ANALYST INSIGHT
Five Leading Trends Affecting
Marketers in 2010 and Beyond
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There’s no doubt that 2009 was a
year for many to forget, but this
year will undoubtedly appear as the
proverbial tipping point from which new
attitudes, perspectives and realities
emerge that go on to shape the careers of
marketers. As a consequence of all this
upheaval and change, the following are
highlights of some of the more interesting
BtoB marketing trends that we expect to
emerge in 2010 and beyond:
Back to Basics: Marketing 101
Marketers took on so many different
tasks in 2009, that many potentially
compromised the basics of their marketing
programs. With recovery taking hold in
2010, marketing teams need to review
their basic blocking and tackling to ensure
that the fundamentals of their programs
are on strong footing. Generating
audiences, creating new messages,
segmenting the database in different ways,
and understanding all the facets of the
sales process will be required skills for
effective marketing programs. As the
recession eases, awareness and
acknowledgement of this global economic
phenomenon and its impact on customers
and buying is key—which means new
messaging and segmentation on the high
end, and a lot of database scrubbing on the
low end.
The Basics for Marketing Effectiveness:
• Mapping the message to database
segments
• Creation of CRM database segments
• Lead scoring for sales leads
• Enhanced ROI reporting on the
marketing spend
• Centralized and simplified data
management of marketing
metrics
• Integration of sales and marketing data
• Understanding the sales process
• A/B Message testing
• Quality control of all new collateral
and messaging
• Attention to lead conversion numbers
• Database hygiene to clean out nonviable
contacts and lost
prospects
• Web site optimization (search engine
optimization and search
engine
marketing)
Sales and Marketing Integration:
It's all about process
Marketing and sales must integrate
their processes and objectives; when they
don't, it is usually the marketing team who
gets the blame.
The delicate balance between sales and
marketing relies on sales communicating
to marketing precisely what a “lead” looks
like, and then marketing establishing the
proper way to score this and hand it off.
Complicating this relationship is the ability
or inability of both teams to explicitly
track the sales process through data
points in a CRM system. Poorly
understood or articulated sales processes
result in the inability to map the marketing
program into the sales process. Weakness
within any aspect of the sales process
results in a cascading failure between the
sales and marketing integration.
This lack of integration causes the
following symptoms: price erosion or
excessive price discounting by the sales
team, lack of lead follow up by the sales
team, inability to track a lead through to
the sales close, low response rates to
marketing emails and offers, and ultimately
a lack of top-line revenue growth. Most
importantly, a disintegrated sales and
marketing process will make the effective
implementation of a marketing automation
solution—which relies on a robust sales
process—nearly impossible.
Automate Your Field
Leading marketers will automate in
2010 if they have not done so already.
Marketing automation integrates your lead
generation efforts, sales process, contact
CRM tracking and Web site analytics into
a hyper-powerful tool. Many companies
provide marketing automation solutions,
so be certain that you identify the one that
best fits with your organization’s culture
and needs. Before you automate, you
MUST perfect your sales and marketing
processes so that they are fully integrated
(i.e. share the same common outcome).
There are powerful returns for those
organizations who master this marketing
automation roll out, with some
organizations reporting double-digit
increases in sales revenues simply as a result of the successful automation
implementation. Additionally, automation
will be a blessing for the marketing
department that struggles to do more
with less. It will also free up resources to
focus on the important tasks of building
new client relationships, demonstrating
value for your product or service, and
finally achieving those ROI targets.
In addition to selecting the right
marketing automation technology, other
essential elements to lead generation in a
marketing automation environment
include: integrated marketing strategy,
content to generate demand, and database
development of contacts, processes and
measurement.
Content is King (Again)
Pop quiz: What has a longer
half-life? A candy bar or that white paper
you just purchased? If you said the candy
bar, you would probably be correct.
Knowing the types of content to select for
your lead generation program and when
to deploy them is a critical success factor
for lead generation programs. When
picking content, marketers must also be
able to model its relevant lifespan to
ensure they have interesting and timely
offerings that attract the right kind of
attention. With so many content sources,
marketers need a distinct content offering
to stand out from the noise.
Content can take many forms, including
social media, user-generated reviews and
recommendations, e-mail copy, Web pages,
customized landing pages, white papers,
event sponsorship, thought leadership,
case studies, ROI/TCO calculators,
benchmarking tools, podcasts, Webinars,
videos, press releases, brochures and
other marketing collateral, interviews,
articles, testimonials and proposals.
Convergence of Marketing/Public
Relations
PR is the new marketing or maybe
marketing is the new PR. Whatever your
perspective, tactics and strategies need to
be tightly integrated between marketing
and PR. With the rise of social media and
a movement away from conventional
advertising, the PR team’s actions affect
marketing more than ever. Many PR teams
are even getting into the lead-generation
business, with the savvy use of press
releases and tracked media mentions.
What defines this convergence is the
movement of major media publications
online, which is traditionally the domain of
marketing. Many wiring services now tout
online press release search engine
optimization strategies as well as social
media optimization strategies.
Further fueling the trend, surveys
indicate a shared responsibility between
marketing and PR for social media
strategies. And as the Web continues to
fundamentally alter buying behavior, much
of the decision-making occurs upstream
from the vendor via Internet searches. PR
can ensure that the company's value is
communicated on a multitude of social
media saites and formats. |
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As a combined organization, we are dedicated
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Read full case study. |
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