The Ten Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution
Marketing is in the midst of a revolutionary change that has marketers standing at the crossroads of irrelevance and investment as the proliferation of new channels, pressure to deliver ROI in today's economy, and customers' growing appetite for personal relationships with brands means CMOs and marketing teams need to reinvent their roles and drive change. This session will review Ten Imperatives that every marketer can embrace to help lead this change across their organizations.
* Karl Schneider, Director, Global Demand Generation, Aprimo (@aprimo)
14. The Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution Marketing Must Be Accountable The CMO Must Be the Change Agent Let Go, Customers Control Your Brand Engage Customers with Conversations Free Your Content Integrate to Innovate Online and Offline Be Mobile. Be Everywhere. Be Relevant Tear Down the Silos Automate the Science of Marketing Be Maniacal, Prove ROI
It’s organic.Help contribute to the 3rd imperative (via customer response).There is a revolution underway in marketingOur budgets got way more scrutinzed in the recent economic downturn and it’s not going away. Flat budgets/slight increases but never going to returnNew channels will emerge. Facebook is 7 years old. Twitter is 4 years oldAs marketing leaders, we will drive that changeSeth Godin – Lynchpin. Talks about a revolutionBrand survey with marketers asked for help5 channels now 30-50 channelsThe revolution is not going to stop
Marketing Must Be AccountableTo the board, building trust with our customers, empowering the marketing organization, work with salese.g. my CMO got an increase in our marketing budget by putting together a planned waterfall and the spend involved. She is being held accountable for the revenue number. Accountability of ROI, run Marketing like a business – need to have control to be accountableA lot of marketing departments I see are very ad-hoc, non-structured processes, due to the creative nature of marketers. But we have to be accountable and we have to do that. We, as CMO’s have to be the change agent.
Different philosophies on being the change agent.‘5 levels of Change’VisionProject…….Changing the Status Quo – the 5th level of Change Agent. We must include our organizations in that change.The change in marketing is immense, it’s not just about using software anymore, but it’s helping marketers get to the other side of that changeBest Buy – drive $1mm of agency cost via automationNeed software systems and processes to enable the change
Hard for many of us, and our executives to ‘let go’One customer, ISC, manages NASCAR tracks. They’ve engaged their fans and their community – who have driven change. The fans wanted a two lane start vs. a single lane start – NASCAR adjusted and the fans love it!We need to control or brand internally so we can let go of our brand externally
Engaging customers is the most important imperative.“Dash to Digital” – 90% of my marketing is online, but 90% of my spend is off line.As a company, we market to marketers. Interesting challenge! – the toughest critics. We’ve moved away from standard booths and putting up our Revolution Walls – to get feedback and ideas for the revolution, and engaging the marketers. This carries over to triggered dialogues, remembering people when they come to your website and having an automated ‘lights out’ response/dialogue with them thru automationOur tradeshow booth was written up by Marketing Profs – engaging in conversations. (YOU are my customer).#1 Channel in engaging customers is events. Optimize conversations across all engagements
‘Content Chunking’ ‘Content pipelines’About being able to use automation to be able to distribute content in bite size chunks. The days of collateral trees and spreadsheets are gone. It’s about that the B2C ‘consumers journey’ it’s about having that content that is either thought leading or educational - we have to free that up which means we have to get that content out of the spreadsheets. To allow our customers to self select when they want to.The buyers journey. Think of the sales funnel (b2b), what content is being consumed when/where? Do you have enough of it? Awareness to interest. And can I model and manage the content? People bounce around (shopping cart abandonment) – get them the right content.
The fear is, as a marketer, we will fall back to our DNA and chase the shiny new bauble. We get caught up in the what’s next and what’s new – that’s who we are as marketers. The danger is, we lose sight of the customer experience – which is the thing that is driving our change in our marketing strategy. We must remember not only what happened when you hit our website, but all of the interactions before. Know all the touchpoints – if the customer just downloaded a white paper we know if we met them at the OnLine Marketing Summit or other event. How many times have you hit a website or sat on a plane and thought “I wish they knew who I was’.
This doesn’t mean SPAM. This means we need to be where our consumers are. This also includes internally – our CMO, while sitting on the tarmac, can not only check emails, but can also keep the department running. Be accountable to her department. Approve campaigns, invoices, etc. Keep mobile. Google goggles. On the android phone it marries the camera, the GPS and return a visual search. I can ‘take a picture’ of a book, google searches on that book and will return to me where I can buy that book. What does that mean to a retailer?Be everywhere- manageable, consistent chunks of information
One of our customers, Cummins EngineImprove production cycle times in marketing by 61% by integrating the internal and external functions of marketing. Btw – consumers will be tearing down our silos for us, so if we don’t do it, we’ll get bulldozed by the market.Direct Marketing/Emarketing, Social Marketing, Marketing Operations – 3 areas with different job descriptions and skill sets creates silo’s of specialties. Share the information, share the processes. We need to have a good understanding of all of these areas to do a better job.
Doesn’t mean outsourcing marketing jobs. Spending the time on strategy, on the right message, how many messages and having lights out processes to execute on that. On of our customers, Folksam, a large Swedish financial services company, 6M consumers have improved campaign response rates by 500%
We have to track the investment in marketing with the results. Not just by channel and campaign, but by valued business function. Our companies are asking us to drive growth. Marketing has to track the I in investment and the R in return. We need a system of record, we need to run Marketing like a business, it’s a journey. Relationships, processes and systems to prove ROI.Link into your channels, back end ERP systems, needs to be managed in a marketing app not spreadsheets.B of A manages every dollar of their spend in Aprimo