The Demand Gen Report Blog

By Alicia Fiorletta, Content4Demand

DGR and Content4Demand closed out the final day of the SiriusDecisions Summit in Nashville and it was a busy week (to say the least). We joined thousands of our fellow marketing and demand gen pals to acquire the latest research, models and methodologies from the SiriusDecisions team.

While we weren’t tweeting furiously in sessions, we were chatting with B2B marketers at our booth. Although we have a detailed recap in the works, we figured we’d give you a quick briefing on some of the key takeaways by sharing some of our favorite tweets:

First, let’s start out with the hot topics and trends. There were many sessions focused on content marketing, but account-based marketing and predictive were common themes across many tracks and sessions:

SiriusDecisions started things off with a bang by unveiling its new Needs Aperture. While taking a photograph, we typically focus on a core subject and as a result, lose sight of what’s happening around us. The same could be said for our campaigns. When we focus too much on one specific persona or campaign goal, we don’t focus on other potential needs or trends that are emerging. The Needs Aperture is designed to help marketers get ahead of trends and be leaders:

Before you start campaign planning and content creation, you need to identify your goals and, of course, how to measure whether your goals are met. Measurement requires balancing (and tracking) content processes and actual performance. Ross Graber provided a great framework for measurement:

The nuances around creating a great campaign theme was also a topic that resonated with us. It’s not just about focusing on your core technology offerings or services, but applying value propositions and buyer needs in a creative way:

We were really excited to see a new version of the Messaging Nautilus, something we know well and apply at Content4Demand. Interestingly, SiriusDecisions changed “content preferences” to “interaction points.” This is because interaction points are actually trackable and you can easily identify trends along the buying cycle, while content preferences cannot be defined as hard facts:

Of course, sales and marketing alignment was discussed in detail. To ensure communication, collaboration and effective implementation, all teams need to be on the same page in terms of campaign audience, goals and strategies. Enter, the Marketing Plan-on-a-Page Template:

When discussing customer experience best practices, SiriusDecisions analysts noted that sales reps need to constantly share new insights and content:

But of course, successful sales onboarding and enablement also requires a variety of other training programs, tools and tactics:

There were a lot of sessions that touched on the value of influencers and advocates. On the surface, influencer programs seem like a hot trend but hard to actualize. However, SiriusDecisions provided a lot of great best practices for identifying influencers and advocates, engaging them, building relationships, using them for content creation and measuring their impact.

And of course, Content4Demand got some love from attendees for our election theme!

By Carol Krol

SiriusDecisions debuted and described the SiriusDecisions Needs Aperture Model at its 11th Annual Summit in Nashville to help marketers address what it called the “art and science of identifying and prioritizing customer needs.”

I have to confess that the terminology — and the multiple Frameworks SiriusDecisions deploys for marketers — tend to be dizzying for this editor, but every time I sit in on a session or interview with one of the SiriusDecisions analysts for a story or seek advice, I come away with a greater understanding of the B2B marketing ecosystem. It helps me chronicle this industry more intelligently for you, dear reader. What follows is my high-level key takeaways from the keynote this morning on the Needs Aperture.

“The ability to find and address customer needs is crucial to commercial success,” said Rachel Young, Research Director at SiriusDecisions.

Young and her colleague, Jeff Lash, VP and Group Director, used photography as a metaphor to describe the framework.

“Photography is both an art and science, and using the right techniques to capture the best image,” Lash explained. “Sometimes when we focus our view on what’s in front of us, we miss the rest of what might be happening around us.”

“You need a view of the entire landscape of the potential needs you can address,” he said. A landscape photo projected behind the two executives of a photographer on safari taking a picture of a zebra drove the point home. He is so focused on capturing the zebra that he doesn’t realize there is a cheetah charging him from behind.

The Needs Aperture is described as a “best-in-class process for identifying, prioritizing and applying needs that have the best opportunity for B2B commercialization.” “The foundation for Intelligent growth — whether through markets, buyers or offerings — is the ability to address commercially viable customer needs,” Young said.

Continuing the photography metaphor, the Aperture includes five phases marketers need to consider and work through in order to be able to address custom needs: Frame, Focus, Find, Filter and Formulate. Inherent within each phase are the key questions to consider, described by SiriusDecisions as follows:

Frame: How do I define needs and what are their components?

Focus: What types of needs can I explore? 

Find: How do I identify and capture needs? 

Filter: How do I analyze and prioritize needs? 

Formulate: How do I use needs in innovation and go-to-market strategies?

“In Frame, we help classify what the need is,” Young said. She described three dimensions of needs: organizational needs, functional needs and operational needs. “Identifying the full need can start from any one of these dimensions, but all of them must be defined to truly understand the need.”

The second phase, Focus, helps organizations determine the market parameters, and the company introduced a new framework to clarify that: the SiriusDecisions Needs Landscape. Sirius said this framework will help marketers categorize the potential needs on the spectrums of customer awareness and time outlook, and identify which types the organization should investigate.

The third phase, Find, centers on techniques that can be used to understand, capture and summarize the needs.  Young said, “The desired outcome and business value must be captured for all relevant personas, along with prevalence of need and any applicable emerging elements. “You need a consistent, objective, data-driven focus.”

The next phase, Filter, is about prioritizing needs. SiriusDecisions, again, created a framework around this, dubbed the SiriusDecisions Needs Prioritization Framework. This helps marketers determine which needs are worth pursuing for innovation and go-to-market efforts.

The final step, or phase, Formulate, is when these prioritized needs are integrated into product and marketing processes to evaluate innovation and go-to-market opportunities, according to SiriusDecisions.

Lastly, Young and Lash provided a list of takeaways, or “Action Items,” in three key areas, to help organizations implement the Needs Aperture Model. These include:

Marketing

Increase message resonance by incorporating insights that focus on customer needs

Isolate the primary buyer needs for the development of need-based campaign themes

Sales

Address the three dimensions of needs for all personas involved in the buying process

Capture and relay explicit and emerging needs to help shape innovation

Product

Broaden the view across the needs landscape to find previously unidentified needs for innovation

Understand the business value of addressing a need to avoid feature-myopic descriptions

By Steve Voith, Client Strategy Manager, Content4Demand

Walking into the opening keynote at this year’s Marketo Summit, I saw firsthand just how busy today’s marketers are. Attendees were anxiously awaiting the start of the show as they furiously sent emails, IMs and tweets. Multi-tasking at its finest.

Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez was first to the stage and immediately confirmed what was palpable in the room — “tomorrow’s marketer” has never been more challenged (read: busy). Phil and the speakers that followed went on to paint a powerful picture of the many obstacles facing “tomorrow’s marketer.”

Summit attendees sat through nearly six hours of presentations to learn about the current marketing climate and how they can be more efficient and effective in their day-to-day lives. To help you get back to work quickly, we’ve created a list that highlights the top five challenges marketers face in 2016 and beyond. More importantly, we’ve distilled the expert advice from Marketo Summit keynote speakers so you can overcome each obstacle and take your marketing to the next level.

Tomorrow’s marketer, read on!

1. CEOs are keeping a closer watch on their marketing department.

Marketo’s CEO, Phil Fernandez, asserts that as marketing teams move towards the front end of the sales process, they also attract more attention from the CEO — he would know, he is one. Here are a few statistics Phil shared with the group to better illustrate his point:

In a recent study by McKinsey, nearly half of respondents said their CEOs are personally sponsoring their company’s digital initiatives.

86% of CMOs believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020, according to Marketo and The Economist.

What to do about it: Stop only thinking about your next campaign and start looking for ways to lay a fabric and mindset across your entire company in a way that will help better serve your buyers. CEOs need marketers that never leave the side of the customer and who can identify platforms that enhance the buyer experience. CEOs need marketers that are constantly thinking about customer needs, who measure how those needs are changing and can adjust campaigns and initiatives so they can better serve their buyers.

2. The data struggle is real.

Fernandez was quick to bring up the power behind all of the buyer data marketers have access to these days. However, he also acknowledged it can be overwhelming to try and harness this information in a powerful way. Where do marketers focus their data efforts? Where do you even begin?

What to do about it: Fernandez invited Jason Kodish, Global Chief Data Scientist from DigitasDBi, to address the data struggle. Kodish reminded marketers that we’re not in an arms race for data. Companies with the most data don’t necessarily win. Companies that win invest in the right people to interpret and act on data that is being generated.

For marketers who are leery to get started, take advice shared by American mountain climber and entrepreneur, Allison Levine. During her two attempts to climb Mount Everest Allison learned two key lessons:

“Find landmarks and take them one step at a time.” Find data “landmarks” that are achievable instead of only looking towards the unreachable summit of all that you can do with an overwhelming volume of buyer data.

“Backing up is not the same as backing down.” When you climb Mount Everest, you work hard to reach a checkpoint. As soon as you get there, you climb back to base camp. This process is called “acclimatization” and is designed to train your body to breathe the thin air. Your approach to data should be the same. Take it one campaign at a time, “breathe in” some new data and head back to basecamp to break down what you’ve learned. You’ll reach the summit eventually.

3. Your buyers can smell phony from a mile away.

Will Smith shared this as a personal challenge, but it absolutely applies to marketers. As his career in music and acting progressed, fans got increased access to his life through new technologies — YouTube, Periscope, etc. — he confessed it forced him to become more genuine. For tomorrow’s marketer, it’s no different. We manage brands and campaigns that are multi-platform and reach broad audiences. Increased buyer touch points put pressure on marketers to ensure they are putting forth a consistent message.

What to do about it: Accept trust as the new currency. Ken Wincko, the CMO of PR Newswire, shared a formula to help marketers measure trust and ensure it’s at the forefront of campaign planning:

Wincko went on to say that great marketing is about serving, not selling — a shift for most companies. For marketers looking to design their next generation customer experience, he offered five key attributes buyers must see in your marketing approach:

Context

Compassion

Connection

Convenience

Consistency

It’s about creating moments that matter to buyers. Ultimately, tomorrow’s marketer is competing on trust and customer experience.

4. Marketers are expanding their expertise.

Marketo CMO Sanjay Dholakia shared research the company has completed that’s focused on the “future of you.” The goal: better understand tomorrow’s marketer. One of Marketo’s key findings was that tomorrow’s top marketers are becoming less specialized in any one aspect of marketing. They are serving more as generalists. Tomorrow’s marketer is a storyteller and an analyst — not one or the other.

What to do about it: Sanjay shared advice to help organizations find “full service” marketers. Look past skills and backgrounds when making hiring decisions. Try and identify the intrinsic qualities a candidate brings to the table. Are they naturally curious? Can they interpret data? Do they love customers?

Search for marketers who can operate horizontally. Tomorrow’s marketing leaders will have to meet marketers everywhere and they will need to be creative, analytic and strategic to do it. Most importantly, look for opportunities to practice and build new skills — you’re going to need them.

5. Marketers are feeling the heat from empowered decision-makers.

Marketing is becoming more and more personalized. In some cases, individualized — think account-based marketing. Almost all Marketo Summit presenters touched on the ever-increasing expectations of buyers and how marketers struggle to deliver a personal experience at scale.

What to do about it: Towards the end of his presentation, Ken Wincko provided a fantastic level-set for marketers obsessed with pleasing their empowered buyers: marketing is all about reducing friction and creating value.

Wincko went on to share the key ingredients for a holistic approach to modern marketing.

Content: Craft buyer focused messages that address customer pain points.

People: Find practitioners who are comfortable with content, data and technology.

Process: Think about how you are coordinating across your organization to foster an agile marketing process.

Technology: Ensure every single buyer interaction is coordinated across paid, owned and earned channels.

Data: Know who your customers are and what their goals are.

Finally, as both Will Smith and Allison Levine reinforced, you have to embrace the idea that sometimes you will notmeet your buyers’ expectations. You’ll learn something in the process. Fail early, fail often, fail forward.

In Summary

We are tomorrow’s marketers and we have our work cut out for us. We are playing on a much larger playing field and we are driving our organizations to push creative boundaries and create more immersive customer experiences. Be brave. Allison Levine reminded the group that, similar to the reality of climbing Mount Everest, “fear is ok, complacency will kill you.”

An interview with Alexandra Gibson and Brian Pesin, Event Farm  

Editor’s Note: Welcome back to Finny Friday, our monthly blog dedicated to celebrating Killer Content Award winners from throughout the years.

In a world where B2B buyers are often bombarded with information, it helps to stand out from the crowd. That’s why more and more marketers are relying on the help of industry experts and key influencers to help elevate their brand message and generate leads. That’s exactly what Event Farm did with its Future of Marketing series.

The company’s influencer marketing campaign was so successful it snagged a Finny in February at our annual Killer Content Awards. In fact, the campaign generated 628 leads and 31 opportunities, with approximately $280,000 in possible pipeline revenue.

Here, Event Farm CMO Alexandra Gibson and Marketing Manager Brian Pesin discuss goals for the campaign, how they chose the content formats used and some of the challenges they faced. To hear the whole story about how Event Farm won their Finny, tune into our Killer Content Showcase Series webinar on May 19.

Demand Gen Report: What were your goals for developing the content/campaign? Event Farm: We had several goals for our Future of Event Marketing series. We wanted to:

Generate as many new, high-quality, top-of-funnel leads as possible, and we used several different channels in order to do this.

Establish our brand’s thought leadership in the event marketing space by educating the industry about important topics like emerging experiential and event technologies, incorporating events into a holistic marketing strategy, proving ROI with event data and more.

Deepen relationships with leading industry experts. Leveraging their expertise and connections for this series was a win for all involved parties and helped to strengthen valuable business relationships for our brand.

DGR: What made you select your content formats and the overall execution approach?

Event Farm: We selected video, as it’s a highly engaging form of content and allowed for a more conversational and serendipitous approach to these interviews. By slow-releasing the videos over the course of four days, we were able to engage our audience over a longer period of time, and gave them a chance to digest our content more thoroughly in bite-size pieces.

Additionally, we knew we would be able to repurpose the video interviews into several other formats, which would help keep the series active and fresh for a longer period of time. By the end of the series, we had produced 12 videos, 12 audio recordings, 12 blog posts, countless tweets and social media posts, and plan on turning the blog posts into an eBook in the near future.

DGR: How did you establish your content promotion and amplification method and what channels were included?

Event Farm: We tried a little bit of everything to market this campaign! It was our first major marketing initiative since joining the company, so we wanted to see what worked and what didn’t for our industry. To maximize our exposure for the Future of Event Marketing series, we used a variety of promotion methods, including

Email marketing: We sent a targeted email to the contacts in our marketing automation system and email marketing platform. In many cases, this actually re-engaged contacts that had gone extremely cold and re-invigorated sales opportunities that had stalled;

Web site and blog optimization: We advertised the series on our web site and blog using a SumoMe welcome mat that appeared when a site visitor landed on our homepage and the blog index page. To minimize interruption, visitors submitted their email address directly from a form on the drop-down menu to register for the series before continuing onto the site. We also added CTAs to our blog posts to direct additional traffic to the series’ landing page;

Paid social ads and organic social posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The social ads performed well and were able to attract high quality leads; 25% of the leads generated via paid social efforts converted to MQL later on; and

Word-of-mouth marketing. We leveraged the influencers featured in these interviews and had them market the series and their inclusion in it to their respective audiences, promoting it using many of the same channels that we did for additional effect. We also had our sales and client services teams spread the word about the series to their prospects and clients in their conversations. This gave them a great reason to reach out that was more about value-add rather than, "Are you ready to buy yet or not?"

DGR: What was the most challenging part about creating this Killer Content?

Event Farm: The most challenging parts came from coordinating the logistics of recording several video interviews, as well as technical difficulties and last-minute glitches with Google Hangouts that we couldn’t have predicted.

DGR: What are some key lessons learned from this process that you'd like other marketers to take with them for future campaigns?

Event Farm: We walked away with a number of important takeaways that we’ve applied to all of our future marketing initiatives:

You don't have to be an expert to show thought leadership. Often by bringing together the right people and allowing their expertise to shine, you become just as valuable of a resource.

Don’t be afraid to try new things! We tested a lot of different promotion and amplification methods to get the word out about our series, which gave us a solid understanding of what worked well and what didn’t for future campaigns.

Finding ways to repurpose your content is key for extending the life and reach of a marketing campaign, and it makes your job as a content-producing marketer easier as well. Consider all the ways that one large piece of content can be sliced and diced into great bite-size pieces, consumed via different media.

_______________________________________________________

By Audrey Goodson Kingo, Managing Editor

During my time at the recent Forrester Forum For Marketing Leaders, I overheard the “f” word quite a bit. No, not that one. The one that’s described the traditional buying journey in B2B marketing for more than a century: Funnel.

These days, it seems like everyone has a different take on the tried-and-true funnel-style approach to lead generation.

Some marketers are talking about flipping the funnel.

Some are talking about “microfunnels.”

During a presentation on contextual engagement at the Forrester event, GoDaddy  CMO Phil Bienert used the term to describe hundreds of unique buying journeys for specific, highly segmented prospects. The idea came about when the company realized many of its small and mid-sized business users had vastly different interests: Some wanted information and products to help scale their business; some were content simply to maintain the status quo.

In a separate B2B-focused presentation at the event, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Lori Wizdo suggested re-thinking the funnel model altogether. Rather than inverted pyramid, think funnel cake.

Why is the traditional funnel facing so much scrutiny? Thanks to the advent of digital marketing and social media, B2B buyers are interacting with brands through multiple channels throughout the sales process. In fact, more than 10 channels influence buyers at each stage of the journey, Wizdo noted in her presentation.

That means B2B marketers should shift their focus away from campaigns that simply hand leads to sales.

“Instead of the funnel, marketers should think of the buying journey in terms of the customer life cycle,” she described in an interview with Demand Gen Report.  In today’s customer-centric marketing world, Wizdo said the traditional funnel fails in three key ways:

1) It promotes a numbers game theory of sales and marketing. Marketers tend to think the more leads you put into the top of the funnel, the more deals that will come out. However, there's a danger in overemphasizing volume at the top of the funnel, because in practice, the funnel is not a high-performance engine, Wizdo said. “When we recently surveyed B2B marketers about the conversion ratios in their lead funnels, respondents on average cited an end-to-end conversion ratio of 0.75% — less than 1%,” she said.

2) It’s a passive model. The lead funnel is devoid of process, she explained, “as if there were a natural phenomenon (gravity?) that controlled the physics of the funnel.” Instead, she suggested B2B marketers “build an active engagement strategy that helps to accelerate a buyer on their path to a decision.”

3) It masks attribution complexities. “With its inherent focus on lead volume, the funnel overemphasizes ‘first touch’ or ‘initial source’ in attribution,” she added. Buyers of business technology products report that more than 28 vehicles have an impact on their buying decisions. However, “lead-to-revenue marketers can no longer shy away from the difficult challenge of attribution, because the ‘peanut butter allocation method’ cannot effectively spread the marketing budget across an ever-increasing set of vehicles.”

Instead of focusing on the funnel, Wizdo believes marketers should concentrate on the customer. Who is it? And more importantly: What does she need? This is where developing detailed buyer personas, as in the GoDaddy example above, is crucial. Here Wizdo has advice, as well: “B2B marketers use personas to understand their buyers’ priorities and motivations. Most do a good job of that. Where many fall short is in defining how the value propositions of the company and its products and services are relevant to the buyer.”

In other words, it’s not about what buyers can do for you; it’s about what you can do for buyers.

It’s not a unique concept in the B2B marketing world, but what’s new is it’s being applied at all stages of the sales process. (Dare I say funnel?) Thanks to today’s proliferation of data, marketers can identify prospects and deliver highly relevant content at first touch. Plus, marketers can pinpoint the prospects that are most likely to actually complete a purchase. This in turn allows them to “better allocate market spending and sales efforts on audiences that best match these patterns,” Wizdo noted. In other words, the approach can potentially save big bucks.

That’s why she calls the process “lead-to-revenue management.”

It’s not quite as tasty a term as funnel cake, but it may be a pretty accurate description of today’s marketing and sales cycle.

By Klaudia Tirico, Associate Editor

With its emphasis on visual context, it’s no surprise that Instagram has become a huge platform for B2C companies. But when I started thinking about how the channel could benefit B2B companies, I had to pause. I understand why most B2B companies turn to Twitter and LinkedIn to engage with followers. A major con for Instagram is that it doesn’t allow the user to include direct links in their captions like they can with Twitter and LinkedIn, which essentially means companies can’t direct their followers to their websites.

That’s OK! Instagram is still a valuable channel for B2B companies, if they play their cards right. You have to think of Instagram as a “wind down” platform. Users go on it to sit back and enjoy beautiful images, not to be pitched a new solution. So B2B companies should save those types of posts for Twitter and LinkedIn, and use Instagram to engage with followers, potential buyers and prospects in a more casual manner. This is what will drive the relationship and encourage them to constantly think of your company.

Here are five ways B2B companies could rule Instagram, with some examples from major players in the game who are doing it right.

1. Start A Hashtag

A photo posted by Explore Oracle (@exploreoracle) on May 2, 2016 at 7:02am PDT

A hashtag that accompanies images of company life and culture is a great way to showcase the people behind a brand. For example, Oracle’s #lifeatOracle hashtag displays company events and volunteer work, while the company’s #MyOracleDesk hashtag highlights employee engagement from their point of view. These fun images will help personalize your company’s Instagram and consolidate images from multiple company and employee Instagram accounts.

2. Promote Your Event

A photo posted by Zendesk (@zendesk) on Apr 27, 2016 at 7:57pm PDT

Hosting or sponsoring an event? Use Instagram to promote what’s going on inside a conference to show people what they’re missing, and to get them to attend in the future. Take it a step further to highlight restaurants and activities for your attendees to check out after event hours.

3. Host A Giveaway

A photo posted by Buffer (@buffer) on Mar 3, 2016 at 11:58am PST

Learn from your followers by hosting a giveaway that enables them to share their experiences. For example, Buffer asked followers to share their customer service experience through emojis to score a book.

4. Let (Furry) Friends Takeover

A photo posted by Hootsuite (@hootsuite) on Mar 8, 2016 at 1:54pm PST

Highlight employees and partners by letting them take over your Instagram account. This will show off your relationships with people inside and outside the company, giving potential prospects a look at what it’s like to have you on their side.

Also, no matter who you are, posting images of animals is sure to be a hit on Instagram. If your company allows pets at the office, why not show them off by letting the little critters take over your Instagram account, as Hootsuite has done?

5. Show Off Upcoming Content

A photo posted by Vidyard (@teamvidyard) on Aug 27, 2015 at 10:50am PDT

If your company has a mascot, make it the star of your Instagram. Vidyard provides sneak peeks into new content they’re creating by posting photos of their mascot Vbot on the job. This gets followers, clients and prospects excited for what your company has planned in the pipeline.

By Andrew Gaffney, Editorial Director

As I made my plans for Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience event in Las Vegas this week, it dawned on me that it has been about five years since Eloqua started using the term to describe the transformation of marketing practices in the digital era. Over the years, other companies have picked up on the adjective to capture the transformation marketing teams have had to make to keep up with today’s digital buyers.

Since the phrase itself is kind of vague in meaning, I decided to take the pulse of some of the experts who will be taking part in next week’s Oracle event to see how “modern marketing” really applies to strategy. We asked a group of authors, bloggers and speakers for their definition of the term, how the interpretation has changed over the years and how technology is shaping modern marketing. Here is what they had to say:

Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Modern Marketing has to be data-informed, customer centric and optimized for experience and performance. Technologies will change and so will buyer preferences for information discovery, consumption and interaction. However, the need for brands to stay on top of those preferences and the technologies that will help deliver the best possible experience across the customer lifecycle is timeless.

The overwhelming amount of data being produced, along with changing buyer tech savvy and expectations for content experiences, requires brands to partner with solutions that will help them stay on top.

Elle Woulfe, VP Marketing, LookBookHQ

I don't think the definition has changed much. It's about having a customer-centric approach to your marketing that assumes a very integrated and personalized approach for everyone you touch, and a focus on making the most of all the great technology and data available to achieve that.

It's the expectations that have changed the most. As more marketing departments embrace a modern approach, it has put more pressure on marketers to live up to those expectations. There's a sense of urgency for all marketers to demonstrate just how smart, data-driven and technologically minded they are, and those skills are now "need to have," not “nice to have.”

While it's not the only thing, the use of technology is pretty critical. But anyone can adopt a new piece of software; it's how we put technology to use that really matters. It's amazing what a small company with a relatively small tech stack can accomplish when they get creative. At the end of the day, people matter the most. When you combine great people with great technology, it can be really powerful.

Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions

Modern marketing puts customers at the core and looks at the longer-term commitment of building profitable relationships. It positions companies as mentors sharing expertise their customers need to solve their problems and achieve their goals…It’s measurable, aligned to business objectives and substantiates the brand as truly relevant and a “must-have” in the minds of its audiences.

Buying processes become more complex as new channels emerge, more people are involved in the decision, and relevance is an imperative. Modern marketers need to be able to execute flawlessly and with continuous improvement, but that requires the visibility made available through technology, as well as the insights available from behavioral data that allow us to refine our content and programs on the fly in response.

Yoav Schwartz, CEO, Uberflip

Today's advanced marketer, more than ever before, uses data and insights to drive decisions on what to design and create.

The more data that becomes available, the more modern marketers are expected to leverage it for decision-making. The days of simply collecting data are over. Now marketers are expected to put that data to good use and prove ROI.

Technology is the enabler of modern marketing. Building an effective stack, and ensuring the tools within that stack are tightly knit, are absolutely paramount to achieving a successful feedback loop.

Ray Kemper, CMO, Televerde

I consider modern marketing to be creative storytelling with data that shows impact. The innovation around marketing technology is that it drives a blending of the creativity that marketing is founded upon with a strong lens toward effectiveness. Modern marketing has a respect for testing and learning because every word and layout can drive a better response.

Today, I consider modern marketing to be much closer to tying marketing activities beyond engagement and actually back to revenue. We no longer live in a world where a marketer or CMO is only as good as his or her last campaign. There has been a real shift to a series of targeted campaigns with creativity required to get the right response from a specific audience.

David Honig, VP Strategy, Dynamic Signal

Modern marketing is a science. Long gone are the days where campaigns and spend were driven by gut and anecdotes, where results couldn’t be measured accurately or only in long-term retrospect. Marketers are data-driven and highly analytical, but maintain a strong sense of creative intelligence.

The other key component of this is that modern marketers are keenly focused on the role of content and how it connects with their audiences. Modern marketers realize they need to communicate with customers and prospects the same way people communicate in real life, which is now dominated by social and messaging. We’ve finally come around to learn that our customers, prospects and targeted leads are real people. The way the world has shifted to bring our lives online has continued to blur the line around what is personal and what is professional.

On top of this, the channels in which we share our messages are ever changing, ensuring that the modern marketer is not only a decisive, metrics-driven thought leader, but a technologist who is willing to experiment and learn as the rules of what works in what format are consistently shifting.

Brian Geise, CEO, True Influence

Modern marketing is trending towards "outside-in" rather than "inside out.” In the past,“inside-out" marketers focused on the CRM database for leads. Now “outside-in” activates the web to harness intent buying signals to inform the CRM.

Being a modern marketer means being an early adopter. So much of what we do is based on what data and technology allow, and most of us have now embraced this and committed ourselves to incorporating the most useful new capabilities as quickly as we can.

Utilizing technology and innovation not only improves results; it also helps us avoid disaster. The expectations of our prospects rise as they are exposed to cutting-edge marketing both by our competitors and by vendors in other sectors (B2B and B2C). Failure to keep pace with modern marketing trends can very quickly damage how our prospects perceive us.

Jeff Pedowitz, CEO, The Pedowitz Group

Modern Marketing in 2016 consists of three things:

Developing organizational capabilities around strategy, people, process, technology, customer and results;

Designing, implementing and managing an optimal technology ecosystem that scales the ability to achieve results; and

Designing, running and optimizing effective programs and campaigns that deliver qualified leads and revenue contribution.

You can’t be a Modern Marketer without successfully adopting technology. This goes way beyond Marketing Automation. It means identifying the proper ecosystem components that will drive the revenue engine and engage across the customer lifecycle for a company. Modern marketers truly commit to the customer experience, and maximum customer engagement, and they use technology to innovate and scale.

Seth Lieberman, CEO, SnapApp

Being a modern marketer is less about doing certain activities or managing marketing in a certain way, and more about maintaining a progressive, agile and results-driven mindset.

Modern marketers also increasingly care a lot about connecting with their buyers and producing marketing that resonates to drive action/results.

Modern marketers think about the problems they want to solve (almost always driving revenue-creating events) and from that they assemble the right strategies and technology toolsets so that they can be innovative to drive results/outcomes/progress.

Thanks to all of these thought leaders for sharing their interpretations and insights into what it means to be a modern marketer. If you are heading to Vegas this week for the Modern Marketing Experience event, track down some of these folks in their booths or during their speaking session.

An Interview With Jim D’Arcangelo, SVP of Marketing, Booker Software

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Finny Friday, our monthly blog dedicated to celebrating Killer Content Award winners from throughout the years. Stay tuned for future installments where we dive deeply into what makes killer content.

Effective B2B marketing campaigns are comprised of a variety of factors: engaging content, well-timed messaging and more. However, leveraging an integrated, streamlined technology stack to measure success in real-time and adapt to buyer needs on the fly is increasingly important. This approach is what helped Booker Software win a Finny this past February during our annual Killer Content Awards.

In a recent Killer Content Showcase Series webinar hosted by Demand Gen Report, Jim D’Arcangelo of Booker Software discussed the company’s goals, tactics and best practices for fueling content-driven demand generation initiatives.

Demand Gen Report: What were your goals for developing the content approach?

Jim D’Arcangelo: Our goals come down to our specific audience, market and how we’re pursuing them relative to corporate goals and the goals of our sales team. We start with the company’s key four goals, roll those into what we need to do from a channel perspective, and then roll it into our marketing goals.

Once we have that, we get very analytical and creative in terms of how we’re going to hit those goals. We forecast not only on a monthly basis, but also by the day, for every piece of content and campaign that we do. We also measure for ROI not just for tech stack components, but we also take a look at individual pieces by channel spend and so on.

We run things very tight; and like I said, we drill it down so everyone on the marketing team has a number they are accountable for each month. It all rolls up to sales and corporate goals.

DGR: What made you select your content formats and the overall execution approach?

D’Arcangelo: We did quite a bit of research before entering into the tech services space. We found out that the audience engaged much more with video content versus reading any sort of whitepaper. This was especially true in the SMB space; any sort of lengthy content was generally less engaging.

Along with video being an appealing [content format], our audience is really engaged with end-customers – in this case dogs – much more so than many categories. We found that if we wrapped that background information along with [the buyer’s preferences], we were able to combine it all into a video campaign that drove significant results. By the end of the month, we saw a 25% increase in the number of inbound leads generated.

DGR: How did you establish your content promotion and amplification method and what channels were included?

D’Arcangelo: We tested a variety of social media [channels] when promoting. It became extremely important relative to targeting SMB service companies. We found Facebook to be extremely powerful for us. The other channels, such as YouTube, were important, but Facebook really carried the day. We used Sprout Social to drive our measures and direction via the social channels.

We’ve done more market research on our space and the drivers for how buyers engage content, companies and brands — we’ve also assessed the data and analytics from our blog. In doing so, we’ve found that there are different ways to reach audiences and engage them far beyond the buyer journey. This month we are upping the ante on our blog content, and when we mix and merge [content selections], we see a huge uptick in engagement. On a week-over-week basis since launching our blog, sheBOOM, we’ve seen a 50-60% increase in unique visitors.

DGR: What are some key lessons learned from this process that you'd like other marketers to take with them for future campaigns?

D’Arcangelo: The biggest lesson-learned would be that the customer buyer journey never ends — it keeps evolving, becoming more detailed and complex. Customer advocacy, for example, was small at the beginning but has since grown into one of our bigger lead drivers. Content consumption, and the way buyers can be reached, will also evolve. Once you invest in the foundation of your tech stack and your approach to content-driven demand generation, you can increasingly jack up the efficiency just by understanding data and analytics.

Last lesson I’d share is for the tech stack itself. Each month, it’s important to assess our tech stack. Use conferences as a means to learn about key vendors at once, and keep your knowledge of the technology up-to-date.

By Brian Anderson, News Editor

(Image Courtesy of Paul Vogelzang)

Like possibly many people in the B2B marketplace, I was excited when I received my copy of Dan Lyons’ book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble. The look-behind-the-curtain of one of the biggest players in marketing technology was really intriguing to me; I also was eager to see what Lyons could possibly have to say that would cause two executives to do some allegedly illegal things to get an early gander at it.

The book does a great job describing — often in hilarious detail — what it’s like working at a tech start-up. While reading, I got into the habit of comparing my experiences to Lyons’, and I came away with a few key thoughts on company culture and how it’s impacting B2B start-ups today.

Check them out below, and let me know if you agree:

1) Company Culture Can Get Weird

It’s not that common nowadays to hear marketing managers and demand gen directors describe their job as the “typical nine-to-five.” Whether it’s having every Friday at 4:30pm slotted as “Beer-Thirty” on your Google Calendar, or creating your own corporate jargon and job titles to have employees feel entitled (ex. Company Evangelist or Social Marketing Superstar), there are quirky aspects of each company that attract — and repel — potential employees.

2) Weird Can Work

But honestly, just because a company has an unorthodox approach to operating a business doesn’t make it wrong. HubSpot is a perfect example. Lyons talks about the candy walls, Nerf gun fights, company jargon and employees “graduating” from the company, but HubSpot raised $125 million when it went public in October 2014. The company has branded itself in a way that’s appealing to prospective buyers (and employees). If it isn’t broke, why fix it?

3) The Times They Are A’ Changin’

Marketing departments no longer look like a scene out of the TV show Mad Men. Lyons spends the first few chapters of the book analyzing the dotcom bubble of the 90s and comparing it to today’s tech bonanza. Ridiculous amounts of money are being invested into organizations that don’t even have something to sell yet — just an idea. Lyons begins his book with the above quote from Grampa Simpson, illustrating how many folks fear today’s rapid pace of change — in their personal and professional lives. However, Lyons continues, it’s more important than ever to adapt to changing work environments, buyer behaviors and employee expectations to find success.

By Carol Krol, Editor-in-Chief

As a journalist, I’ve covered the evolution of marketing and advertising for 15+ years, with a focus on direct and digital marketing. Direct marketers in particular have been powerful advocates of predictive analytics and data mining for one-to-one customer success for more than a decade, yet it is only recently that B2B marketers have begun to adopt predictive analytics and powerful customer engagement tools.

The difference is obviously in the technology and the ability to apply that to automate these processes. That technology is available in abundance, but the majority of marketers have yet to take advantage of it. Two reports came out this week to address the issue from different angles.

Merkle, a database marketing provider, released its fifth annual “Marketing Imperatives” report this week, which details the continuing evolution of digital marketing. The report includes a closer look at the diverse and fragmented landscape of digital platforms.

“The emergence of addressable digital platforms has given rise to countless possibilities for building individual-level customer relationships,” the report said.

“By the end of the decade, we’ll be navigating thousands of platforms in our quest to master people-based marketing. As a holder of first-party data, your brand now has access to a vast and growing ecosystem within which to activate it in new and innovative ways. But be aware, the execution landscape for people-based marketing is diverse and fragmented, and while the market works toward bringing it all together, there are still several people-based ecosystems to navigate.” Indeed.

Another survey published this week, this one by Accenture, found that while automation and the growing sophistication of tools is transforming sales organizations, with Global 2000 firms spending $2.4 trillion on digital sales channels and tools, companies have yet to maximize their potential.  The company outlined several reasons for this particular disconnect and suggested ways to solve it.

According to the survey, 80% of companies have adopted a CRM system and a majority of them have deployed tools across the entire sales process. Despite that, turnover rates of sales reps are up 22% and 60% of respondents said they lack confidence in meeting their targets. At the root of these results is a disconnect between the sales executives who design and implement the tools and the reps who use them, according to the company.

“Empowering Your Sales Force: It’s Not Just Automation, It’s Personal,” conducted by Accenture Interactive among more than 800 sales professionals, found that companies have an opportunity to rethink their approach to sales enablement by aligning digital tools to the sales reps’ and customers’ needs. The study was combined with data from the CSO Insights: 2015 Sales Performance Optimization Study to gain a comprehensive understanding of sales tools usage and perceptions.

Misaligned Objectives

In the Accenture study, sales leaders cited “capturing new accounts” as their number one objective (58%), while sales reps cite “improving customer satisfaction” as their biggest goal (36%). The reps’ approach has evolved toward pull-based, collaborative, guided selling with a focus on deepening customer relationships. That means sales leadership is providing tools for new account capture, while sales reps are actually seeking tools to help collaborative selling efforts.

“As companies strive to improve sales effectiveness, they need to fundamentally rethink their approach to digital within their sales organizations,” said Jose Goncalves, MD and Global Digital Sales Lead, Accenture Interactive. “Rather than a top-down, enterprise approach, companies need to take a people-first approach that listens to the sales force and marries their needs with tools that deliver data-driven, flexible and personalized omnichannel experiences that help them sell smarter and drive the bottom line.”

And while sales tools grow increasingly sophisticated, only 13% of salespeople said they use their full capabilities. Seventy-five percent acknowledged the sales tools provided to them are an important part of the sales process, but more than half found them more an “obstacle than a facilitator to their sales performance.”

In addition, the study revealed that:

Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they are required to use too many tools;

Fifty-eight percent of study participants felt tools are used more to monitor performance than to increase performance (trust); and

Fifty-six percent felt tools are not customized to their needs.

Make It Personal

To address the gap, Accenture suggested organizations rethink sales tools through the lens of service design. When designed through the eyes of the rep, the company said, sales tools can match the way salespeople sell and engage in customer dialogue – no longer just providing reporting and tracking features, but tools that are also as personalized and easy to use as the services reps are using in their daily lives.

Accenture said sales organizations need to shift away from a top-down approach designed from an enterprise lens. Instead, organizations should adopt a service design lens that puts salespeople first and adheres to the following three principals:

Follow human-centered design.

Identify critical data to measurably improve the guided selling experience.

Leverage the highly flexible technology platforms available.

By Carol Krol, Editor-in-Chief

Marketers face an ever-expanding array of available technology and a need to harness it to improve their work. As a result, they are beginning to borrow from the software developer playbook, according to Scott Brinker, editor of chiefmartec.com and founder and CTO of ion interactive, in his keynote remarks at MarTech in San Francisco.

As marketing becomes a software-powered profession, Brinker said marketers can learn to adapt and “think like an engineer” using the classic agile and lean approach developers have refined over time.  That approach, namely taking the time horizon of a given project and breaking it down into smaller, iterative cycles, can be applied to great effect by the marketer community.

“It is still good to have high-level strategy, but marketers have gone to a more agile approach,” Brinker said, with phased sprints along the way.

He explained that each sprint is an opportunity for marketers to:

Respond to new events and information;

Deploy viable work into market sooner;

Adjust the approach based on feedback;

Stop wasting time on ineffective programs; and

Experiment with innovative new ideas.

“This is a great example of marketing borrowing the ideas and improvising agile to work within their organization,” Brinker said. The idea is also the foundation of his book, “Hacking Marketing,” which publishes this month.

Brinker explained that marketing used to be created at the intersection of messages – “what you say” – and media – “where you say it,” but that now marketing has added a third element: mechanism. The mechanism can be things like blogs, e-books, reports, webinars, assessments, calculators and quizzes.

That combination, he said, “is the art of communications in a digital world and the art of customer experience.”

Brinker cited a recent Dell B2B project as a good example of incorporating the third element. Dell wanted to target IT managers responsible for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) management in their organizations. Rather than a static content asset, they devised a set of questions for this audience, which touched on concerns such as use of personal devices in the corporate network and additional questions with increasing complexity around device management. The user could take the quiz and then click to see their results. At the same time, Dell provided additional information and links to relevant Dell as well as third-party content. The campaign was successful, and Dell has continued to develop similar interactive content.

Experimentation and testing, he said, is central to an agile approach to marketing. The access to data affords marketers the ability to leverage software to see patterns in the data that were not available in the past. Brinker said, “To be able to activate data, you have to run tests.” And those tests can provide “meaningful learning that is more valuable than optimization,” he said.

He cautioned that marketers should make sure there is senior management support for testing and experimentation and a culture that encourages it.

By Brian Anderson, News Editor

Photo Credit: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

You don’t have to be following the 2016 Presidential Primaries in the U.S. to know that things are getting rather heated for both parties. Oftentimes candidates resort to screaming over one another to get their point across to their target audience. While the debate might become inaudible sometimes, there has been clear evidence that some candidates have put a lot of time and effort into researching their prospective voters.

While demographics are still a staple in both marketing and political campaigns the focus is turning more to audience behavior. A study from HotWire PR concluded that marketers are no longer focusing on audience age in their marketing campaigns. Instead, marketers are looking to focus on their audiences’ passions instead of their age or location.

After listening to a number of political debates, and following the news analysis afterwards, I’ve noticed similarities between political and B2B marketing campaign best practices — primarily when it comes to communicating with a target audience. Here are three takeaways I’ve gained from this year’s Presidential Primaries that can have a positive impact on any B2B marketing campaign:

1.     Stop The Conceited Messaging

Ultimately, self-centered content can only get a company so far with their prospective buyers. Similarly, Trump’s attitude has played well until recently, but the candidate is beginning to see a concerted effort by pundits and politicians to discredit and blame him for his divisive rhetoric and even contest his candidacy.

Conceited messaging also can be found in the form of belittling competitors within content. While it’s important to highlight your company’s competitive positioning, focusing too much on your perceived competitor’s flaws can do more harm than good. A similar example can be found in Senator Marco Rubio’s notable hiccup during the Republican Presidential Debate in New Hampshire where he repeated the same phrase about President Obama’s record multiple times. The crowd turned against him, and he has since been playing catch-up behind other nominees.

2.     Understand Your Buyers

Today’s B2B marketers can access a plethora of available audience data that they can use to target prospective buyers. The information provided by individual buyers is often most valuable when it provides a holistic view of target audiences. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, carefully identified her target audience — and her message style — when she announced her bid to run for President online with a 2-minute commercial.

Understanding your buyers’ needs can provide  insight into multiple components of a marketing campaign — from creating content to enhancing targeting capabilities through email and social channels.

3.     Be Authentic

Author and Historian Craig Shirley addressed the topic of authenticity on CNN when the 2016 race for the White House began. He said voters are looking for a candidate that speaks the truth instead of the vanity metrics they hear coming from all the other candidates.

By Andrew Gaffney, Editorial Director

Editor’s note: As part of a special arrangement, the article below has been syndicated from the Content4Demand blog.

G3 Communications has been publishing Demand Gen Report for more than eight years, and from the first day there has always been debate about whether or not marketers should require buyers to fill out a form in order to access content.

This discussion was raised again during David Meerman Scott’s keynote presentation at last month’s Content2Conversion Conference in Arizona. To highlight the bigger potential impact of openly sharing content, the New Rules of Marketing & PR author pointed to none other than The Grateful Dead.

While most musical acts strictly prohibit their audience from recording live shows, Scott pointed out that “The Dead” has always allowed and even encouraged fans to record shows and share them with other Dead Heads. He argued that openly sharing recordings of their shows has helped the band create a thriving and loyal community that has flocked to their shows over the past 5 decades.

This example may seem like a stretch for a marketing executive on the hook for driving leads. For marketers, content offers are the currency that drives their campaigns, so making assets available without filling out a single field sounds ridiculous.

But Scott did share real-world B2B examples where removing the gate is having significant payoffs, such as MailerMailer, which saw 20x to 50x more downloads once it stopped gating its content.

Scott’s theory is also supported by several data points that came out of our 2016 Content Preferences Study, including:

93% of buyers recommend that brands make content easier to access by using shorter forms.

Content is increasingly becoming viral, with 85% of respondents saying they share content via LinkedIn occasionally or frequently; and 78% say they get more of their content through social networks or peer recommendations.

A whopping 82% of respondents say they access business-related content on smartphones, and 56% saying they do the same on tablets. But the fact is that mobile devices aren’t ideal screens for filling out forms and downloading content for later viewing.

These new realities present a compelling case that encourages marketers to think through the traditional exchange that takes place between a brand and a prospective buyer. Marketers are increasingly accountable to show results and gather intelligence on their buyers, but they need to find new tools and platforms to gather these insights. The reality is they need to become less dependent on landing pages that require buyers to fill out 10 fields of information to access an asset.

As we established earlier, content is currency and there should be some value placed on the assets brands are creating, especially high-value assets that include proprietary research or original data. In fact, the 2016 Preferences Study validated that buyers expect and are willing to fill out forms in order to access high-value content. Here are some specific variances where executives are willing to pass through a “gate”:

79% said they are willing to register for a white paper

77% for webinars

63% will register for E-books

51% will register for case studies

Conversely, while interactive content is growing in popularity, the expectation is that these assets should be ungated, with only 31% expecting to register for ROI calculators, 37% for infographics and 23% for videos and motion graphics.

The solution for dealing with this perfect storm for many B2B marketers is a hybrid approach, where high-value assets such as E-books and white papers remain gated, while short-form derivative pieces are immediately available to access and share.