What Would Shakespeare Say About Modern Marketing? 7 Quotes from the Bard Content Creators Can ...

What would William Shakespeare, the Immortal Bard, say about modern-day marketing and content creation? Short of discovering how to time travel, we’ll never know. However, his works might give us some idea or at least a little inspiration.

 

1. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.”

As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

Marketers each have their own roles and responsibilities, but they have to be prepared to wear many hats. A content manager might act as a writer, editor, publisher, and project manager. But who then edits the editor? How about another marketer? Is anyone available? Who else has an eye for copy? The designer? Marketing manager?  Be sure to check around. Your marketing team is going to have talents you never knew.

 

2. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5

Many people are born with talent, but use is talent if you never hone it? If you never practice or get try to get better? You might have someone on the team with a keen eye for design. They just seem to know almost intuitively what works on an email or landing page. But are they keeping up with industry trends? With the competition? Are they challenging themselves with new designs and trying to see how those designs work with copy? Content marketing is not the work one of person after all; it is the work of many: the writer, editor, designer, and anyone who has a stake in the project. Does your designer know how to work with a team? Keeping your skills sharp and knowing when to put your ego aside and being a good teammate is you can achieve greatness in content creation.

 

3. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1

We are all mortal, and we are all people, so marketers can relate to their target audiences. Your customers have wants, needs, and preferences. Your marketing is offering them information and a solution (sometimes to problems they might not even know they have yet). In short, you, the marketer, are trying to make their lives and jobs easier. We all have dreams we want to achieve, and the marketing automation solution you offer, the digital analytics platform, or just the insights you can provide into their industry or the B2B or B2C world can help come just that little bit closer to helping them achieve their goals and ambitions.

 

4. “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2

How much is too much? In the era of digital marketing, you might only have so much space to make your point. Emails don’t tend to be more than a couple of paragraphs, if that. A social post will probably only be a line or two. A blog can be longer, but you don’t need to write a novel. Even with any guides, pdfs, or how-to’s you create, you don’t want to overstay our welcome. You want to make your point as succinctly as possible, as to not waste your audience’s time. Get to the point. Make your marketing only as long or short as it needs to be, especially when you are considering mobile. And also consider that you don’t need to send email after email, and post on social all the time. Find the right amount of emails to send and social posts to do and blogs to publish per week that works for you. Just don’t go overboard.

 

5. “There are more things in heaven or earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

No marketer knows everything. No person does. Thankfully, though, you have data that you can work with that at least gives you some of the answers or indicators of what they might be. What do your audiences want? What are their interests and preferences? The answers might be things you never thought of, but the data will tell the tale.

 

6. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not within the stars, but in ourselves, that we are mere underlings.” 

Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2

It is important that marketers have a plan in place. What should a marketing plan consist of? It should at least have messaging, an understanding of your audience and product, a content strategy and calendar, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities for everyone on your team. If you don’t have viable plan in place, you can’t blame anyone but yourself when thing don’t go your way. You can’t rely on luck or random chance. You have to rely on yourself and your team to achieve success.

 

7. “Nothing will come of nothing.”

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1

Of course, you actually have to sit down and do the work. Look at the data and analyze. Formulate a plan and get started. Create the email, guide, or case study. Shoot the video.  Send it out at the optimized send time. Promote your asset on social. Take in feedback, and have it inform the next project. Things don’t always just happen; you have to make them happen.

                                                                                                                       

Your marketing doesn’t have to be Shakespearean, but it should strike a chord with your audience. The best way to do so is to work off the data you have to see what resonates with whom you’re targeting. A customer data platform is a good place to start with that. See how you can “Do More with Customer Data Platforms.”

Go to the guide.

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Persistence Arises from Gratitude

If you ask virtually any working artist how they developed a creative career, they’ll mention a dedication to their craft...

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Tapping into the Experience Economy - Trends and Best Practices with Dan Gingiss

Originally published at: https://blogs.oracle.com/cx/tapping-into-the-experience-economy-trends-and-best-practices-with-dan-gingiss

Ignited by his marketing and customer experience (CX) background at Fortune 300 companies, Dan Gingiss is on a burning mission to “make the brand lovers louder than the haters by creating experiences they can’t wait to share with their friends and followers.”

Gingiss is a keynote speaker, experience consultant, co-host of the “Experience This!” podcast, and contributor to Forbes with both of his ears keenly tuned to everything CX. That means he’s increasingly focused on the “Experience Economy”—a shift in power in which customers drive innovation and view their brand experiences as inseparable from a brand’s products and services. We asked what CX trends, tactics, and best practices are on his radar, and which brands are leading in this fascinating era.

What best practices are separating the leaders from the pack?

It may sound simplistic, but the first is essential: They are their own customer! Your consumer instincts will be pretty accurate with what your customers are thinking about their experience with you.

The second insight is they understand that the customer journey is not linear. In the past, we researched, considered, bought, and used. But not anymore. It’s vital for companies to know there's a lot of back and forth, pauses and sideways. We go on tangents and look at competitors.

Related to that is my third observation which is that leaders must eliminate organizational silos because those were built for a linear customer journey. Customers view organizations as a single experience. When we are organized in a siloed way,  we create siloed customer experiences.

Small changes make a big difference. Starting a CX program doesn't have to require millions of dollars in infrastructure. It’s about finding and fixing the small parts of your experience that cause customer pain.

Is CX in B2B as important as in B2C?

Yes, they’re equally important. I’m often asked, “I work for a B2B company. Does this apply to me?” My answer, which is not meant to sound sarcastic, is, “Are you marketing to humans?” Just because you’re in B2B doesn’t mean you're marketing to a building. The human you market to is a consumer who has had amazing CX experiences on a B2C level and expects the same from all companies, including B2B.

Beyond the CX giants of Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, who else should we watch?

I used to work for this company, and I swear they’re not paying me to say this, but Discover is a great example. It’s the nation’s smallest major credit card company, so leaders realized early on they needed an exceptional differentiator: customer experience.

Discover is the only credit card company where the customer service is 100% based in the United States. When you call, the agent answers with, "Hi. I'm Sally in Phoenix." Oftentimes, the customer's first response is happiness that they're talking to someone in the US.  

They also focus on simplicity of the digital experience. They found all the places that required two clicks and reduced them to one click. That and similar changes make it easy for consumers to do business with Discover. For example, a key customer pain point was that people didn't like being upsold when their call purpose was service, so Discover eliminated it. That was smart to say, “We know this is a painful part of our industry and we're no longer participating in it.”

Starbucks has also done exceptional work drilling down to customers’ likes and dislikes. The first two “likes” are product consistency and a terrific rewards program. Also, they are one of the nation’s leaders in the prepaid market, because their mobile payment option is incredibly easy to use.

Another company to watch is Imperfect Produce, based in San Francisco. They source fruits and vegetables farmers can't sell to supermarkets because they're not as pretty, but they’re just as tasty and nutritious. Imperfect Produce is absolutely nailing a social issue, with reminders that you're doing good for the world by helping farmers and eliminating food waste. They added gamification to their app so as you continue to buy from them, you can see how many pounds of produce you personally saved from the landfill, plus the equivalent CO2 and water savings from farmers not having to replant.

What channels for augmenting CX are making a difference?

You may have noticed a theme here that augmenting CX results in significant impacts. These companies I discussed combine multiple aspects of their business—remember eliminating silos?—into creating a great experience. Self-service channels such as Google, apps, and websites are important, particularly for Gen X and younger, as they prefer to solve problems themselves. Emailing, chatting, or—as a last-ditch effort—calling will be frustrating for them.

Another trend is “private social”—social media direct messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Twitter direct message. Companies like them because customers complain in private instead of in public on social media. Customers like them because they’re fast and easy with no active wait for an answer. Responses can sit in customers’ inboxes until they’re ready to read them.

The Last Word

Excelling in customer experience and the Experience Economy can be daunting, to be sure. However, industry leader Dan Gingiss distills his observations to a few key themes: embrace the Experience Economy in which customers are in charge, work together, and extend CX beyond B2C to B2B. For more information about how Oracle CX Unity helps businesses master the Experience Economy, click here.

                                                                     

Curious about what tools can help marketers succeed in the new era of data-driven marketing and the Experience Economy?

Visit Oracle Marketing Cloud.

 

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An Inside Look at Google’s Future Plans

Everyone talks about algorithm updates, but Google does a whole lot more than adjust algorithms.

Some of the moves they are making are really going to impact your marketing efforts.

So, what are these non-algorithm changes?

Well before I get into them, keep in mind that you aren’t going to like some of them, and that’s ok. Instead, I want you to focus your energy on how you can leverage these changes before your competition.

Let’s get started…

Change #1: Google executives are big on “ambient computing”

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of ambient computing, here’s a quick definition:

Ambient computing is a term that encompasses many different concepts. At its core, it is the combination of hardware, software, user experience, and machine/human interaction and learning, all of these things becoming the idea of using a computer or internet-enabled device, without necessarily consciously using it.

In other words, Google wants you to use them 24/7 no matter where you are or what you are doing. They are doing this by integrating products everywhere.

Whether it is Nest, Android devices, Chromebooks, smartwatches, Google Home, or anything else they can drum up.

Because their mission is to spread the usage of all Google related products, it will eventually open up new ways for you to drive traffic and monetize.

An obvious example is to create apps on mobile devices that work on Android phones. Uber, Netflix, and Candy Crush are all examples of apps that work on Android devices.

You already know about apps, but I bet you don’t have one.

To give you an idea of how well you can do with a mobile app, there are roughly 2 million mobile apps, and there are over 13 billion mobile devices.

Of course, a lot of those devices are old or in landfills. But still, there aren’t that many apps for how many mobile devices that exist. Especially when you consider that there are over 1,518,207,414 websites.

In other words, there are 759 times more websites than apps, so consider creating one. 😉

If you don’t know how you can always use services like Build Fire.

And in addition to apps, you’ll need to start looking at generating traffic through all voice devices. Phones, watches, and even the smart home assistants that Google is creating leverage voice search.

Using tools like Jetson.ai will help you create a voice version of your website so you can collect sales and leads.

If you don’t think voice search is that important, 50% of searches are now voice-based.

Again, just like an app, I bet you don’t a voice search version of your website.

Question is, are you going to create one first or is your competition?

Change #2: Future generations are more likely to be hooked on Google devices

Do you have a Chromebook? Chances are you don’t.

But if you have kids, or nieces or nephews, ask them if they have ever used a Chromebook.

Chromebooks are not only affordable, but they are taking over the world, at least when it comes to millennials and generation z.

Just look at the percentages of schools that use Chromebooks.

In some countries like the United States, 60% of the schools use Chromebooks.

That’s a ridiculously high percentage.

Apple has also been trying to penetrate classrooms, but they haven’t been having the same success as Google.

All this means is that kids are going to grow up using Google devices and fall into their ecosystem.

Sure, social sites like Instagram, Tiktok, or whatever else is new will always be popular, but the chances are these young kids will get to those sites using a Google device.

Even though Google isn’t as sexy as it once was, you shouldn’t take it for granted. It’s not going anywhere, and future generations will continue to leverage them. Just don’t drop your eye on Google and you’ll be fine.

Change #3: Expect Google to buy someone big in the ecommerce space

When you think of ecommerce, what name comes to mind?

I bet you are thinking of Amazon.

We all use Amazon and, of course, every major tech company wants a slice of the ecommerce market.

Even when I’m using a search engine to find something to buy, I usually click on an Amazon listing because we all love their Prime shipping feature.

Google’s been trying to take a piece of that market for years. From shopping actions to Google Shopping nothing has really been too effective.

As consumers, we are just trained to go to Amazon to buy stuff.

And if you aren’t going to Amazon, you are probably going to Walmart or one of their online stores that they own all around the world.

To make matters worse, Walmart has removed all of its products from Google Shopping.

Google hasn’t made any big ecommerce or commerce purchases in general but you can expect that to change.

They may decide to buy a grocery delivery company like Instacart, but knowing them, I believe they will stick with the software, just like most things that they are doing.

Expect them to go after Amazon by helping people create their own ecommerce site. Whether it is through a Shopify acquisition or Bigcommerce or any other platform out there, they want to own the ecommerce market.

It’s going to be too tough to go head-on with Amazon, and that’s I think they will take a different route and go after a platform like Shopify.

If you are selling products online you should, of course, be on Amazon, but don’t rely on them. Make sure you have your own website and look to see what platform play Google makes as you may eventually want to consider moving over to whatever they buy.

Change #4: Google will dominate the hardware industry

And no, I don’t mean they are going to create something better than an iPad or an iPhone.

Apple, at its core, is a hardware company and they are clearly the winner when it comes to producing amazing devices that we use. But there is a big issue with Apple devices and even Samsung devices.

They are expensive.

If you want to buy a brand new iPhone, expect to drop $699 for the lowest model.

Google, on the other hand, does have high-end devices, but they also try and produce affordable devices. They also let other manufacturers use their operating system for their phones.

Their goal isn’t to make the most money per phone. Their goal is to get everyone in the world using their hardware.

Why?

Because that means they are collecting more data and that allows them to generate the most amount of money from advertising because all of these devices drive people to their search engine that is filled with ads.

It’s a pretty smart move.

I highly recommend that you watch this…

They aren’t just using this strategy with their phones, they are trying to make all of their products affordable. That way people all over the world can afford them.

Because if you live in places like Brazil or India, Apple devices are too expensive, which leads people to choose a Google device.

Less than 5% of the world lives in the United States… the money is in the global markets.

If you are debating which platform to build on, consider Google, even if it isn’t the sexist due to sheer volume. Android’s market share is roughly 87% because of its affordable hardware and partnerships.

Change #5: Expect Google Ads to go offline

Right now you mainly see ads on their search engine.

Yes, you will also find ads on some of their other properties like Maps, but expect them to be everywhere.

For the first time, the 2019 digital ad spend overtook traditional ad dollars in the United States.

But still, ad dollars offline is more than a hundred billion-dollar industry, and that’s just in the United States.

Over the next few years, I bet you’ll see Google dip into offline advertising.

Just think of it this way. Google owns Waymo, a self-driving Uber type of service that is growing fast in popularity.

They have data from the Google devices in your home and the watch on your wrist and they know where you going through Waymo… essentially, they have more data on you than anyone else.

Heck, they are even starting to offer checking accounts.

With all of that data, who better to serve you offline ads? They’ll be able to target people better and make them more relevant.

This will also increase the value (cost) of offline ads as well as online ads in the long run.

Change #6: Search results won’t look the same in the future

You are probably going to hate this change the most, but it will also make their search engine more usable.

They are testing a lot of different ad types.

For example, as a business, you can collect leads through Google.

And eventually, you’ll just be able to book a hotel room right on their search engine without going to the hotel’s website.

The same will happen with mortgages, auto insurance, and many more industries.

This doesn’t mean that SEO will be dead or no one will go to your site from search engines, it just means you will have to adapt.

For example, you can create educational-based content, rank highly, and when people land on your website, you can convert them through sales funnels.

You can also use tools like Hello Bar to create sliders and popups to drive visitors to your money pages.

Conclusion

The future isn’t going to look the same. Companies like Tesla aren’t the only ones who are innovating, most big companies are.

Don’t expect Google to just stay the same and not adapt just like every other tech company is trying to do.

It’s the only way to stay ahead and win.

As marketers and entrepreneurs, Google won’t be the only one disrupting how you are growing your sales and traffic. But instead of getting upset or complaining, accept it.

Be productive with your time and focus on adapting. Because when you are adapting while your competition is complaining, you’ll win.

What other changes do you see Google making in the future?

The post An Inside Look at Google’s Future Plans appeared first on Neil Patel.

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The Old Man and The Pen

This is a simple story about the life of a particular writer, and how he ignored the one thing about...

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Maximizing Your Email Audience Potential: Turning Email Addresses on File into Opt-Ins

Everyone wants more subscribers who are regularly converting. While going out and attracting new, high-value subscribers is one path that every brand should explore, it’s also the most expensive. That’s because these subscribers are at the very top of the Email Audience Potential Pyramid. Thankfully, there are many other paths open to marketers to achieve their goals when they take a step-by-step approach to maximizing their email audience potential.

One of those approaches is to leverage the email addresses you have on file and try to get more of those folks to opt in for marketing emails. That moves them from the first step on the pyramid to the second step—and some will take another step or two upward, generating even more value for your email program.

With an email address serving as a means of customer identification across much of the digital landscape, when you already know a person’s email address, it’s much easier to reach them than someone who hasn’t shared their email address with you yet. Mining your “un-reachable” email subscriber list can reveal several opportunities to engage these people and grow your business, both via the email channel and other channels.

Deciding How to Approach Non-Opted-In Contacts

Prospects and customers who have given you their email address, but are not currently opted into promotional email marketing fall into one of two groups:

1. People who retracted their email permission. These are former subscribers. They received your marketing emails for a while, but ultimately decided that your emails weren’t relevant enough or that email was no longer their preferred way of receiving your marketing messages. 

2. People who have never granted you email permission. These folks shared their email address with you as part of a registration or purchase, for example, but never opted in for marketing emails. They didn’t sign up because either they aren’t aware that you offer these emails, or they weren’t convinced of the value of signing up for them. 

The first step in developing a strategy for how to approach the people in each of those groups is to better understand them and why they aren’t subscribed. Leverage first-party and possibly third-party data to find for the following data points:

For former subscribers:

• Acquired date: How long ago was each former subscriber acquired?

• Opt-out date: Did they opt out right away or after a period of time?

• Email engagement data: Were they ever engaged with your promotional email? If so, what was their engagement level?

For all non-opted-in contacts:

• Other digital engagement: Are these contacts active on your website, apps, and social media properties?

• Customer value or purchase data: How valuable are these contacts to the business overall? What have they each purchased in the past? What is the value of their past purchases?

• Attribute data: Who are they? Besides purchases, what other forms of engagement have they exhibited? What are their interests or hobbies? Where are they geographically located? What age are they? Are they currently in market? Those are just a few of the questions that might be applicable to your audience.

These types of data points can begin to reveal your opportunity size and targeting strategy within your non-opted-in audience. Here are some of the persona groups that you’re likely to find and what, if anything, you should do to address them:

Low-Priority Groups

The following two groups are of relatively low value. Let’s look at each of them and the action that we recommend you take:

Customers and prospects who no longer fit your demographic. Consumers change. They move away from your stores and change jobs. Their incomes and their interests change. Leverage available attribute data to determine if the non-opted-in contact is still a fit for your product or service. 

Recommended action: If they no longer fit your demographic target, consider removing them from your list-building efforts

High-value customers who have opted out. These customers are already top performers for you. Your relationship with them is already strong, so don’t try to fix or spend money on what’s clearly not broken.

Recommended action: Use their email address as an identifier for digital targeting in other channels. Just because they aren’t engaged with email, doesn’t mean their email address isn’t valuable. Consider leveraging their email address to identify them across the digital landscape, targeting them with ads or promotions in custom audiences, display targeting, lightbox targeting, etc. Use attribute data to personalize those ads and messages.

High-Priority Groups

The following two groups are of relatively high value. This is where you should focus your attention. Let’s look at each of them and the actions that we recommend you take:

Customers who have never opted in to receive promotional emails

These are customers who know and like your brand and purchase at least occasionally. They haven’t signed up for your email program because they either don’t prefer to communicate with brands with email or you haven’t done a good job of selling them on the benefits of subscribing. 

Recommended actions:

• Use all of your owned media to help drive customers to become subscribers. 

• Clearly define and communicate a value proposition for your email program.

• Ensure your email capture user experience follows best practices.

We explore each of those action items—and more—in the first post in our “Maximizing Your Email Audience Potential” series, which is about how to optimize your email signup forms.

Former subscribers who were engaged purchasers

Because they experienced at least some value from your email program previously, this group is more likely to respond to a re-opt-in prompt than those who never engaged in any manner. This group should be toward the top of your priority list.

Recommended action:

• Leverage their email address and cookies to identify these contacts and deliver a personalized prompt to resubscribe. For example, if through a cookied ID or login you know your opted-out subscriber is on your site, consider personalizing the prompt to them with first-name personalization, imagery that fits their known profile, and really sell them on the benefits of signing up. For former subscribers who opted out long ago, stress what’s new about your email program, such as personalized recommendations or improved email preferences, for example.

The Bottom Line

Just like retaining a customer is far cheaper than getting a new one, turning a person that you have an email address for into an email subscriber is far cheaper than attracting a new subscriber from nothing. If you know someone’s email address, then they’re already standing on the first step of your email program’s pyramid. Encourage them to take the next step and some will surprise you and climb all the way to the top and become high value, regularly converting subscribers. And who couldn’t use more of those?

Want more ways to maximize your email audience potential? Check out:

• Maximizing Your Email Audience Potential: Optimizing Your Email Signup Forms

—————

Need help growing your email audience? Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including audience experts on our List Growth & Demand Generation Services team.

Learn more or reach out to us at OMCconsulting@oracle.com.

For more information about email marketing and the tools needed to make it successful, check out Oracle Marketing Cloud.

 

 

 

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5 Lead Management Best Practices That Build Account-Based Marketing Success

Originally published at: https://blogs.oracle.com/cx/5-lead-management-best-practices-that-build-account-based-marketing-success

Lead generation and lead management both play an equally important role in fueling the revenue engine for your business. Where lead generation creates interest among your target audiences, lead management tracks, manages, and engages these leads to qualify them for sales.

However, the rules of B2B engagement are quickly changing. Brands are embracing account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, which revolve around engaging the right buyers, not just generating thousands of unqualified leads. It brings together the right people in your organization to develop coordinated strategies for engaging, converting, and expanding target accounts. As B2B organizations prioritize lead quality over quantity, marketing and sales must take a sophisticated, data-driven approach to lead management. According to SiriusDecisions, there are three ways organizations can think about this:

1. Large accounts: “A very small number of large existing or targeted accounts.” Some call this “one-to-one,” as this is when they employ highly targeted marketing and engagement tactics, such as including the company name in a piece of content, landing page, etc.

2. Named accounts: “A moderate or larger number of defined existing or targeted accounts.” This is also known as “one-to-few” ABM.

3. Industries/segments: “A moderate or larger number of new or existing accounts in the same vertical or other specific segment,” also known as “one-to-many” ABM.

Effective lead management improves alignment between marketing and sales to better identify and prioritize high-quality leads for sales outreach. This means focusing on key accounts with a high intent to buy. However, few organizations have a solid process to successfully prioritize and identify those accounts, impacting the organization’s ability to reach and exceed revenue targets.

5 Core Best Practices for ABM Success

1. Align sales and marketing around the buyer’s common goal. This has been a popular narrative in the B2B world as organizations work to create more seamless customer experiences across all channels. Every buyer journey is unique. Some may never interact with sales while others expect a high-touch, consultative experience. It’s up to sales and marketing to have unified goals and follow a cohesive brand story and approach to buyer engagement. Therefore, any combination of sales and marketing can be ready to assist buyers wherever they are in the decision-making process.

“The job of defining shared goals may at first glance seem like a marketing job, but there’s a key role for sales operations to play.” says Steve Silver, Service Director of Sales Operations Strategies at SiriusDecisions. “Sales ops is in a unique position to reach across organizational boundaries and help synthesize revenue generation targets handed down by sales leaders, provide practical suggestions for mapping go-to-market strategy to account and territory assignments, plus translate these decisions into reliable sales forecasting data so that even finance is working from the same clear picture as sales and marketing.”

2. Prioritize accounts. In order to identify and prioritize the right accounts, you need robust, connected data. Company data including location, industry, and revenue, plus online signals such as new acquisitions, hires and funding rounds can help you select accounts that are most likely to buy—even when it may not seem obvious to your sales operations or demand generation team. This data should integrate into your CRM environment, so both sales and marketing have a comprehensive view of the accounts. Marketing can leverage these insights to fuel marketing campaigns while sales can use data to guide account and territory planning. Your ABM approach (one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many) will dictate how many accounts you need to select.

3. Enrich account insights. Typically, sales and marketing have an established lead scoring method, aligning certain behaviors and actions to a numerical value. When leads and accounts reach a specific threshold, they’re officially qualified and handed off to sales. Both marketing and sales should contribute to the lead scoring methodology, accounting for the number of contacts within an account that engage with your brand. These metrics can help marketing and sales understand which accounts may have a higher propensity to buy. For marketing, this helps guide lead assignment. For sales, this helps reps prioritize the leads in their queue and determine where to focus their time and energy. When it’s time to engage, sales can pull from a wealth of account information and smart talking points to guide their conversations with these target accounts.  

4. Tailor account engagement accordingly. In their conversations with prospects, sales reps can have deeper conversations focused on the specific contact’s unique situation within the organization. These can be more emotional insights that often funnel up to larger, account-wide issues such as the strategic direction of the broader business. Plus, marketing can relay important engagement metrics, such as an account’s behavioral interactions with campaigns and messaging, so sales knows what resonates. All of these insights transform the selling process from transactional to consultative, helping forge stronger customer relationships. Using innovative technology like artificial intelligence (AI), sales can receive automated actions on how to further engage a contact.

5. Measure and optimize. ABM isn’t just a one-off tactic. It’s an ongoing strategy that should influence the way your entire organization engages with accounts and buyers. That is why having access to real-time insights is critical to ongoing success. Data around campaign reach and impact, sales engagement, and results will help you gauge the impact of your ABM efforts and help you identify opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell within certain accounts.

Reinventing Lead Management for the Experience Economy

In the Experience Economy, marketing and sales should collaborate more closely to ensure they’re delivering on their brand’s promise and exceeding buyer expectations at every touchpoint. It’s the responsibility of marketing and sales to stop thinking simply in terms of lead handoff. Instead, they should think of new ways to collaborate to meet each and every buyer at their point of need. Oracle is dedicated to helping sales and marketing professionals thrive in this era and that’s why the company has once again been named a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management 2019.

Most notably, Oracle has been recognized for native tools and solutions that support ABM strategies. The reason is because Oracle’s deep legacy in data drives product innovation. In the age of ABM, those insights are critical to driving client relationships and generating long-term value for the organization.

Learn More!
Download Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management 2019. You can also contact us to learn more about how the Oracle CX Suite of products can help you reach your sales and revenue goals with engaging, connected customer experiences.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management, Ilona Hansen, Julian Poulter, Noah Elkin, Christy Ferguson, 23 September 2019

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

 

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Don’t Let Go of Expectations … Put Them to Work in Your Marketing

We all know the potential trouble associated with expectations: If you expect something to turn out a certain way —...

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The post Don’t Let Go of Expectations … Put Them to Work in Your Marketing appeared first on Copyblogger.

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Modern Marketing Blog Influencer Series: Building Your Dream Martech Stack - Success Over the ...

In the first blog of this two-part series, Shane answered questions that can help you define parameters for your martech stack. In this blog, he provides guidance on choosing the right tools for your current marketing strategies and future ones.

Q: How can you design your martech stack to support your marketing vision?

First, it’s crucial to start by outlining all the steps involved in fulfilling that vision. Once you do this, you can get a better idea of what you need to do to complete those steps and what kinds of tools are necessary.

For example, let’s say I want to dominate search engine results in the digital marketing landscape. Some of the major steps involved in fulfilling this vision would be:

1.  Conduct competitor research to see where the competition currently ranks and what strategy is working for them.

2.  Research industry keywords to understand user intent and discover the most searched keywords.

3.  Brainstorm engaging topic ideas by identifying top-performing content in my niche.

4.  Create high-quality content to improve search engine visibility and shareability.

5.  Distribute my content through multiple channels to draw in traffic. This could include email newsletters, guest posts, social media, content syndication platforms, etc.

6.   Gain more high-quality links from relevant, authoritative sites.

7.  Run search engine ads to get a stronger head start and attract a highly relevant audience.

8.  Analyze my performance to see what’s working and what isn’t, and using these insights to inform/optimize my existing strategy.

From this brief outline, I can get a fair idea of what kind of tools will help me with each of these steps. This would include:

1.  A comprehensive SEO reporting tool that lets me track rankings, analyze my backlink profile, and conduct keyword research. I would ideally look for one that also lets me research my competitors’ SEO strategies.

2.  A content research tool that gives me in-depth insights into the top-performing content in my niche. It should be able to help me identify which pieces of content are getting a lot of shares and engagement, so I know what’s resonating with my target audience.

3.   An email marketing tool to automate the email content distribution process. This will help me schedule and send out my emails at the best times, helping me get more opens and clicks.

4.  A social media marketing tool to effectively distribute my content through social media. This should help me schedule my posts to reach the audience when they’re most likely to engage. It will also give me more insights into how my posts are performing, allowing me to optimize my posting strategy accordingly.

5.  A host of content optimization tools to help me create better-quality content. This can include tools to improve readability, tools to detect and prevent plagiarism, tools to create catchier headlines and subject lines, etc.

6.  An analytics tool to understand how much time people are spending on different pages and how they’re engaging with different types of content. This would be extremely helpful to identify which pieces of content people love the most.

These are some of the basic tools that I need to include in my martech stack if I want to dominate search engine results. However, it’s important to note that the list doesn’t have to be limited to just these tools forever. I could keep adding tools depending on the strategy I’ve developed to fulfill my vision as well as tools to help me execute any new tactics I include in my strategy.

This is where having an integrated cloud marketing platform, like Oracle Marketing Cloud, is beneficial. Cloud can inherently scale, and keeping data in one place makes it easier to add new tools and capabilities.

Q: What is driving the need for an integrated martech stack and why is this a part of the dream?

Marketers dream of maintaining a seamless integration between their most trusted tools to increase efficiency and effectiveness. There are several driving forces for adopting an integrated martech stack.

When your tools are working together, they also perform better because they’re getting the exact kind of support they need from the other tools. So, for example, an automation tool that can seamlessly integrate with your social media tools and email marketing platform will streamline your brand-consumer communications.

When the new tool you introduce to your martech stack works well with your existing technology, more people will be encouraged to use it. So, taking an integrated approach helps you improve technology adoption rates as well.

Q: Could I make a case for cost control as well?

Yes. We now have access to a lot more microservices and APIs designed to solve very specific problems. So if all these microservices and APIs can seamlessly work together, marketers no longer have to invest in large, multi-purpose platforms just to gain access to certain features.

They can just select the most crucial tools and integrate them into a quilted martech stack, saving money and resources.

Considering all of these factors, an integrated martech stack is an essential part of the dream because it improves your chances of fulfilling it. Not only can you work more efficiently with seamlessly integrated tools, but you’ll be doing so with a unified team and at a reduced cost.

Q. Are your business goals supported by your martech stack?

Yes. We’ve built our martech stack gradually over the years, after thorough research and several trial runs with the sole purpose of supporting our business goals. We now have a full-fledged martech stack to support every aspect of our strategy, from search engine optimization and marketing tools to content research and distribution tools. And we continue to add to the stack as our strategy and goals evolve along with organizational growth.

Q. What are you usually trying to accomplish when you make adjustments to your stack?

We create or update our martech stack with the primary goal of simplifying certain tasks and streamlining our marketing efforts as a whole. This is one of the reasons why it’s so crucial to take an integrated approach because we want to make sure that every single addition to our stack makes sense in the bigger picture.

                                                                                   

Successful marketing requires the use of innovative technology, but you have so many options to choose from. Then once you’ve chosen, how do you get all your technologies and tools to work together? Find out with “The Guide to Building Your Marketing Technology Stack.”

Read the guide. 

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