by Dave Sutton
This is where Marketing Automation will make a huge difference: unifying social media listening functionality with structured and disciplined customer response strategies. “Reputation filters” will be fully programmable—reflecting the values and voice of the brand and engaging the target audience with vulner- ability, transparency and empathy.
Keep in mind that true authenticity is not a destination or an end-state—it is a discipline that must be enforced day-to-day within a company and we believe that Marketing Automation will be a critical enabler for success.
From Campaigns to Conversations
The multitude of channels and technologies for communicating with the market- place will continue revolutionizing the work of marketing. Today, the effectiveness of conventional outbound marketing campaigns is limited. In 2020, building brands and driving revenue growth will require tools that enable marketers to facilitate con- tinuous, relevant and meaningful conversations with customers.
Traditional outbound marketing campaigns demarcated by periodic sales seasons, budget cycles and responses to competitor moves will be insufficient to engage custom- ers. If you keep thinking about marketing campaigns as your one-shot at broadcasting promotional content, you will miss the bigger opportunity to connect with customers.
By contrast, conversations are continuous, adaptive, and ad hoc. They take advan- tage of the immediacy and reach of social media channels to communicate with an audience repeatedly and meaningfully, targeting messages by media type and invit- ing the recipients not just to listen, but to engage with and respond to your valuable content.
The goal of conversation is not just to promote the brand, but rather to engage the customer. What the company says in the conversation should stand out and make sense, but just as important is how well the company listens and makes sense of what the market is saying.
We’ve stressed the contrast between campaigns and conversations to call atten- tion to the challenges and opportunities associated with the latter. As a practical matter, the two should go hand in hand. Any marketing campaign today should incorporate and encourage ongoing conversation with customers and analysis of these conversations should reveal opportunities for innovative campaigns.
In 2020, brand owners will recognize that they can’t possibly control the myriad of conversations about their brands. Moreover, unlike campaigns, con- versations are often not even initiated by the brand. The most successful market- ers will expect their marketing automation tools to enable that conversation both internally and externally so they can engage their customers with the right things in the right way at the right time to drive results. To address this opportunity, Marketing Automation vendors will begin integrating Smart Bots and Intelligent Agent technologies into their platforms to manage continuous, real-time conver- sations with customers.
From Rules to Algorithms
As anyone who spends a little time with it knows, Marketing Automation requires you to think like a software engineer and, given the complexity of ever-more- sophisticated multi-step campaigns and behaviorally-triggered decision logic — as depicted in the example below — things can get out of hand pretty quickly!
As time goes by, we encounter more and more exceptions and start making more rules to keep exceptions under control. As Isaac Wyatt pointed out at last year’s MarTech Conference: “If you’re not careful, you end up with the equivalent of spaghetti code in your marketing”.
Fast forward to 2020, mature Marketing Automation leaders might find themselves struggling with unwieldy and cumbersome “rules management” processes—especially as the data changes faster than one can keep up with the rules.
We see a tremendous opportunity for MarTech innovators to establish the best practices to tame this burgeoning complexity and then to fundamen- tally create a better solution. The introduction of Machine Learning will be a
game-changer—giving Marketing Automation software the ability to learn, grow and change without being explicitly configured or programmed by users.
Simply put, machine learning will remove the manual task of classifying and tweaking rules each time new information is captured about a customer. Marketing Automation platforms equipped with machine learning will help marketers with real-time segmentation of customers, personalization of messaging, forecasting of customer lifetime value and prediction of churn.
Machine learning combines science, statistics and analytics to make predic- tions based on patterns discovered in data. As opposed to rule-based decision systems, which follow an explicit set of “if-then-else” instructions known by the developers in advance, machine learning algorithms are designed to analyze data and discover patterns that people cannot find by themselves. In other words, machine learning leverages the massive power and objectivity of computers to see things in big data that slow and biased humans cannot see, enabling the use of insights to accurately predict results.
Marketing Automation Enables Smarter Marketing
Without machine learning, it is simply too difficult to compile and process the huge amounts of data coming from multiple sources (e.g., website visits, mobile app interactions, purchase transactions and product reviews). However, when all of this data is made available to marketing platforms programmed to perform data mining and machine learning, very timely, accurate and profitable predic- tions can be made.
Marketing Technology Transforms Marketing
Today, MarTech has proven that it can be an amazing set of tools for enabling marketing success. By 2020, we predict that MarTech innovation will literally transform how your customer experiences your brand, converses with you, and dynamically interacts with you.
Transformational marketing is about optimizing and mobilizing all marketing assets to create lasting preference for the brand, to activate customer purchase intent, and to accelerate organic growth of revenues and profits. To truly trans- form and interrupt marketing as usual, marketers must get all 3S’s right: the right Story, the right Strategy, and the right Systems, all measured through the lens of Simplicity, Clarity and Alignment.
Mastery of the 3S’s gives you a powerful capability to capture the customer’s attention, create an authentic connection and give them a reason to care and a reason to listen. Provided that your brand story resonates with the recipient’s needs and wants, you’ll give them a reason to engage. If the experience you create for them based on your brand story is remarkable, you’ll give them a reason to buy, and most importantly, a reason to stay.
To paraphrase Benjamin “Uncle Ben” Parker, the overshadowing figure in Peter Parker’s life in the Spider-Man comic book series, “You must remember that with great transformational marketing power comes great responsibility!”
No one wants to be interrupted. Or ‘talked at.’ Or ‘sold to.’ We seek authentic. We expect relevant. And we want it only when we are ready for it. This calls for marketing to make a change: a change in how customers understand you, engage with you and experience you.
No longer is the story simply about you and what you offer. Your brand, your products, your services are not really the hero. The power and impact of your brand, your product, your services and your story comes from making the customer the hero, and you, the marketer, serving as the guide on their buying journey
This is called Transformational Marketing.
Acknowledgments
his book is the result of relentless hard work on the part of many talented people. While conducting research for the book and developing content,
I had the pleasure of working with some of the most talented and transforma- tive marketers in industry today. Their success became the foundation for this book.
I must start by warmly acknowledging the generosity of these professionals who let me be a part of their story: Mike Ziegler at Ameritox; David Marks at Asurion; Jim Brady and Harmandeep Singh at the Brady Family of Companies; Lidia Frayne at Dell; Chad Thevenot and Scott Barton at IHS; Scott Klinger at First Data; and Kelly Chmielewski and Andrea Koslow a
t PBS.
Finding untold stories can be challenging, so I’d like to acknowledge Gretel Going for connecting me with the marketing team at Albert and for introducing me to the wonderful marketers at Evisu and Harley Davidson NYC.
I would like to thank everyone at TopRight for their dedication to trans- forming marketing with our clients around the globe. I would like to especially thank those colleagues who dedicated their personal time, of which there’s never enough, on the book. They’ve added content, been there to think through new ideas, and helped me to bring it all together.
Thanks to Will Allred, Rob Carter, Lisa Cronin, Francesca Figari, Bill Fasig, Siva Kandaswamy, Deborah Kuo and Feyikemi Oniyitan for their energy, ideas and general passion for great marketing. And, thanks to Erin Cribb and Lillian Shaw for their creativity and patience in helping to develop and organize the graphical content.
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Of course, even books about marketing need to be marketed. A special thanks to Jordan Blum, Emily Shay and Bill Stone for their help in applying all of the principles held within to getting this book into your hands.
Special thanks to Fernanda Biagini for getting the project moving, pulling together the very first outline and helping along the way with her insights. Also, thanks to the editorial team at Elevate and Mark Russell for working with me to refine the manuscript and for keeping the project on track.
Writing can be an onerous and lonely task. It helps to have friends who you can bounce ideas off of and collaborate with on projects. He may not have real- ized it, but Brad Power played that role for me on this project – thanks Brad!
To the thousands of marketers, LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers who keep up with my weekly rants on the TopRight blog, thank you! Your likes, shares and candid comments on my ideas is what keeps me going. Thank you!
Finally, I owe a combination of an apology as well as a debt of gratitude to Whitney, Wheeler and Maggie who put up with me during the long nights and weekends I committed to getting this book completed amidst an already hectic work and travel schedule.
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Index
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