.

4. Better Messaging to Drive a Seamless Customer Experience

As stated above, we live in a digital world. and our customers consume content in multiple places using multiple devices. So, we need to be sure our brand messaging is consistent across channels, and in real time. All organizations need a strategy to do so.

Omnichannel isn’t just about conveying the same message across all your channels. It’s about understanding the relevance of different platforms and presenting the right messages per channel. A blog post has no place on Instagram and a whitepaper has no place on Facebook. Take aspects of the whitepaper, however, and post an image of significant learnings from it on Instagram. Boom, instant conversions. 

Omnichannel can be used to help get the story to flow from one channel to the next. It can help spread the right message, at the right time, in the right place to the relevant audience. 

5. Capturing Customer Pain Points and insights 

Customer experience goes beyond messaging; it also includes solving your customer’s pain points depending on where they are in their journey. In the omnichannel world, you’re not having multiple first date conversations with your customers, you’re honeymooning. 

By presenting messages that are relevant to where they move on the internet, you let customers know that you’re listening to their needs. It also gives you the ability to capture valuable customer data and insights.

6. Improved Tech Stack Delivers Better ROI 


As an omnichannel strategy requires multiple platforms to work together,it’s important to start making investments in tools that can work together but also build on each other. An integrated tech stack that’s essential for omnichannel delivers better ROI than fragmented tech investments. 

7. Allow For Innovation: Play By Your Own Rules

Omnichannel allows for multiple opportunities to innovate and experiment. This is the most enticing reason to be part of an omnichannel organization, in my experience. Gamification of demos and experimenting with augmented and virtual reality and other interactive experiences are vital for creating customer moments that matter. Additionally, when proven successful, these innovations too can be scaled via an omnichannel plan across the board. 

To sum up, a well-planned and executed omnichannel strategy allows for revenue growth, real time optimization, unified goals and cross-team collaboration. It helps you address customer pain points and gain insights, improve ROI and also allows room for innovation. Omnichannel arms you to become a successful, trans formative marketing organization!

As Global Omnichannel Manager, Digital Marketing, Cisco, Spandana Lakkamraju is responsible for driving an omnichannel strategy for key initiatives across Cisco’s business, and for scaling innovation such as “new digital experiences” created at Cisco. She partners with the BU, Brand, Content, Country/Regional, and other teams in the organization to establish coordination of message, touch points, and frequency across customer-facing channels. Previously, she was an Inbound and Revenue Marketing Specialist, Global Demand Center, for Cisco and a Technical Assistant for the Aerodynamics Department at NASA Ames Research Center.

Sharpening Your Strategy for the Long Game





By Chris Moloney
Chief Marketing Officer
TaxSlayer






Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), along with many other senior business leaders, exhaust a lot of energy discussing the critical importance of being strategy-driven. So, why do many leaders have difficulty creating enough time for strategic planning? We all know it is essential, but the magnetic forces within our companies are always pulling us toward more operational projects. I have found in my eleven years as a Chief Marketing Officer, that most organizations often stereotype the marketing role into advertising and communications production, with a campaign-centric approach. As a result, marketers must create a constant counter-balance to the daily pull toward tactics. 

The Chief Marketing Officer is largely responsible for driving growth and profitability. However, it is increasingly essential that we serve as the “voice of the customer” by maintaining a regular pulse on customer trends, needs and behaviors. When I first became a CMO, there was no concept of an iPhone. I can recall people saying that they would never make calls from their “iPod”, assuming the iPhone was just that… an iPod with a phone. Ten years later, iPhones and other smart devices have radically changed the way consumers interact with companies and each other.

The change is more radical than we could have imagined, but there were a few leading indicators that gave some hints along the way. A few years before the iPhone, the CIO of Scottrade and I gave a keynote on how “widgets” and “gadgets” were likely to overtake web pages and further discussed how we should prepare. Subsequently, widgets became the immediate precursor to all apps. Without our strategic planning, we would have been caught off guard. This is one of many trends that reminds us we must think long-term and build plans that offer flexibility. As leaders, we must pull the organization out of the day-to-day operational mindset and strive to define and refine strategy regularly based on technology or market changes.  

How often do you think about where you want to be in three years? While a three-year view (or even more, a five-year plan) can seem outrageous, you’d better have one! The future is truly unpredictable, but a strategic framework allows you to evaluate numerous outcomes. Some of these outcomes may be close to the truth, but if they are not—you still have the core framework to rely on to keep you confident in your path.

As things change, revise the plan, but review it often and keep it a living and breathing document. Even consider creating visuals around the plan that you can post and share with all levels of the organization. Your team wants to know where you are heading and they need to be fully invested to help you get there. Partner with your CEO and others to enthusiastically share and MARKET the plan internally

All too often in the media, stories about marketing focus on celebrating a winning campaign or marketing tactic that worked well. When reading articles about marketing successes such as a campaign that took off or a product that exploded in season, there is an implication that the marketing organization, ad agency, or leader “got lucky.” These stories often mislead one to believe a slot machine moment drove success. In fact, behind the scenes, marketers are typically studying customer attitudes, needs, and trends to re-define their customer benefits. The journey of how customers find us and what they experience along the way is a changing ecosystem and marketing must be at the center of sharing these insights. 

When a company delivers on a big success, some doubt that the leaders had a vision. Luck is easier to fathom. But, in my experience, great marketing successes are either the result of a long-term vision or good fortune that occurs as the result of being at the right place, at the right time. Luck and strategy together are the perfect cocktail. That said, there are great products that fail because of bad marketing, but there are also bad products that fail despite great marketing. This is not to sound aloof or arrogant. Quite the contrary, marketers must embrace their role as the voice of the brand and realize how important it is to get their jobs right each day. 

After all, marketers are expected to keep the communications flowing, the ads running, the leads coming in, and other operational initiatives moving at a rapid pace. If we aren’t making our best effort to look forward with a long-term view of our customers’ needs, we are missing out on something very important.

Big and Small Companies Alike Struggle

Often, I find the strategic planning process just as difficult in the large and well-funded organizations as it is for the medium to small organizations. In a large organization, there are immense resources and several people who weigh in on a long-term vision. However, each year it seems more like a budget planning exercise when the final strategy is delivered. In a small to medium-sized organization, marketers must be bolder, especially if they represent a challenger brand. The mission and vision must break through the clutter of those who might have deeper pockets, abundant resources, or a bigger brand. There are fewer “committees” and often a clearer understanding of the budget as “investment” versus “expense.” Those two words alone seem to be emblematic of whether a company thinks long-term versus short-term. 

Marketing is at the Top

Fundamentally, marketing is all things that make up our products, services and benefits—packaged together in a way that appeals to the overall marketplace. Marketing is a connection of who we are as a company and what we deliver to the overall marketplace. Stop thinking about marketing as a place where advertising is created. Stop thinking about marketing as a place where short-term goals, objectives, and quick wins are the benchmark for success. In today’s marketplace, the marketing leaders must look ahead and have a vision that is both inspirational and reasonably accurate. Chief marketers must execute the short-term strategy with a clear insight on how it affects the long-term strategy. 

Marketing is a wild mix of being fun, incredibly challenging, yet extremely rewarding when you get it right. It reminds me of the game of golf where you have that moment when you hit the ball and many things come together at once to make the shot. It is important to remember there were many missed shots before the good one. As marketers, we should think of ourselves in some ways as golfers. No matter how many times you do it and no matter how good you get, there’s always room to learn more, take more lessons, and think about your long-term objective whether that is to have fun, win, or hand over your expertise to the next generation.

Chris Moloney is the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Partnerships for TaxSlayer, a leading provider of tax and financial services tools to U.S. consumers and financial professionals. TaxSlayer has been ranked #1 by the National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP) for many years. TaxSlayer is headquartered in beautiful Augusta, Georgia - home of The Masters Tournament.

His prior roles include roles at two digital leaders as Chief Marketing Officer of CAN Capital, Chief Executive Officer of Gremlin Social Media, and Chief Marketing Officer for three major brands (Wells Fargo Advisors, Experian, and Scottrade). Chris is a big believer in the power of marketing to drive business growth and his expertise lies in driving companies to be highly successful in their digital and social media presence with measurable results.




Top 10 Things About Digital Strategy That You Are Still Missing Out On




By Doyle Buehler
Chief Executive Officer
Senior Smarty Pants

The Digital Delusion






Defining your ‘why’ is actually about defining your digital strategy. Delivering your true value to your audience is the embodiment of your digital strategy.

When push comes to shove, those businesses with a solid digital strategy are better able to weather any storm that comes, and better maximize and leverage the opportunities when they arise as well. Whether it is from economic or political factors or other external or even internal factors, if you are prepared and understand the roadmap that you are on, then it can be easier - not only during troubled times, but also during times that you can take advantage of.

The challenge? Most businesses don’t have an overall strategy, nor even a digital specific one, either. This leads many businesses to the SOS or, “shiny object syndrome” - trying to leverage the newest and flashiest sparkly thing that comes along, only to see it fade away within months of launch. This costs you and your business time, money and resources.

So, what are the Top 10 things about digital strategy that you are probably missing out on?
  1. Develops your ‘why.’ If you don’t understand the ‘why’, do you think your customers will? Probably not. Not so much the “why you are doing this”, but also the “why do you provide value?
  2. Gives you focus. How hard is it to figure out what you need to do every day as it is? What if this was already taken care of for you?
  3. Helps you understand your market. Have you spent the time to actually fully comprehend who your customer is and what they want to become?
  4. Creates improved competitive forces. Yes, you get better, faster and more efficient if you are thinking long-term. What will your competitors think when you surpass them? 
  5. Gives you and your staff and customers something to think about. No, it’s not just about a single sales transaction. If it is, a strategy will not help you.
  6. Prioritizes how to tackle projects. Stuck with what to do, next? Having a strategy will help you clarify what is really important and what forms the essence of your business for projects to undertake.
  7. Creates comparisons for debriefs and reviews. If you have a strategy, you will actually be able to measure your success and failures.
  8. Expands your market. Now you can actually look at new projects, as well as entering new markets, as you can understand what resources are required to be effective.
  9. Improves your customer base. If your customer can understand the strategy or rather interpret it through your themes and values, then they can become a lifelong customer.
  10. Provides direction on what is next. Now you can decide when to launch a new product or improve your existing ones, and all with a better understanding of your customers and overall business value.

Digital is not an overnight success - it's the long game. It starts with planting your roots - your strategy. Only then can things really grow your business, otherwise you will eventually land out chasing your own tail - not being able to decide what to do, when, and more importantly, why.

Take what is best about your business, define your value, and create a compelling digital strategy that provides remarkable value to your perfect audience.

Easy, right? :)

What's your digital leadership quotient? Find out now: www.leadership.digital

Doyle Buehler, MBA, is a best-selling author, global entrepreneur, international speaker and digital business thought leader, specializing in strategic digital branding and marketing. He has mentored, coached, trained and inspired many in the areas of startups, digital leadership, digital innovation, disruption, transformation, online marketing, social media and entrepreneurship. 

Doyle runs a worldwide strategic digital marketing agency for companies who want to create disruption in their industry. At the intersection of innovation and strategic marketing, he is best known for effectively connecting business leaders to their entire digital ecosystem, to help them build a remarkable business online. Doyle is the author of the best-selling book on digital strategy and digital leadership: The Digital Delusion: How To Overcome The Misguidance and Misinformation Online.

Seven Key Take-Aways from the 18th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange





By Adam Kahn
Senior Director, Marketing Operations & Demand 
Frost & Sullivan






The 18th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange might have ended, but during my time at #FrostMar, I gathered seven key takeaways that marketers of all shapes and sizes will find useful.

The event took place in Nashville on July 17-19, where 150 marketing minds gathered to exchange ideas, build relationships and learn from leading organizations like RSA, GE Digital, TaxSlayer, Jet.com, Vanguard, MetLife and many others.

If you missed this outstanding event, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered with our Executive MindXchange Chronicles! You can benefit from videos of the keynotes and focused session summaries of the entire event, including key ideas and takeaways, plus guidelines for implementing these strategies at your own organization. The Executive MindXchange Chronicles are the next best thing for those unable to attend and those looking for best practices in the industry.

Without further ado, here are my top takeaways from the event:

1. Embrace Disruption for Growth

The companies that are actually disrupting are the ones that are making successful strategic digital marketing decisions based upon critical digital strategies. This is where the disruption starts. It’s not about the technology. It is about rethinking how you assemble your team and formulate your core digital strategies that affect disruption.

It’s critical that we create a disruption strategy that includes 5 critical steps:
  1. Define the Purpose
  2. Uncover Patterns
  3. Develop a Platform
  4. Create a Process
  5. Produce Results
Once we develop a disruptive strategy, we’re on our way to redefining our future. Status quo is NOT sustainable in the age of disruption.

2. Know Your Customer/Prospect Brain Types for More Effective Communication



When you market to “brain types” you can bypass personalities. This key point simplifies a communication plan into four key brain types: Controller + Manager, Innovator + Influencer, Nurturer + Harmonizer and Analyzer + Systemizer. Once we understand the dominate brain type of the audience we are marketing to, we can properly frame the communication in these easy steps:
  1. Identify your audience’s brain type
  2. Recognize what’s important to them
  3. Frame your message to get their attention
  4. Trigger emotion, use metaphor and story
  5. Sell the end result or absence of it
3. Data Is Still King

With marketing technology’s dramatic growth, data continues to drive our customer insight, engagement and conversion. We’re now starting to see emerging areas like AI, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and IoT as additional tools and resources that will continue to help us, as marketers, generate higher quality leads, retain existing customers and enhance relationships thru visualization, predictive modeling and trend assessment via unprecedented volumes of data we now have access to.

4. Quality Journalism Skills Are Imperative, but Challenging To Find

If Data is King, then Content is the Queen that drives community engagement. During the course of the event, we had countless conversations about content marketing strategy, campaigns and creation and I quickly recognized a theme – “marketers lack basic writing skills.” Much of the content creation tends to fall on young professionals who don’t possess proper journalism skills. Where do you find professionals who possess a strong editorial sensibility, as well as a solid foundation in journalism fundamentals? Regretfully, I wasn’t able to garner a specific answer, but the take-away is clear – when you interview prospective team members, don’t forget to ask for writing samples and review what they’ve posted online. Regretfully, strong writing skills are a necessity that many marketers do not possess.

5. We Must Continually Transform to Survive

As marketers, we want to be strategic, but tend to be reactionary. We must continually look for ways to improve engagement and transform our competencies to maximize efficiency and effectiveness for business growth. In order to transform our teams and organizations, we must be innovators, strategists and change agents. As Dave Sutton of TopRight stated, “To truly transform, marketing must get all 3S’s right: the right Story, the right Strategy, the right Systems, all measured through the lens of Simplicity, Clarity and Alignment.” 



6. Org Charts Are Dangerous

As noted by Holly Rollo, CMO at RSA, “Your legacy is your team, not the situation.”

We can no longer operate in silos and effectively meet the needs of our customers and prospects. We must define workflow, not org charts, to place sales and marketing in the same boat to best serve our customers. To be truly customer facing, we have to go big or go home, the Band-Aid must be ripped off. No one said it would be easy, but pain = progress. If we set group values for change and create mechanisms to listen to each other we will succeed. 

7. ROR (Return On Relationships) is Amazing!

The Executive MindXchange is really an extraordinary event model. The main emphasis of the event is to establish meaningful relationships with like-minded professionals and that objective was executed flawlessly. Throughout the course of the event, I was able to meet, engage and establish industry relationships that will serve me throughout my marketing career. The variety of networking and social activities was organized in a fun, yet meaningful way. I couldn’t be happier with the outcome – meaningful professional relationships I leverage for best practices and lessoned learned!



Adam Kahn serves as Senior Director, Marketing Operations and Demand at Frost Sullivan. He is a passionate event and digital marketing professional who has worked in the events industry since 1994 for both higher education and for-profit event organizers, including: ZDEvents/Key3Media, iMark Communications, IIR, Diversified Communications and Rising Media. Adam has successfully launched and managed events throughout the United States, Canada and India during the course of his 20+ year career. 

Personally, Adam enjoys spending time with his family. He loves coaching his daughter’s basketball team and attending as many of his son’s high school football and basketball games as possible. He loves sports and is a diehard Philadelphia Eagles and Boston Celtics fan. He was born and raised in Philadelphia and has been in Boston since attending graduate school at Northeastern University in 1995. If he’s not attending one of his kids sporting events, you can bet he’s trying to carve out time on the golf course. 

Highlights of Strategic Marketing Priorities:
A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange




By Dan Colquhoun
Senior Vice President, Customer Research
Frost & Sullivan







What is the impact of digital transformation on the marketing function? Will it be, indeed is it, disruptive? How will the role of the marketing officer evolve under these conditions, and what do we need to do to get ready? The 2017 Strategic Marketing Priorities: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, held in Nashville, set out to answer these complex questions and more.

Allison Cerra, the Chief Marketing Officer for McAfee, opened the event with an engaging talk, Own the Growth Agenda and You Own the Future, that provided insights into her 20 year career in marketing and the lessons learned. Her career anecdotes were humorous and enlightening at the same time.

Some important takeaways from Allison’s keynote:
  • Marketing is the most visible discipline in the C-suite, and hence the most exposed when the company misses its targets or objectives. Marketers live and die by the numbers and this became an oft repeated refrain for the remainder of the day as other marketers took to the stage to add their view of this purported reality
  • There is often tension between sales and marketing and this is a sign of a healthy relationship. One way to ensure that the tension is helping the business is to regularly audit the quality of leads that marketing is generating
  • Marketers must also speak openly and honestly with product management about the realities of the performance of their product portfolio

Allison closed with the three Bs of measuring marketing value:
  1. Brand: valuation or equity created; one must “weigh the pig”
  2. Business: measuring what value marketing generated directly or influenced
  3. Brain: marketers should consume a constant diet of competitive intelligence, buyer preferences, and research

Boardroom Brain Trust Panel:  Aligning Corporate Growth Objectives with Strategic Marketing Priorities

Three senior leaders in marketing moderated by a chief marketing officer took to the stage to discuss the role of marketing in what one panelist described as the “age of disruption. The panel started by referring back to the keynote with a quick straw poll to determine the panel’s stance on Allison Cerra’s prior assertion that marketers must “live and die by the numbers.” The panel was unanimous in their agreement with the statement, its applicability to the marketing function, and its specific relevance to senior marketing leadership.

The panel discussed the importance of collaboration in an organization, and how marketing is central to achieving high levels of organizational collaboration. Indeed, the panelists suggested that “marketers have the tools to be in charge of collaboration.” Some suggested that CMOs should be referred to as Chief Collaboration Officers to accurately reflect the importance of their position in spearheading collaboration.

ThinkTank:  Growing Revenue and Developing Brand Strategy in Whitespace and Adjacencies

The audience was implored to consider the hedge fund as an appropriate financial metaphor for the marketing function. Both have profits and losses and both inherent risks attached.

The essential question for marketers, it was posited, is, “Where I should spend my next dollar for maximum effect?” The fundamental business model of generating revenue, earning margin (profit), and optimizing cash flow was overlaid with a marketing example that starts with deal generation, ultimately leading to deal expansion as customer confidence grows, and finally deal velocity as trust begins to develop, there by creating a loyal customer.

CMO Challenge

Janet Brewer, Chief Marketing Officer at Tennessee Valley Authority, gave the Nashville audience a “big Tennessee welcome.” She opened with a celebration of sorts by suggesting that “this is [marketing’s] moment.” Brewer went on to describe the three roles for CMOs, the traditional commercialization role, the strategy development role, and the third as an enterprise wide profit and loss role.

Brewer implored marketers in the audience to “think beyond marketing as a CMO” and “step outside [those] boundaries.” Finally, skills that the modern marketer must master were enumerated:  customer experience advocacy, strategic leadership, innovative influence, data driven analysis, and relevant messaging.

Dan is the Senior Vice President of the Customer Research Group at Frost & Sullivan. This global business unit of the analyst research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan provides market research services to the company’s broad-based clientele.

Dan has close to 30 years of experience in marketing research including leading the customized research group at Nielsen Canada for close to 10 years where he developed leading edge approaches to measure customer value, consumer needs, brand equity and assess advertising and marketing communications. Before joining Frost & Sullivan, Dan served as vice president of research at an international advertising agency supporting accounts such as GM, McDonald’s and Bell Canada with strategic consumer insights.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

A Five Point Checklist to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy in 2017


By Patricia Jacoby
Publications Editor
and
Elisha Gist
Marketing Program Manager
Frost & Sullivan

Creating compelling content that performs is an essential requirement for the modern marketing leader. Content marketing, or creating and providing useful content to customers with the end goal of a profitable return, will be most successful if you think through your team’s strategy first and adhere to the following checklist and best practices: 

#1: Target Your Best Prospects First 

The first best practice for effective content marketing is to identify and target your best prospects. This should include your best potential customers as well as your best current customers, as generally 80% of future revenue comes from 20% of existing customers. To identify your best prospects, create a customer persona, or semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Personas are based on market research and information about current customers. It’s also important to include demographics and behavior patterns as well as drivers and motivations when creating your customer persona. When putting together your content marketing strategy, focus on these two groups—your best current and best potential customers—first. 

#2: Consider Your Source

When creating your content, consider the author and voice carefully. Make sure your content marketing comes from a credible, authoritative source. It is usually best to have an expert or analyst who can communicate from a vantage point of industry expertise. Ideally your content will also be derived from well-respected research in the marketplace. Accept the fact that perception can progress or hinder the message: content written by a vendor, about the vendor and delivered by that vendor, will be viewed as corporate collateral, not credible research. Utilizing a third-party who has evaluated your product or service or who is recognized in the industry is a great way to present outside validation of your brand’s value in the marketplace. This third-party content could be in the form of a video, white paper, customer case study or over a dozen formats you may choose as your content delivery vehicle.

#3: Make Sure You Create Compelling, Customer-Centric Content

Content is no longer just the written word. The vessel you choose to contain that content is equally as important. Infographics are liked and shared on social media three times more than other any other type of content, and companies using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-video users. Knowing these statistics, make sure your team’s content is customer-centric and deliver it in a format that will appeal to your target market. For instance, a mix of video, infographics and blogs will diversify your channels and can offer reuse or repurposing of older assets. Consider delivering traditional content such as whitepapers or executive interviews in snackable 30-90 second videos or digital eBooks: your buyers are going to look for these assets and you will capture and delight them with a more modern presentation. 

Content marketing should be leveraged to keep your visitors on your website longer and a balanced combination of content marketing formats can help visitors continue to engage. Consider your audience’s generation as well as their profession and title when selecting your marketing channels and content formats. A multichannel digital approach would be appropriate for some, while more traditional formats such as direct mail might work better for others. The goal of your content marketing is to give your customer the data, information or context they need. Ideally the stories you tell or the information you share will address your customer or potential customer’s pain points and help them solve a problem. 

Utilizing the user personas you’ve developed for your ideal customer, share value added content that will resonate with your buyer. Position your company as a thought leader and only if relevant and additive, work in customer case stories which will provide prospects insights on your company’s client roster and your company’s success stories. Content can be proactive and reactive. Create a library of case studies by vertical to make that instant connection to your audience. Dedicate a section of your website to this content and label it appropriately ‘Customer Case Studies,’ ‘Our Work,’ ‘Success Stories.’ Embrace the idea of repurposing, reusing and recycling to create content that's both timely and lasting. 

Learn to support your story with data: use surveys and brief Q&As to collect data and encourage engagement along the way. Be sure to link responses to internal sales and marketing channels by tying their answers to content or even products that match their needs. Finally, for account based marketing opportunities, consider leveraging your current or potential customer’s trigger events, such as a merger or new product in the marketplace and use those events to create relevant, targeted and timely content. 

#4: Distribution is Key 

When it comes to distributing your content, do so intelligently. Before any content is presented to your audience, make sure your team has a distribution plan and appropriate marketing mechanisms in place. Remember, the goal is to create useful content that brings in leads. 

For B2B content, consider distributing via LinkedIn and targeted industry websites and newsletters. For B2C content marketing, social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest and even Instagram are channels that should be explored and tested. A social media channel’s popularity can be largely generational, so having your customer personas mapped will help you identify the best social avenues to engage with prospects and customers. “A social media channel’s popularity can be largely generational, so having your customer personas mapped will help you identify the best social avenues to engage with prospects and customers.” 

Investigate avenues that are available to your organization for recycling, repurposing and reusing content: a digital newsletter can be a great way to repackage and extend the shelf life of content that might be buried on your website. For a content marketing campaign to succeed, it should be delivered in a mix of formats and channels to align to the myriad of different customer personas a company may be targeting. 

#5: Always Track, Measure and Drive 

Although it’s very important to track and measure your content marketing efforts, many marketing teams find this to be a significant challenge. Prior to launching any campaign, identify exactly what (and how) you are going to track and then begin measuring what is working—or not. You’ll begin to understand what channels and formats are delivering the results you crave— and you can kick the under performing channels (or formats) to the curb. 

Once you have started your content marketing campaign, the first thing you’ll want to track is unique visits. These will provide a standard measure of how many people have viewed your content within a specified time frame. The next thing you’ll want to measure is page views. High page view and unique visitor metrics generally mean that your audience is very engaged and returning regularly to view your content. Another metric to capture is your conversion rate, specifically your micro conversions and macro conversions. A micro conversion is any activity that the user takes towards your primary conversion goal, such as filling out a lead capture form when downloading a white paper. These customers may not have purchased a product yet, but a measureable journey has begun. Macro conversions are any user completing your ultimate conversion goal. These conversion goals vary but generally are a user purchasing from your organization. 

You’ll also begin to learn what other data you need to drive results: beyond user name, company name and title, what other data is necessary for you to qualify leads? Once you’ve started asking—and answering that question— you are ready to implement a lead scoring system so both marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) have a clear destination through a lead nurturing program or even a first touch by the sales team. 

Transforming Digital through Account Based Marketing and Predictive Analytics




By Kevan Savage
Global Marketing Leader
Life Sciences Solutions Group

ThermoFisher Scientific






Marketing leaders continue to feel pressure to grow revenue through customer experiences across multichannel touchpoints, including digital commerce, social media, mobile, internal and field sales teams along with emerging channels such as IoT (Internet of Things).


With significant advancements in digital platforms, vast internal and external data, increasing competition and customer expectations abounding, what is today’s marketer to do? 

No longer are the days of prospect information sitting in piles of paper notes or business cards, it’s all digitized across CRM, marketing automation and many other technologies. The best part? It’s all available for marketers who focus on increasing the precision and scale of their digital initiatives.

One emerging yet validated strategy forcing both B2C and B2B digital transformation is the convergence of account based marketing and predictive analytics. The power of predictive analytics combined with the rigor of an account-based marketing approach can be a potent combination as detailed here:

How Predictive Analytics Empowers Your Account Based Marketing

It accelerates in-depth customer understanding
  • Identification of new accounts and pre-buying signals – including company size, industry and other factors for determining the best fit for your business
  • Watch listing prospects, high value accounts, and competitors – like most companies, your CRM is full of companies, predictive models allows you to do this
  • Modeling for new commercial opportunities and intelligent engagement

It extends account coverage with your selling teams
  • Engaging key accounts digitally at scale with customized content
  • Delivering “always on” pre and post-sale, cross sell, up sell, and retention campaigns
  • Finding in market buyers—dropping people in your lap who are ready to talk

It ultimately leads to: 
  • Customers – Better predict what keeps them coming back or turns them away
  • Websites and apps – Understand where and how to optimize and customize content for better conversion
  • Clear Visibility to ROI - Predict the most effective allocation of marketing dollars
  • Immediacy of insights to selling teams
  • A steady flow of revenue protection campaigns
  • A steady reliable flow of more mature, qualified opportunities
  • Aligning sales and marketing around the accounts that matter most

Adopting Predictive Account Based Marketing At Your Organization

Prepare and Assess
  • Assess your data management maturity – do you know what data sources are available to you? How are they structured? Can your digital platforms and teams easily access the data?
  • Assess your martech foundation – do you have marketing automation, testing, content and targeting platforms in place? Are you able to track and measure on and offline results from your marketing activities?

Get Organizational Buy-In
  • Identify a cross-functional team and establish goals - don’t underestimate the need for collaboration and alignment on the strategy. A strong alignment of sales and marketing is necessary for a team to grasp the full potential of predictive and account based marketing
  • Empower your team members to identify high-impact marketing initiatives, set metrics to track business impact, secure any needed investments and include any stakeholders from product, legal or regulatory teams

Identify your Target Accounts and/or contacts 
  • Don’t shoot in the dark. When setting up an effective account marketing and predictive analytics strategy, the first step is to identify who you are targeting 
  • Using all of the data and technology available to you, this will help prioritize high-value accounts based on revenue potential, which are in market, or as well as other key factors including market influence and purchase potential

Understand your Targets
  • Once you've identified your primary targets, you will need to find out more about them and what makes them tick. This can be achieved by investigating their internal structures, taking a closer look at elements including key decision makers and main influencers 
  • Once you're familiar with the core information relating to your target accounts, you will be able to segment them in the way you would a persona-based marketing strategy that allows you to reach multiple stakeholders
  • If existing assets are available, consider creating custom experiences to reach a broad audience without struggling to keep pace with content production

Act 
  • Define and personalize your content - deploy your sales and marketing plays - A truly successful predictive account based campaign employs valuable content that places focus on crucial business challenges your target faces on a regular basis 
       •   Use dynamic content in emails
       •   Use web personalization to increase campaign engagement
       •   Leverage paid media to extend account targeting across the web
  • Consider this, some organizations develop work streams for joint account planning, deal identification and management, opportunity mapping, experience delivery and stakeholder management through social-mobile channels

Measure and Optimize
  • Create an operational scorecard - Monitor progress in real-time, evaluate program performance, enable marketing and sales performance management, along with campaign ROI
  • Don’t underestimate development of use cases and successes, communication is key to continue fostering alignment and fueling investment!
  • Maintain agility – consider developing an active optimization cadence, isolating variables and making strategic adjustments across sales and marketing teams
  • Product, Sales and Marketing achieve efficiency, greater visibility into the nature of their customers, and are rewarded as an integrated team on customer satisfaction and growth 
  • Customers and prospects respond favorably to predictive account based marketing because they are served with information that is more personalized, timely, and relevant to their needs, and are therefore more likely to respond. Consider tying these initiatives into your NPS or CAS customer experience scorecards over time

As marketers gain more experience with the methodology, and both predictive and account based technologies become even more advanced, additional opportunities will emerge for both B2C and B2B marketers. There is no silver bullet. Enjoy the journey and most importantly, have fun!

Kevan Savage is the  Global Marketing Leader, Life Sciences Solutions Group, at ThermoFisher Scientific. In this role he is  responsible for brand, creative services, digital marketing, marketing insights and planning.

A Frost & Sullivan Market Insight

Digital Transformation Meets the Contact Center: 
What Companies Need to Know to Survive in a Digital World

Introduction
On the heels of the push to provide omnichannel customer care, we are witnessing an upsurge of business transformation unheard of five years ago. The focus is on growth, and in order to grow companies must embrace the change occurring in numerous technology segments. Amongst these are the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, mobility and social networking. Enter Digital Transformation (DT); a confluence of technology advancements that drives changes in the consumer base, ignites rapid technology adoption, and opens the door to new business models. DT has the power to completely disrupt the way that goods and services are delivered. This onrush of change is challenging customer service and support organizations unlike anything that has preceded it. 

After years of belt tightening and consolidation, companies have woken up to find themselves in a new competitive environment of disrupted business models. New technology and a changing more empowered and knowledgeable consumer base is pressuring companies to closely look at the way they transact business. For CEOs this new reality is to embrace digital transformation or die trying. This market insight will examine the changes that digital transformation is having on customer care, technology providers, and the steps that forward thinking companies need to take to fully embrace it. 

Digital Transformation and Customer Care 
Frost & Sullivan defines Digital Transformation as the strategy and execution of harnessing digital assets and information across an organization, bringing all areas of the business into alignment with the needs of all stakeholders, including employees, customers, prospects, suppliers, distributors and partners. It is as much a mindset as it is a change in technology and its use. This is an age where customer loyalty increasingly is in question. Nowadays, consumers associate the brand with the experience forcing companies to innovate on how they engage, nurture, and retain customers. It requires a new way of thinking and the sometimes destruction of the status quo to create new models of engagement. On a basic level this means understanding what a customer is really trying to achieve and make it easier for them todo so, but also anticipate what they might need beyond that. On an organizational level it means understanding how every touch-point can be used together to deliver faster and better results and deeper more engaging customer interactions. 

How does this apply to customer care? A comparison can be drawn organizationally between the evolutions that have been occurring within the contact center and digital assets across an organization. In essence, digital transformation is to digital channels the way omnichannel is to all channels. Omnichannel customer care evolved from the maturation of multichannel customer engagement, in which the biggest challenge was tying together disparate interaction channels and silos of data to support a seamless customer journey. 

Digital transformation includes a broader perspective in order to:
  • Improve customer and business experience 
  • Foster innovation within the business 
  • Add value to all stakeholders out of combined assets 
  • Create new experiences to foster deeper customer relationships 

Digital transformation and omnichannel delivery also share something else as well. The second biggest challenge with omnichannel is gaining cross organizational support to make it happen. Too often newer channels, such as web or social, aren’t initiated from within the contact center. Creating an omnichannel strategy therefore entails getting buy in, support, and skill set from different owners to ensure all channels can work in concert for seamless customer journeys. It also involves taking resulting data from those journeys to analyze and provide continuous feedback for improvement. The same goes for digital transformation.

The Digital Connection 
Digital Transformation is not easy and it can be uncomfortable. It involves understanding the needs of prospects and customers, as well as the needs of different customer segments. What are they trying to achieve? Are customers young and tech savvy, older generation digital immigrants trying to embrace change – or not? Or are they a mix of both? Consumers want to know who they are doing business with. They want to know where products are sourced from, who businesses are partnering with and what they bring to the party. In essence they want to know why they should do business with you. Understanding the different profiles and needs of customers is even more important as the population ages, grows more digitally savvy and uses digital assets to bridge work and nonwork time. 

Frost & Sullivan’s 2015-2016 Megatrends series on “The Future of Work” shows that by 2025 Millennials (1981-2000) will comprise 48.3% of the workforce. Generation Z (2001-2015), who grew up as digital natives, will comprise 15% of the labor force. These populations work and play differently than prior generations. They are always on and socially aware. They blur the lines between work and non-work time, and increasingly are digital nomads - working from anywhere. Therefore, finding ways to connect with them as they move throughout their day is a crucial part of this transformation.

Transformation of the Customer Experience Starts at the Top 
The rising base of post Baby Boomers (Millennials, Gen X, Y, Z, etc.) consumes technology and services faster than any prior generation in history. Unlike prior generations, they grew up surrounded by increasingly complex technology. The most eye-opening difference is the relationship that has developed between consumers and their devices. While Baby Boomers were amazed by punch cards and Cray computers, computing power and applications now can be found on any wrist, or in every pocket or purse. New ways of accessing and consuming information has become the norm. These newer consumers instantly research any question or issue, often from mobile devices, and tend to troubleshoot before seeking help. They also eagerly discuss their issues and findings on social networks. 

However, it’s not just Gen X, Y and Z that is changing. As customers of all generations have become more informed, they also have become less patient and demand quick resolution to their issues. They seek transparency from the enterprises they do business with, and demand to know more about the relevancy and value of what companies are offering. More than ever technology change and innovation needs to be delivered from the top down. The chief customer experience officer of 2014 needs to become the chief digital transformation officer, chief innovation officer or chief innovation strategist of 2016. Innovation not supported financially, culturally, and organizationally, by the top, is doomed to stagnate. Innovation and hence, digital transformation were top of mind in 2015. 

For instance, in KPMG’s CEO Outlook for 2015 Innovation was in the top five most critical challenges for CEOs, along with financial growth (30%), focus on operational excellence (27%), strengthening of brand (26%), expanding geographically (26%) and innovation (25%), and was again in the top five for strategic priorities in the next three years as well. 

New Ways, New Business Models 
New Business Models Creation of transformational business models that use digital assets can have a huge impact on customer service. It requires cross organizational support to go beyond that of omnichannel to address unmet customer needs and create new customer experiences. While small changes can create new customer experiences, large changes can create disruptive business models that radically change the way a business service is offered. 

For instance, Uber and Lyft revolutionized transportation, creating an amazingly different Customer Experience than consumers were accustomed to. Both companies disrupted an ageold business model in the process. Airbnb has done the same for the hospitality industry. Selfdriving cars with full-service dashboards, including virtual assistant capabilities, show the promise of transforming the automotive industry. In each of these cases, the new models provide a radically different user experience than before by anticipating customer needs. They are engaging. They address consumer pain points, such as the need for ease and convenience. Moreover, in some cases they decrease costs to the consumer.

Perhaps as interesting, is that the companies creating these applications have elevated consumers into the business model themselves with no start-up costs. Suddenly you or I could be a taxi driver or B&B owner, with no overhead and no education or experience. Market disruption, of course, is not without its downside. New models that lack regulation, can give unfair advantage to the disrupter. For instance, ride sharing app companies have skirted the city licensing requirements that taxis endure. These advantages can leave a traditional market caught unaware, driving companies out of a market. Despite this, DT within these markets is driving meteoric adoption unlike anything previously seen. 

Summary 
Digital transformation is a journey, but one that companies need to embark on if they are to survive not just the onslaught of traditional competition, but new market entrants. It is also a necessary component in keeping pace with the rapidly changing consumer base. While there are too many developing technology components to delve into in this insight, the following areas should be on the radar of any company starting on the digital transformation path: 
  • Movement to the Cloud. The benefits of moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud has been well documented, as it provides an easier path to eliminating data silos, and smoothing customer journeys 
  • Emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Companies need to investigate the impact that device connectivity, cloud computing, and advanced analytics can have on changing the Customer Experience 
  • Security. Companies should keep abreast and plan for the ongoing security threats to digital assets 
  • Big Data. As explained in Frost & Sullivan’s recent market insight “The Contact Center is Rich with Data – Why Add More?” Big Data is moving beyond the realms of data projects and into enriching what companies know about customers 
  • Advanced Analytics. Companies are well advised to investigate how to make use of advancements in analytics. Understanding customer wants, needs, and behavior and predicting outcomes is key to owning the Customer Experience. Areas to investigate Digital Transformation Meets the Contact Center 6 include advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and speech and text analytics
  • Virtual Assistants, Intelligent Personal Assistants and Robotic Process Automation. Customers prefer to self-serve before contacting a business. Embellishing self-service options from the growing ranks of digital personal assistants can help differentiate and transform customer interaction
  • Mobility. Companies need to meet customers where they live and that is on mobile devices. Extending business access to the device of choice for the consumer is key in changing the Customer Experience and cementing brand loyalty

Developing a holistic digital transformation strategy involves the blending of technology assets with a deep understanding of how consumers work and play. It involves not just the elimination of data silos to create seamless customer journeys, but in enriching those journeys. This can involve creating simply creating proactive rather than reactive customer interactions. Or it can go beyond to encompass data and interaction capabilities that hook in third party suppliers, partners or other participants to create entirely new Customer Experiences. Rethink service delivery. For instance, allowing a customer to place and order and click on a package tracking link to check on delivery is great. Providing video status of a car repair, or rewarding a customer of a concert ticket order with a free download of the artist’s song from a partner service, is better. Transforming the way a business thinks will transform the Customer Experience.