Paramita Bhattacharya
Director, Integrated Marketing,
Content and Digital Marketing, Demand Generation
Hitachi Data Systems
More than a few thousand content, digital and brand professionals convened at an industry event not too long ago. As they explored and exchanged insights, it became clear to me that it is ever so important to not forget the fundamentals that are pivotal to content marketing.
We are encountering increasing sophistication of marketing automation and content platforms and constantly challenged by fast moving changes in advertising, search and syndication. In the face of this, it’s easy to lose sight of the essentials of content marketing and adversely impact the customer experience.
Here is what I consider the key pillars of Content Marketing:
Pillar #1 Content Strategy: Start with a clear articulation of your business objectives and campaign goals. Highlight content themes based on core messaging around your product, solutions and brand propositions. Hopefully, at this point, you already have your customer-buying journey defined along with buyer personas. Doing this will help your content strategy deliver valuable content to your prospects and customers in each stage of their buying/purchase journey.
Pillar #2 Content Plan: Design a content map across your customer’s buying journey and define objectives for each content asset. Identify suitable formats based on your desired story to tell. Here, create an optimum mix of multiple media, short and long forms, and a combination of original and third party/expert content. As this plan starts to take shape, focus on content re-use and customization to address various audience needs. Draw in your best internal and external design, copy, UX, UI and video resources to build the best content - striving for efficiency, quality and effectiveness.
Pillar #3 Content Promotion: Promoting and distributing content is the game changer. This is where your content meets your channels in a distinct, unique manner – to delight and engage your prospects and customers. Map and plot your content into a matrix of paid, owned and earned media. Connect your various content interactions into a coherent customer experience - across web pages, PR articles, text and display advertising, along with blogs and social media posts. The more you match your media footprint with your prospects and customers, the better your engagement and value.
Pillar #4 Content Measurement: Gathering insights into what’s working and what’s not begins with measurement. It’s often helpful to measure incremental success or micro conversions - along the path to the final success criteria whatever that maybe for you (driving qualified leads, increasing the pipeline, or generating actual sales etc.). These micro-conversions can be content usage, consumption, shares, likes, impressions, views etc. and is primarily based on the channel. Even though they are sometimes dismissed as vanity metrics, they can be a leading indicator of the potential success of your content campaign and help you test and optimize accordingly. Plus these help establish credibility, relevance and engagement with your prospects and customers.
I hope you found this helpful in formulating an end-to-end content life cycle that is designed to engage new prospects and play a leading role in converting them to customers.
What, in your opinion, is critical to building a successful content marketing campaign? Let me know your comments.
Paramita Bhattacharya leads the development of content marketing strategy and the digital campaign content calendar for IoT, Cloud, Converged Infrastructure, Virtualization, Flash Storage & Mobility offerings at Hitachi Data Systems. She was previously a Group Manager at Adobe where she drove customer engagement and revenue through strategic content, integrated digital campaigns, multi-touch programs and digital platforms leveraging inbound & outbound tactics, and partnered with multiple disciplines. She is a member of the Frost & Sullivan Digital Marketing Advisory Board.
Jacob Baldwin
Global Manager, Digital Marketing
Emerson Climate Technologies
We’ve all heard it–maybe even used it–time and time again. It’s the ever-popular idiom that’s thrown around like mud on the walls in a brainstorming session–Content is King. But what does that really mean? Sure, with the proliferation of conversational search, Hummingbird, even content marketing–content has become the golden child upon which many a strategy hangs, and with good reason. But just as the title of this post implies, content alone is not enough.
What is Content, Anyway?
Ask this question to a room full of marketers and 9 times out of 10, you’ll get a cookie cutter answer: “Webpages, white papers, blog posts, press releases, social media posts”…on and on and on and on. I have a different opinion–to me, content is an articulation of expertise, communicated through the aforementioned channels (blogs, white papers, webpages, etc…). A good way to think about it is to imagine a white paper that has no subject, no words, it’s just a shell–we marketers fill in the shell with expertise that our target market is [ideally] looking for. This is where the other members of the team come into play.
Content and Search
Different studies have varying percentages, but directionally, they’re all telling the same story–businesses and consumers alike are increasingly flocking to search engines to start their research for buying decisions. Some studies show nearly 90% of consumers and more than 70% of businesses start their purchasing research with search engines. Ensuring that your content–your expertise–can be found via search is essential. I am not going to harp on best practices of SEO; resources are plentiful if you take a look. Instead, I am going to focus on how your content marketing and search campaigns can form a symbiotic relationship, helping each other soar to new heights.
The essence of search optimization (paid and organic) is traffic acquisition. We marketers want to attract people who have problems that we can solve, and turn them into leads. It is insane how many marketers write or commission a white paper to be written without selecting target keywords to use throughout the article. Keyword research/strategy is the cornerstone to any solid search marketing program. With the correct keywords selected and infused into your processes from the beginning, the contextual qualifiers and variations of your targeted keyword will manifest organically. And this is huge, considering the latest Google updates. One of the most important aspects to organic search optimization is building earned editorial links. It is essential that you build links into your content to reference pages from your digital properties (and others, if appropriate, but NOT competitors) that have resources for users to dig deeper into a concept, product, or service if they want to. The symbiotic relationship comes in this form: optimization for search helps the content get discovered. Engagement with that content helps drive organic ranking, further helping that content get in front of users’ eyes. It’s a beautiful cycle.
Content, CRO, and Analytics
When considering how content marketing and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) play together, for many organizations, access to some content comes at a price–whether it’s an email address and first name or the completion of a full-fledged business profile. CRO is one of my favorite topics in digital marketing. Great practitioners understand that CRO is where psychology, design, messaging, and UX intersect. Billions can (and have) been made and lost as a direct result of CRO testing. To me, CRO in the simplest terms is the management of the perceived cost to perceived value ratio. If the elements on your page work to effectively communicate your value proposition, and generate interest while reducing friction and anxiety, you’re on the road to success…and a promotion. Oftentimes, this is not the case. Legacy data fields and dependencies on IT are often roadblocks to getting rid of extraneous elements in conversion processes. It is a battle you’ll have to fight. And win.
The Great Machine
Weaving strategies together for content marketing, search optimization, and CRO will pay off in dividends. Each piece, if effectively done, works to bolster the performance of each of the other elements. Content that’s optimized for search, and content portals that are optimized for conversion, will effectively deliver significant gains in return ratios to your marketing efforts. In conclusion, let’s hit on a few key points that we covered today:
- Let’s be careful not to confuse content with content mediums
- Optimizing your content for the correct keyword selections from the beginning will help contextual content qualifiers and keyword variations manifest organically within the content
- A strategic and scientific testing methodology will work to tilt the perceived cost to perceived value ratio in your favor. Achieve this by first ensuring your value proposition clearly articulates the exclusive benefits your product/service offers, then work to add factors supporting the credibility behind these claims. Next, work to remove unnecessary friction from conversion processes. This, in conjunction with your efforts to inspire interest in your offer, will work to reduce the amount of anxiety your users experience in your conversion funnels
Jacob Baldwin is the Global Manager of Digital Marketing at Emerson Climate Technologies. Previously, he was Digital Marketing Manager at One Call Now. Over the past several years, he has been recognized as an emerging expert in the field of digital marketing, speaking at multiple national industry conferences and contributing to numerous notable industry publications. Feel free to reach out to him via Twitter @jacobaldwin, or find him on LinkedIn.
Mona Baset
Assistant Vice President of Advertising,
Digital & Brand Management
Carolinas HealthCare System
I’ve spent my career in both the B2B and B2C worlds, and I’ve never understood why there has traditionally been such a sharp distinction between marketing to businesses and marketing to consumers. Aren’t we all consumers? Once you start seeing everyone as a consumer, something magical happens. You bring humanity into the marketing process, which is the key to engagement with your brand.
Be interesting
Taking a human-centered approach to content for B2B marketing means that no matter what role someone plays in their company, they still want to read interesting things. Business people are people, too! Think about how interesting good fiction is. The reader can’t wait to get to the next page. Why can’t all content take this approach? Offer up questions that people HAVE to get answered. Use visuals. Be the click bait that actually delivers. We wrote a piece about one of our patients who went into sudden cardiac arrest at 25. Our headline could have read, “Carolinas HealthCare System’s Experienced Doctors Save Young Man’s Life.” Instead, our headline was “Omar and the Unstoppable Heart.” It was just as interesting as fiction, starring a real-life character. The content was promoted on our website and social media, pitched to media and influencers, and boosted in social, paid search, native and display. We also did a stop motion video that could live on its own. Omar’s story was one of our most successful, and so many more people were able to engage with our brand.
If you can’t be interesting, be helpful
Any topic can be interesting if positioned the right way, but if you’re struggling, take the pressure off and think about being helpful instead. During the panic around the Zika virus this summer, there was a lot of information out there from many different sources. How did people know whom to trust? Your positioning of the content can differentiate you from information already out there. As a healthcare system, we had the credibility to communicate with our communities and beyond, and packaged it in a way that would be most helpful. We used Google AdWords to understand what people were searching for, and constructed our communications to address those very questions. We also addressed the specific situations that could prompt a search in the first place. A parent might be trying to protect their child at camp or themselves while hiking in the mountains. Overlaying specific circumstances adds contextual relevance to the information, making it more relatable. Our headlines included, “Zika Virus: Your Top Questions Answered” and “Traveling? Preparation Can Lessen Zika Fears.” And all articles featured our doctors, reinforcing that credibility.
Tap into what people want
Google AdWords is a great place to start to understand trends around what people are searching for. But alone, it won’t get you to the deep insights you need to connect in a compelling way with your consumers. Reading trending content on the subject, using online tools can help you to identify content gaps for differentiation. Combing through your consumer surveys will give you another view, but still isn’t enough. Take a design thinking approach as well. Talk to your consumers – or potential consumers – about how they go about their day doing the things that might align with your product. If you are selling a marketing management tool, ask them to walk you through how they manage their projects today. Listen and watch closely. Have them show you what they need – rather than expecting them to tell you. Understand what their pain points are and what motivates them. You can take this information back to improve your products and speak to potential customers in the right way. More people will connect with your brand in a more meaningful way.
And give it to them where they want it
Knowing where your readers are searching for the information, in what format, and when, is critical in reaching your consumers. Consider that in a world of never-ending meetings, many B2B decision makers conduct research after hours. Many subscribe to leading publications and industry journals to stay ahead – that content is often of the highest authority to your readers. Sponsoring content on those domains gives you greater visibility and authority to readers who matter. Also, use your client use cases to tell your story. It’s a less self-promoting way of talking about the value of your products; the brands tell your story for you. An integrated approach to content distribution and a targeted approach to promotion is essential for content marketing success.
Content marketing is where you can differentiate your business on a very crowded playing field. By taking a human-centered approach, you can increase your chances for success. Be interesting, be helpful, and tap into what people want and where they want it.
Mona Baset is Assistant Vice President of Advertising, Digital & Brand Management for Carolinas HealthCare System. She leads advertising and media activities, management of the Carolinas HealthCare System brand, consumer digital channels, creative design and content, and marketing operations management. Carolinas HealthCare System is one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare organizations in the country, with 60,000 employees and 900 locations in North and South Carolina.
By Teresa Caro
Senior Vice President, Marketing
Fortiva (an Atlanticus company)
Top marketers recently gathered in Asheville, North Carolina at the 17th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXChange. As you might guess from the event theme, Digital Transformation: Leading Marketing’s Revolution, there is much to learn and much to do as a marketer today. Examples abound. Our favorite new word: SMarketing. What every event conversation came back to: content marketing. What can help you define your target audience: Personas.
Yet so much of what was discussed at this highly energizing and informative event circled back to remembering your marketing fundamentals: identifying your target audience, measuring response and optimally integrating sales and marketing. All important to keep in mind no matter what new technology or strategy you are applying.
So, yes, leverage the essential take-aways and technologies below to take your marketing to the next level, to compete in the age of IoT and ultra-empowered and connected customers. But, as you innovate and transform, remember your marketing basics too.
Define Business Objectives
Content, content, content. Every discussion came back to the use of content marketing across the buyer journey. Yet, unless it is direct response content, measuring the impact on the organization remains a struggle for most companies. To make this a bit easier, it is important to start by identifying the ultimate goal of your organization: branding awareness, brand perception, or simply sales. Second, ensure your company understands the difference between KPIs and metrics. KPIs resonate with the CEO: increased sales, decreased costs, as well as indicators of sales such as brand awareness, perception, and net promoter score (NPS). Whereas, metrics help respective departments optimize over time: time spent with the content, content downloads, content shares, etc.
Even though the most common KPI is increased sales, several organizations talked about how they had brand challenges and hoped content could be used to shift perception. One of the groups discussed creating baseline branding surveys or net promoter score (NPS) surveys before the campaign launched in order to show success over time.
Identify Target Audiences
Whether it was called Persona-Based Marketing, Account-Based Marketing, or Addressable Marketing, it all came down to a renewed focus on defining the target audience as specifically as possible. Yet, organizations are also pushing further to align prospect/customer experience with journey maps. As each persona takes a step in the journey, companies are detailing the respective challenges, and devices used (PC, tablet, mobile, 3-ring binder, etc). With this type of visual, it is easy to identify gaps and tailor content to support different parts of the sales and customer retention process.
Key reminders from these discussions included: 1) Remember, customers are always on, always connected, and go everywhere, both digitally and non-digitally. 2) Think “Rocks & Turkey Slices,” as in you can build a big content piece and then repurpose it in many different ways 3) Be sure to recognize what’s working by audience, by journey step, and what is not, and optimize or re-organize quickly.
Integrate Sales and Marketing Tactics
Our favorite marketing word from the conference: SMarketing. SMarketing is when sales and marketing are aligned strategically and tactically. Why is SMarketing important? Several reasons: 1) Marketing doesn’t have all the answers (although we like to think we do). Instead, marketing needs to be a team sport, and should not occur in a vacuum or silo. It’s better to partner internally and foster strong collaboration. 2) The journey map, if done correctly, should reflect how sales and marketing touch the prospect in different ways and each step in the journey. If you agree with the point one speaker made about marketing effectiveness being directly related to a medium’s ability to tell a story, you will understand why in-person events continue to be the most effective channel: It is a salesperson’s ability to tell a story which specifically relates to one person (the sales person in this case is the medium). The story cannot end with this medium though and becomes more impactful when it continues after the show through marketing touches, intermingled with sales follow ups. See example below:
Choose the Right Technology
Finally, how does today’s marketer pull it all together? Tools to choose from include salesforce automation, marketing automation, analytics, content marketing solutions, and so on. There was a great deal of brainstorming around how to make the business case for a particular platform and how to do more with the same resources. Many participants voiced issues with how to stay in alignment with sales (and get them to use the technology, oy). Another recurring challenge: how to be more automated and personalized? Everyone had an opinion on their favorite solution and platform and it will likely change again next year. When marketing in a digital world, the most important thing is that you stay in the discussion.
Interested in learning more about 17th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXChange and all the great marketing take-aways and insights? They are available in one handy document, the Executive MindXchange Chronicles. To learn more, please contact Matthew McSweegan @ 516-255-3812 or email: matthew.mcsweegan@frost.com. You can also click here.
As Senior Vice President of Marketing for Fortiva (an Atlanticus company), Teresa Caro brings over 20 years of strategic marketing experience in the digital and traditional space, including email, social, and analytics. Teresa plays an instrumental role in defining how Fortiva and its B2B2C and B2C brands can improve sales and customer retention, strengthen loyalty, and increase advocacy through the use of digital marketing and technology.
Prior to joining Fortiva, Teresa held two leadership roles at leading agencies: Senior Vice President of Social and Content Marketing for Engauge (acquired by Publicis and merged with Moxie), as well as the head of strategy for the southeast region of Razorfish. She is also a past-president of the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA). @teresacaro
Lance Kinerk
Director, Global Digital Practice
Ingersoll Rand
Navigating home after a long day at the office, you pull into the driveway, jump out of the car, walk through the front door and find your family circling to get ready for the evening in front of the television. Does this sound like you? Probably not, because that is what happened in the 1950’s when you would find 50% of the U.S. population watching the number one television show in the country, “I Love Lucy.” Today, you would be lucky to find anyone in your family in the same room. Instead, they are probably wandering around the house, wirelessly connected to a community that could be halfway around the world, sending media messages through Snapchat, We Chat, Facebook Messaging, Google+, or whatever launched yesterday, as they simultaneously watch something on Netflix, YouTube, Facebook Live, Periscope, Apple TV, Roku, or Youku.
The fact that people are sharing media on their own, with their own comments, requires brands to be even more diligent about what they put into the market. In fact, brands need to focus on three things to be successful in 2017 and beyond: organizational structure, technology, and standards.
Organizational Structure
In the digital world there are no geographic boundaries. You need a global team focused on the brand first and the different business lines second. This is very important, because in the digital world the brand leads. This can be demonstrated when you do a search of some of your favorite brands. If the search results in a brand that provides you quick links to their top business lines, you can surmise they are successfully organized around the brand. For example, search Bank of America and you will see checking, home loans, small business banking, and auto loans links, an organized brand presentation. If you find the paid search results in one line of business being highlighted instead of the parent brand, it is likely the organization is decentralized. For example, search Suzuki and most often Suzuki Cycles are presented without mention of autos. One line of business leading the brand conversation leads me to believe the different lines of business are operating to achieve their objectives before the overall objectives of the whole organization. This is neither good for the investors nor the user of the brand.
Now that we have established the importance of organizing the team around the brand, the next thing to think about are the key tactics in good digital marketing. Therefore, align the organization based on the tactics (SEO, Paid Search, UX, Analytics, and Lead Generation) and make sure there are people assigned to each of the tactics. If the size of your business is bigger than the resources provided to your function, figure out what is most important to your business and own that with your top people while outsourcing the rest. The most important function today is analytics, because it provides insights into the marketplace even before financial results. We are able to see search volumes fluctuate before we see sales volumes fluctuate. The analytics team can therefore provide insight into the market and begin to test ideas for corrective action or increase what is working.
Standards
In relation to setting up a sound organizational structure, developing standards is very important. Yet, standards for marketing professionals can be perceived as a dirty word. It sounds like you are trying to take the art out of marketing. However, I want to explain why that is not the case. If implemented correctly, standards provide guidance and increase creativity. You can focus on the creative and not spend time getting approvals from legal, IT, product engineering, etc. In addition, standards create consistency for the user.
Always seeing the IBM blue bars on a television commercial gives the viewer context immediately. Follow this same diligence in social channels, on television, in blog posts, in stores, and on manuals. That means engage all senses with standard practices. Make sure your auditory signals, visual signals, scent (yes, scent is the most powerful memory cue) and text are all the same globally. This seems to be so basic, but I continually run into brands that do not maintain this consistency. The problems exist when the standards are too geographically specific and are unable to translate globally.
Technology
Now leverage technology that supports your strategy and extends your reach. There are over 2,000 vendors in the digital marketing space today. The sheer number makes the task of selecting the right partner daunting. However, at the same time it’s extremely likely that there is a technology out there that can do what you need it to do. Therefore, focus on your current organization and standards and connect with a technology partner that will facilitate this. In the digital marketing space it is important to create content once and be able to repurpose it in a multitude of distribution channels; so a partner that begins with this in mind is a good start.
Here are a few ideas to think about when selecting a partner: Will they last? Will they provide consultative help to your organization? Is their technology team adept at API development --in case you want to connect into current enterprise systems-- and you will. Will they continue to invest in the software you are buying?
In summary, focus on the things you can control. This will allow your more relevant messages to beat out any of the noise. Consistently monitor the channels and focus on improving your process. As new channels appear, you will be able to quickly adapt and maintain a consistent brand image.
Lance Kinerk is Director of the Global Digital Practice at Ingersoll Rand. During his career he has been involved in sales, operations, and marketing. Lance has taken his digital experience into diverse projects such as starting a home automation company, building the largest man made whitewater river and outdoor recreation facility, bringing a failing company out of bankruptcy, and leading a diversified manufacturing company into the digital age. He currently sits on the board of Tripstr and is an active investor in several other digital media companies. Lance has a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Davidson College and a Master of Business Administration from Vanderbilt University, Owen Graduate School of Business.
Matthew Royse
Director, Marketing Communications
Forsythe Technology
Part 2
Frost & Sullivan: Energized by his participation at the 17th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange event in Asheville, North Carolina this summer, Matthew Royse answered a few more timely questions about digital marketing.
We began by asking him to share his top two social selling tips from his presentation at the event, The Social Selling Revolution: 10 Tips to a Successful Social Selling Program That Drives Business Results.
Matthew Royse: Start small with a pilot to get C-suite buy-in and have a plan for follow up and reinforcement.
For examples, to get C-suite buy-in, it is critical that your initiative starts small with a pilot. The pilot should be long enough to collect information but short enough so that it doesn’t take up too many resources.
There are five ways to get C-suite to buy-in on social selling:
- Set a vision and establish a strategy.
- Find an internal social selling champion who can help you show the value and importance of social selling.
- Provide use cases or case studies on how other companies are taking advantage of social selling.
- The C-suite takes notice when competitors are doing something that your company is not doing. Find out what your competitors’ plans are for social selling.
- Build the business case during the pilot with documentation through a charter that explains scope of the initiative, identifying an executive sponsor or sponsors and a timeline to show what is or what is not working.
To make your social selling program successful, it needs to stick so reinforcement and follow up are critical. Research shows companies that reinforce post-training activities achieve better business results. Ongoing education and reinforcement is vital to long-term success of your program.
Your sales team needs a partner like marketing or sales enablement team to keep them up-to-date with the ever-changing landscape of social media and LinkedIn. For example, are we ready for potential LinkedIn changes as a result of the Microsoft buying LinkedIn?
Establishing a feedback loop with the sales team is critical for marketing and sales enablement teams who are leading this initiative. To help with reinforcement, explore some social selling tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, PeopleLinx, and TrapIt. Also, it is important to provide your team with social selling resources with helpful blogs like Sales for Life and HubSpot.
Do you think there are any organizations that have successfully figured out how to leverage social media marketing effectively or profitably? Examples?
There are three brands that are using social media marketing effectively: Oreo, Dove and Domino’s.
Oreo is constantly producing fresh, relevant content on their social media websites. Oreo really made its name for itself on social media with the Super Bowl tweet “you can still dunk in the dark.”
Dove is always creating content aimed at making women feel good about themselves. Dove’s “Speak Beautiful” campaign encouraged women to be more positive when tweeting about beauty and body image. They teamed up with Twitter to measure how positive or negative women’s tweets are. People retweet a post on Dove’s Twitter account that has the hashtag #speakbeautiful and then Dove automatically responds to them with a link to a custom microsite that displays personalized Twitter data as a chart and how their tweets stack up against other women.
Domino’s is helping their customers order pizza in an easier way. They are also taking advantage of a trend of emoji’s on social media. Customers just need to tweet a pizza emoji to the Domino’s Twitter account or use the hashtag #easyorder.
Your key take-away(s) from the 17th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange event?
There were two big event takeaways for me:
- We, as marketers, need to shift toward agile marketing. Agile marketing helps large enterprises more quickly respond to change. It values rapid iterations over big campaigns; uses data and testing to drive modifications in executing the strategy; values small pilots over a few large bets; and encourages collaboration over silos and hierarchy.
- Be remarkable. Do something truly exceptional that stands out in a world of noise. What makes our company different than our competitors?. We need to constantly ask ourselves: Why are creating this piece of content? Why are we posting this to social media? If it doesn’t add value, why are we doing this? It is important that we, as marketers, constantly question things and try new things. It is ok to fail.
How about a recent digital marketing success story? Anything you would like to share that other marketers can learn from?
A recent successful digital marketing storys that stands out the most is the creation of our first eBook: Are You Ready for Data Center Facility of the Future. We created it for our new subsidiary, Forsythe Data Centers, a colocation data center outside of Chicago. The goal of the eBook was position Forsythe Technology as a thought leader on how the data center is changing and how to prepare for the future data center.
To provide well-rounded content, we teamed up with our partners, Emerson Network Power and Anixter. We interviewed their thought leaders. As a result of their participation, they agreed to help promote the eBook. More than 400 people have downloaded it.. It has led to numerous opportunities for our sales team. Our sales team liked it so much they wanted the eBook printed so they could personally hand deliver it to their clients. It helped them have conversations with their clients about how companies can get ready for the future of the data center.
The eBook has helped us refine our content marketing strategy. Our strategy has evolved so we now create heavy weight and strategic content first with an eBook. Then, we repurpose and repackage the content from an eBook into different formats such as articles, infographics, webinars, and SlideShare presentations. We also promote the eBook in our email marketing programs. This strategy has been so successful that we are in the midst of our creating our next eBooks that will follow this similar framework.
Modern marketing is inextricably linked to technology…any technologies that you are particularly excited about?
Right now there are a lot of new and exciting marketing technologies at our fingertips, but with the never-ending options, it sometimes feels like navigating a transit map. Whether you jump in as an early adopter or ease into new technologies, the key is to understand these marketing technologies personally so you can advise your company on how it can work for you professionally. Right now, I am exploring wearables. It worked out well that I won a Fitbit at the Frost and Sullivan conference.
Any final marketing insights or observations?
I am seeing a strong shift toward influencer marketing. Developing content with influencers has become a standard best practice for your content marketing and social media efforts. You may be asking: what is influencer marketing? Influence marketing is when a company works with key influencers to co-write content and the influencers would share that content with their networks. A great example is our data center eBook I mentioned earlier and LinkedIn’s Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide. In this series of guides, LinkedIn has created guides for content marketing and thought leadership. The influencers who co-create content for guides share the content online with their communities. Influencer marketing has become a more effective method for reaching a company’s target audiences at a more affordable price than advertising.
Speaking of advertising, advertising is not dead. It has just evolved, in large part because of digital marketing. According to a recent report, social media has capture a quarter of all digital ad spending.
Matthew Royse is the director of marketing communications for Forsythe Technology, one of the largest independent IT integrators in North America. He has more than 15 years of experience in marketing and communications, working in many different industries, including financial services, technology, media and entertainment.
At Forsythe Technology, Matthew oversees all content marketing and social media initiatives internally and externally, across multiple platforms and formats to drive sales, engagement, retention, leads and positive behavior with clients, partners, analysts and employees.
Matthew currently teaches a social media class for students in Duke's Event Development Certification program. He has spoken about social media and content marketing at numerous industry and regional events.
Matt Preschern
Executive Vice President,Chief Marketing Officer
HCL Technologies
In this second decade of 21st century marketing, the playing field is changing swiftly. The pace of change accelerates month by month and often week by week. Consumers have upped their game through mobile technology and hyper-connected environments at home, at work and on the road. If you haven’t yet rewritten your own strategic playbook to identify and capitalize on this change, you risk being overrun by consumer demands for your brand to match their own constantly transforming lifestyle.
It’s not just about speed—consumers have always sought faster access to products, greater responsiveness to their questions and faster deliveries. Our challenge as CMOs is to be agile enough to race ahead of the consumer’s expectations while anticipating them. If you don’t respond to a customer email within an hour, a customer call within 30 minutes, or a customer order request within seconds, you’re likely to lose that customer. She can order from your competitor in just seconds with the touch of a graphic button.
Complicating the challenge is the need to personalize your response with contextually relevant information. If you’re still dumping pre-written answers to frequent questions into your online chat windows, you’re dying or dead. Instead, we can now use data analytics more extensively than ever before to ensure we meet each customer one-to-one and face-to-face, predicting the questions she will ask and the products she will prefer.
The new playbook also requires us to carve new crosslinks to connect channels. For the consumer, it’s all one big channel now. What she finds online she expects to see at the store. When she places an order on her phone, it had better be equally accessible in the aisle and on her front doorstep, whichever she prefers. With ever rarer exceptions, today’s shopping excursion is a single digital experience that runs across all social media and stores (online and off). A single customer may choose different outlets at different times or different points in the sales process--awareness on Facebook, preference on Yelp, selection and questions at the physical store site, purchase on Amazon--so we want to be ready to present a consistently attractive and convenient experience that cuts across all channels.
This new digitally driven destiny for marketers also embraces the sharing economy. Millennials increasingly make their way through the world by sharing data. They expect brands to have their data at hand, through social media and previous online shopping patterns. It’s important that we understand millennial consumers and present product information in the context of their individual preferences as gleaned from their shared data via analytics.
The pace is indeed frantic. Big data, therefore, becomes critical to staying ahead of the consumer, requiring more automated systems that digest consumer data and guide the buying experience. “Big strategies” no longer appear valid. In the months you might spend building a conventional campaign, everything will have changed--technology, social media, market conditions, competitors--and you may find that you never catch up, much less get ahead. And large, complex strategies can’t possibly furnish the agility and personalization that we need now.
Rather than attempting to pull consumers in, CMOs ought to consider adopting the characteristics of the consumer’s shopping style so as to join them in their hither-and-yon shopping journey. Five tenets are especially important to this process:
- Understand that the experience is everything. Create an authentic experience that resonates with consumer emotions. When a consumer can connect to a brand’s core values through experiences, engagement shifts from a company effort to a consumer desire. Context, coherency and collaboration within an ecosystem make for outstanding experiences.
- Measure outcomes, not opportunities. Consider putting a stop to chasing metrics such as “marketing-qualified leads” and begin working closely with sales to target and convert your best prospects, your most profitable customer segments.
- Stay agile and lean. Build teams that respond quickly to unanticipated market changes. Demolish silos and flatten hierarchies with teams that prioritize small experiments over large bets. Create a culture of experimentation by transforming your workplace from one that values opinions and conventions to one that thrives in testing and data.
- Build your marketing operation like you build your IT operation. Trying to assemble all the technologies required for a world-class in-house marketing operation would be as expensive and inefficient as assembling all the software you use in doing your job. You employ software as a service(SaaS); it may be time for you to adopt a marketing-as-a-service approach as well. MaaS lets your marketers choose capabilities on demand to build out their marketing technology architecture. It’s scalable, efficient and fast.
- Redefine your partnerships. Today your best partners are your customers, and they can join your suppliers, affiliates and developers in a mutually beneficial ecosystem enabled by APIs. For example, when you search for directions using Google Maps on a mobile device, you’ll see a tab showing estimated pickup times and fares for Uber options available in a particular city, and a click on any airline site will enable you to search for a car and hotel room from hospitality partners. Application program interfaces, commonly known as APIs, make these connections both possible and valuable. Advances soon will make every business a technology company, racing along the Internet of Things, growing smarter with artificial intelligence systems. Creating ecosystems of partners and developers to produce seamless, engaging customer experiences will be crucial to outrunning the pace of change.
It’s a new game with new formations and a new, much more expansive playing field. CMOs can benefit from rejecting convention. When you become more agile, adaptive and connected, you can build a winning brand that resonates with a vibrant marketplace.
Matt Preschern is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of HCL Technologies. Matt leads all marketing functions, including global business, strategic marketing, sales enablement and corporate communications to drive demand, growth and value for the HCL Technologies brand. A global citizen, Matt was born and educated in Austria and has an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.
Q & A with:
Matthew Royse
Director, Marketing Communications
Forsythe Technology
By Patricia Stamas-Jacoby
Publications Editor, Events
Frost & Sullivan
Part 1 of 2 – Stay tuned for Part 2 in our next Digital Marketing eBulletin!
Matthew Royse will be presenting The Social Selling Revolution: 10 Tips to a Successful Social Selling Program That Drives Business Results at the 17th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange in July. In anticipation of the event, we posed the following questions about the state of B2B Digital Marketing today.
A key take-away: Marketing is no longer just a cost center, but can drive business transformation.
Frost & Sullivan: What is your working definition of digital marketing?
Matthew Royse: If you Google the definition of digital marketing, you get a lot of different answers. You also get a lot of additional questions such as: What is e-marketing? What is digital ad sales? What is online marketing?
Digital marketing is an umbrella term that is used in many different ways, depending on the context. Simply put, it is the shift in the “value prop” of marketing to digital. By taking advantage of digital technologies such as websites, email, social media, online ads, e-commerce and other forms of digital media, marketing can better reach its target audiences.
As the world becomes digitized, the value for businesses lies in using digital to its competitive advantage to grow and better serve customers or clients. The marketing team should be leading the charge to digital because marketing has become such a critical part of today’s business model. The most successful companies today are the ones that are so useful to their target audiences with their products and services that they will become a part of daily life of their customers.
What is your organization’s working definition of digital marketing?
The definition of digital marketing is different for every company. At Forsythe Technology, we documented our digital marketing strategy on one page in order to clearly communicate our perspective internally and with our partners. As I will briefly discuss during my upcoming presentation, The Social Selling Revolution: 10 Tips to a Successful Social Selling Program That Drives Business Results, we outlined the following in one page: our digital marketing strategy summary statement, the current and future state of our digital marketing, our strategy timeline, our top five digital marketing initiatives and our underlying beliefs and assumptions about digital marketing. We treat the one-pager as a living document to be updated as our digital marketing strategy evolves and as our people, processes and technologies change.
What are your thoughts on where digital marketing is heading?
Digital marketing will become part of everyone’s job, just like social media. Social media was initially a separate area with social media specialists and strategists. Now, social media has become part of everyone’s job description. The same will happen for digital marketing. Digital marketing will just become marketing because successful marketing today requires marketers to be hybrid or T-shape professionals. Marketers should specialize in one area such as social media or content marketing but should know enough about search engine optimization, online advertising, influencer marketing, marketing programs and other marketing functions so they can understand the holistic view of marketing.
Marketing is becoming more data-driven and automated but marketing still needs the human element and the creative part of telling great stories. Companies that position themselves in the minds of customers as being helpful and useful are the ones that stay top of mind with them. One of the ways to stay top of mind with customers is through social selling.
Can you share your insights on how B2B (as opposed to B2C) organizations should leverage “social selling?”
Contrary to popular opinion, B2B organizations have a bigger opportunity to utilize social selling than B2C for the following reasons: there are more decision makers in a purchase decision, the purchasing process takes longer, more money is involved in a purchase and the buyers are typically more informed with tons of research.
In my upcoming presentation, I will talk about how social selling is the next evolution of content marketing and social media. Social media and content marketing have become critical to sales. Social selling is a hybrid of these two important functions.
Social selling is a revolution for sales. The old sales model used to be about cold calls, qualifying leads and sales demos. The new sales model is about education, social media networks and engagement. According to CEB and OgilvyOne, 60 percent of B2B customer research is conducted before contacting sales and 71 percent of salespeople believe their role will be radically different in five years.
Sales is looking for a partner in marketing to help with this transition, and marketing is looking for more insight from sales on what works and what doesn’t. According to the Sales Management Association, two in three companies don’t have a social media strategy for sales, but 80 percent of sales teams would be more productive with a greater social media presence. And, according to Sirius Decisions, 60 to 70 percent of all company content goes unused. Social selling can help your company better understand what content your sales team is sharing with clients and prospects online and via social media. As marketing learns more and more about what content sales is using successfully, they can create better and more targeted content.
Can you outline the next phase of mobile marketing?
The next phase of mobile marketing is where a company puts its mobile experience first, which is a challenge for many companies due to legacy thinking, systems and organizing the data so it is real-time and easier for consumers. Brands understand the importance of transforming to a mobile-first, digital strategy but they are not prepared for how quickly they need to adapt to make this happen. There are a lot of changes that need to be made to people, processes and technologies at large companies in a short amount of time. That is why smaller companies have a competitive advantage—they don’t have the legacy technology and processes in place. As a result, larger companies are moving toward creating their own enterprise “app store” so they can more quickly adapt to changes in the marketplace.
Your insights on moving from multi-channel marketing to omni-channel marketing?
People can now engage with a company in a physical store, via the website or mobile app or through social media, fueling the shift toward omni-channel marketing to provide a seamless customer experience across all interactions. Where companies often go wrong with the customer experience is a lack of integration between teams. Bad marketing experiences occur at the consumer/end-user level when it becomes apparent that the company’s technology, people and processes are not well integrated.
Your thoughts and good or bad experiences on integrating marketing across the organization?
Yes, marketing should be definitely be integrated. That is one of the most important aspects of marketing today but often the most difficult. Marketing needs to ensure their department is integrated first and then work on improving integration across the organization. For example, contact centers have a wealth of information for marketers on the types of questions that they are being asked by customers. Do the contact centers record that information so that marketing can create helpful content to answer those questions? It sounds so simple. Yet, it is rarely done. Another example: Are marketing/PR teams prepared if the company gets hacked? Do they have a crisis communications and disaster recovery plan if it occurs? If so, can the company communicate it quickly?
The key for digital marketing and good customer experiences will be integration, strategy and a shift in mindset that marketing is more than a support function. Marketing is no longer a cost center but drives business transformation. As a result, marketing organizations should consistently have a seat the business table (and at the C-suite and board level) to drive digital transformation conversations, its value proposition to the company, and why its budget should grow.
To sum up, digital marketing and heightened customer expectations are changing how the modern marketing organization is structured. Marketing has become more holistic, aligns more closely with the business strategy, and is responsible for the overall customer experience. One company to learn from is Target. They built a successful digital marketing department. They did not put their marketing teams into groups or silos. Instead, they brought everyone together as one big marketing team. This helped Target tell a cohesive brand story and attract top talent. An example we can all learn from.
Matthew Royse is the director of marketing communications for Forsythe Technology, one of the largest independent IT integrators in North America. He has more than 15 years of experience in marketing and communications, working in many different industries, including financial services, technology, media and entertainment.
At Forsythe Technology, Matthew oversees all content marketing and social media initiatives internally and externally, across multiple platforms and formats to drive sales, engagement, retention, leads and positive behavior with clients, partners, analysts and employees.
Matthew currently teaches a social media class for students in Duke's Event Development Certification program. He has spoken about social media and content marketing at numerous industry and regional events.
By Heather Caouette
Marketing and Public Relations
eClinicalWorks
You know the drill; get more results with a smaller budget. With these mandates, showing a campaign’s business impact is imperative. There are several methods you can employ to optimize your marketing department and show real value.
First, make sure marketing initiatives align with business goals. There are multiple avenues marketers can take and CEOs are impressed when the one you choose aids the current goals of the business. Prioritizing tasks in this way will also help manage your efforts in an impactful way.
Once your programs sync with what is driving your company, it is essential that marketing efforts speak to your customers’ motivations. It does not matter how beautifully crafted your campaign or message is. Any project that does not speak to what influences your customer will fall flat. As B2B marketers, we tend to think product-centrally and focus on solutions. Go beyond that. What keeps your customers up at night? What inspires them? You need to understand these motivators before you can make the link to how your offerings can help.
Build Brand Ambassadors
Addressing the vulnerabilities of your audience will also help develop customer advocates and extend word of mouth – arguably the most efficient and beneficial form of marketing. A recent Nielsen’s Harris Poll Online found that more than 80% of Americans seek recommendations when making any kind of purchase1. Most people trust their peers more than company messaging so hearing the virtues of your solution from a colleague will go far in establishing your credibility. Once you are delivering a solid solution, exceptional customer service and conducting business as a true partner, customers will be open to acting as brand ambassadors. Build and engage a captive audience of your customers, partners and thought leaders.
When engaging with current and potential clients, be aware that some channels that have been successful in the consumer space can also be brought into the B2B space. Social media is one example. Businesses are made of people that are on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. You need to get your message to the people where they are and not wait around hoping they find you. That said, tread carefully to put your efforts in the channels that can offer the greatest reward as some may be a better fit than others. A channel that makes sense for one industry may not work for another. Do not get caught up in the tool – focus on the message and desired outcome.
Mobile Matters
According to an April 27, 2016 post by Smart Insights2, mobile use grows an average of 58% year over year. Most people now consume information on mobile devices with that trend rapidly accelerating, yet many B2B companies do not have a clear strategy to leverage this mobile engagement. Ensure that viewers can move seamlessly between devices and that the experience is consistent regardless of whether they find you on a desktop, tablet or phone. Find ways to align your offline marketing such as tradeshows with mobile, which in addition to improving the user experience, will give you additional analytics to measure initiatives that are more difficult to quantify.
All of these approaches require one thing that is constantly mentioned but there is never enough of – content. You will never catch up if you create new pieces for every program or medium. Repurposing content is key to keeping the pipeline full while maintaining a budget. A podcast, for example, can be reborn as a case study, web content, blog post and social media messaging.
Keeping in mind customer preferences regarding motivations and channels, and finding multiple uses for fresh content will deliver true value to your business. By making sure these tie into clear business objectives, you can deliver a business for business connection instead of just a business to business one.
Heather Caouette helps develop and execute integrated marketing activities globally at eClinicalWorks. Previously, as a Senior Account Executive with Schwartz Communications, she assisted a variety of technology innovators in meeting their public relations goals. Heather holds a Bachelor of Science in Communication from Boston University and a Master of Business Administration in Finance from Bentley University.
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1 http://www.business2community.com/marketing/numbers-dont-lie-2016-nielsen-study-revealed-referrals-01477256#h3ArXTPfQoJ7yLd5.99
2 http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
By Stephen Delvoye
Global Head, Marketing Communications
Bekaert
If there’s one thing I learned at the Digital Marketing, Europe: A Frost & Sullivan Executive Mindxchange event last January in beautiful Cascais, Portugal, it was that big B2B companies are finally catching up with the digital age. Okay, we are still not as sexy or advanced as our B2C counterparts, but it is clear that the huge gap between us that once existed is now almost gone.
The big players in B2B IT are leading the digital transformation by applying best practices from the B2C world. To guarantee a seamless customer experience, they create an omni-channel presence using well-founded content strategies, buyer personas and a mix of digital tools.
But many B2B players, even the big ones, still don’t offer the most basic digital services. While most people are on their phones all day long, a lot of B2B companies don’t even have a mobile (responsive) website. These companies fail to understand that their customers are expecting the same level of professionalism that they are expecting from any online services in their personal lives. A corporate purchaser expects to have the same customer-oriented, persona-driven online experience buying goods and services for their company as he or she does buying a book on Amazon for their own leisure.
The ongoing trend of website personalization will also hit B2B companies very soon and force them to offer specific and relevant content tailored to the needs of the targeted audience. We (@Bekaert) recently started experimenting with personalization of our website and have had very positive results in terms of conversion rates. Our personal experiences have taught us that to make any online activity succeed, it is essential to select the right tools and vendors. A condition sine qua non is a mature and well-managed CRM system and integrated customer experience platform that contains a CMS and marketing suite. Having these in place will cover the biggest part of your needs.
Though it is still often debated where digital marketing belongs on the organizational charts, it is generally accepted as part of marketing and not IT. Depending on its perceived importance, digital marketing can be seen as just another marketing department responsibility or as a separate department that operates along with marketing. Top-level executives who are dismissive of the digital department underestimate its potential. Digital marketing is much more solid than it was at the beginning of the century. Many digital business models show us that digital marketing is here to stay and it is crucial for any business situation; B2B, B2B2C or B2C. Adaption is the key to survival.
Honestly, it was good to hear that B2B players are finally considering using digital media in the same efficient and effective way as B2C companies. It was getting tiring to be constantly reminded at conferences that we, big B2B companies, are lagging decades behind the digital trends. Colleagues from more consumer- oriented businesses have always mocked the boring customer approach of their B2B selling peers. At least now B2B, B2B2C and B2C companies all have the same mindset when it comes to digital communication. It might not seem radical, but it is happening right now: no more boring business!
Stephen Delvoye is the Global Head of Marketing Communications for Bekaert, where he built the global marketing communications team from the ground up after a major restructuring of the company in 2012. He guided a 10+ person team spanning four continents to create and execute all integrated, multichannel initiatives to support the company's corporate branding, sales and marketing strategy.
Over the course of his life, Stephen has gravitated toward roles where he can work as a strategic thinker, an innovative achiever and an authentic leader. His background in politics, also helps him to see the big picture and act as a bridge-builder.
