“Marketing used to be pretty simple.” Not anymore.
That’s how Joe Payne, Eloqua’s CEO, opened his Eloqua Experience keynote on what modern marketing is, and what modern marketers need. Everyone, as he put it, is talking about marketing. The world has taken notice.
The Internet, mobile, social media, and analytical tools available have flipped the equation. Where once sales was able to control most of the buying process, customers now can run the table. As a result, marketers are responsible for the majority of the buying process: providing the education, keeping buyers actively engaged and aiding sales in closing the deal.
This is a daunting amount of responsibility. And for marketers to succeed, there are five indispensable requirements of modern marketing.
1. Digital Body Language
One of the fundamental truths of marketing is that you need to know who your buyers are and what they do. But that’s not enough. Modern marketers need to also need to know whom buyers trust.
For an organization that means understanding how buyers are interacting with your content, tracking their engagement and what moves them. It means learning more about their roles and responsibilities so you’re saying the right things to the right person. And, importantly, it means knowing who influences them, who are the people they trust, so you’re reaching out not just to customers, but the influencers in the marketplace.
2. It’s Social and Mobile
One billion users on Facebook. 5 billion professional searches on LinkedIn. Smartphone penetration has leaped from 38% to 50.4% in a single year. Clearly, marketing needs to be more social and mobile.
Increasingly, people want to access offers, content and sites by using their social media accounts. They want to share with friends and peers. If marketers are going to succeed in this environment, they need to make their work easy to access and easy to share socially.
At the same time, people are searching, sharing and reading on mobile devices. 40% of emails are read on smartphones, for instance. Marketers need responsive design, making sure their efforts can be experienced from a plethora of devices – from iPhones to Androids.
3. Apps Matter More Than Ever
Two years ago, Wired magazine declared the Web dead. The thesis: people will interact with the world’s information through targeted portal and less through the Wild West environment of the Internet.
The Web isn’t disappearing, but there’s no question apps are changing how people interact with brands, and how brands target their buyers. The problem with this specialization is there are too many apps that live in their own closed off houses. Modern marketing, and the companies that hope to push it forward, need apps to talk to each other and connect. Marketers can’t be cobbling different data and results from an ever-growing number of apps.
4. You Need Data and Analytics
If you live in marketing, you know big data. Well, it’s getting bigger. According to IBM, 90% of world’s data has been produced in the last two years.
Marketers need to focus in on the data and analytics most important to them. Payne laid out the key data points that both sales and marketing need to track: the reach of your marketing, the velocity through which leads move through your sales cycle, the conversions marketing is influencing at each stage and, finally, a single view of the buying process. In other words, marketers need to see which campaigns result in actual revenue and how they stack against others in their industry.
5. It’s a Collaborative
Joe’s argument isn’t that sales is superfluous, but that sales and marketing need to play better together. In the end, that means helping sales close the deal. Marketers need to help sales discover leads, provide profiles of those leads and their interests, and help them engage leads with killer content without going off message.
It’s also real-time communication, not simply stats. Sales and marketing need to be able to collaborate across the organization and across borders. This is where private social networking becomes crucial so communication can move laterally, not only top-down.
What do you think? Would you add anything to Joe’s list?
