The man behind the scenes of the Funnelholic — Paul Rosenberg has crowd-sourced a really cool video featuring top b2b marketing thought leaders that will be featured in the upcoming virtual summit from Demandbase and Adobe: Marketing’s Next Move. I hope you get a chance to check it out!
He asked each thought leader the following question: How will B2B marketing innovation allow marketers to be more effective? You can see my answer below….you can see the rest of the answers here.
First let me just give you my view of the world, in terms of where we are today with innovation. You know, I feel over the last call it six to ten years we’ve done a really great job of automation supporting us from first registration to close. And perfect examples of that are Marketing Automation and CRM. For me, I think the innovations, and ultimately the upside for marketers are in front of the first reg, and then post customer or first buy. And then I want to talk a little bit about the data layer.
So let’s first talk about everything in front of the reg. If you just take a standard conversion number. Let’s say you get a 10% conversion rate for people to fill out your reg forms that come to your website. That means 90% are not doing anything and not being put into the Marketing Automation CRM funnel. So there’s a big upside there, and a lot of efficiencies. I mean you talk about any percentage uplift on how you can either work to expose yourself to those folks and convert them.
That’s really a big area of efficiency for marketers, and the key there is technology allowing us to take the customization and personalization concepts that we’ve built from registration to close. And put those in front of the people who were previously anonymous. That includes the open Internet. That includes our website. Can we take those concepts, and be more effective with the folks that have not done the first reg? Cause if you look at the numbers reasonably there’s a lot of them, and there’s a lot that you want to expose yourself to. So that’s one. There’s a big upside there.
The second one is post customer. So what I mean by that is, can we do a better job of taking the nurturing techniques that we’ve taken from registration to close, and apply those to the way we talk to our customers? So today we typically outline the buying experience for net new, but there’s this whole new buying experience that we have to explore, and outline, and design that’s from the point of becoming a customer and beyond, and becoming a bigger customer. And can we take a lot of what we learn from the buying experience, and what we’ve learned from what we’ve done in the lead nurturing, and a lot of the marketing tactics that we’ve been doing over the last five or six years, and apply those to folks that are already customers.
And I think that’s obviously a big upside. A lot of times it’s handled by sales following up, and saying we have a new product released. Or asking them “how is it going?”, and even marketing doing the same. There’s a big upside there. It’s a lot easier to sell your current customers than it is to bring on a net new one.
The second part of the customers to think about is whether we can we turn our customers into advocates. I think everyone knows the power of peer recommendations. I mean just today the buyers obviously have access to tons of research before they actually buy your products, and their peers are probably the most powerful source of recommendations for them. So what can we do to cultivate advocates out of our customer base? These advocates can become an extension of what we’re doing from a branding and a demand-gen perspective. That’s a process and technology. That’s obviously another big upside of things we can do with folks post close.
And then the final thing is I want to address the big data analytics movement. I know that you’re probably seeing a lot of information on that, that it’s still mystical to a lot of folks. That market is just starting to figure out what they can go do for people on the marketing side, and I think that’s going to continue to grow. We’re starting to see some technology today that’s doing some really amazing things, and they are just going to continue to get better. Right now we make a lot of our decisions based on a small data set. It looks like a large set of data, but lead scoring is kind of the primary example of kind of what we are doing from an analytical perspective. The big data idea is to take data from external sources, internal sources, including the marketing automation data captures that I just mentioned, and then also ERP, CRM, you name it, and gathering that information. Then you have a smart engine that can tell marketers or sales folks what to say, what to do, and when. That’s obviously almost synonymous with efficiency. Right? If we can get better at that, then we’re going to see another area where automation will make us more efficient.
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic and a co-founder of Topo. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter