It’s a truth universally acknowledged that no two B2B martech stacks are the same: while KPMG’s primary objective – as well as improving the user experience – is to generate a consistent stream of high-quality leads, ON24’s top priority is to engage with customers and maintain a clear view of their experiences. So which platforms are galvanising each company’s successes and what can marketers do to optimise their marketing efforts?
ON24
Joe Hyland, CMO at webinar software platform ON24, shares his company’s martech stack, a mix of CRM systems and marketing automation tools that it uses to gain a 360-degree view of its customers.
- Salesforce Wave Analytics
ON24 leverages this technology to make data-driven decisions and generate insights around its sales pipeline in real time.
- CRM Fusion
This tool helps ON24 ensure its Salesforce data is clean and of a high enough quality to better score leads and increase the rate of leads accepted by the sales team.
- LeanData
ON24’s marketing operations rely on LeanData for lead management, matching, routing and reporting. It‘s also helpful for ABM and targeted marketing programmes.
- SpringML
This tool is chosen for its predictive analytics capabilities which help improve ON24’s forecasting.
- GainInsights
ON24 uses this piece of tech to help the business understand the entire lifecycle of its customers.
The top priority for the business is ensuring its tech stack is adding capabilities that engage its customers and deliver insights into their experiences. A separate stack that’s integrated with these tools helps achieve these goals. This includes:
- Conductor
Joe explains that Conductor helps ON24’s customers find the content they want: its insights into the trends and topics ON24 customers are searching for have revealed impactful opportunities for new keywords and content topics.
- Demandbase
This platform provides personalisation at an account-based level, ensuring ON24’s campaigns are relevant to its prospects’ business and industry. That work is generating better-quality leads and increasing the number of leads accepted by the sales team.
- Optimizely
Optimizely is personalisation technology that helps the company meet the customer wherever they are across any channel, and allows the brand to experiment with different mixes of targeted content and experiences.
- Influitive
Influitive helps the company build a robust community of customer advocates.
Time-consuming manual tasks such as predicting pipeline, scheduling email follow-ups and understanding which campaign is performing best are left to the tech, while ON24’s marketing team focuses its attention on the art of marketing. “I’d much prefer my team members to use their talent to create a hilarious video or host a best practice webinar rather than calculate our email open rate,” says Joe. “Marketing technology gives us an unprecedented view of who, what, where, when and even how our customers engage, but it will never explain why they engage. I look to my team to analyse what’s beyond the numbers and identify the strategies that are working best for our customers.”
KPMG Small Business Accounting
While assembling its martech stack, the KPMG Small Business Accounting team’s main focus is creating a solution that generates high-quality inbound leads. Dan Roche, head of marketing at KPMG UK, gives a summary of the technologies helping them to achieve this.
- Eloqua
This is the most expensive piece of tech KPMG Small Business Accounting uses. It’s an email and CRM platform that strengthens the brand’s lead generation, nurture and capture strategy, and integrates with its website.
- ResponseTap
With this technology, the marketing department can listen in on, play back and report on calls that have come through its sales hotline. This helps the marketing team better understand the types of businesses that are enquiring, as well as their particular needs and painpoints.
- Hotjar
A conversion rate optimisation (CRO) platform, Hotjar provides a ‘heat map’ of where website visitors have moved their mouse or cursor around the screen, and clicked or tried to click, enabling KPMG Small Business Accounting to continually improve the user experience while also capturing more sales enquiries.
Dan explains opting for a simple user interface ultimately justified the purchase of these tools. “The common denominator is they are intuitive and easy to use, and most allow integration between them. By integrating these technologies we’re looking to generate a consistent stream of high-quality inbound leads; everything flows back from that primary objective.”
KPMG Small Business Accounting’s stack allows the company to delve deeper into customer data, and find the insights that are going to provide full visibility of not only the small business accounting digital landscape, but also the customer journey. “This informs our marketing strategy and better enables us to engage potential customers with appropriate messaging and timing,” explains Dan. “The ability to schedule reports, adverts and posts across multiple platforms is arguably more reliable too. The stack also prevents us from having to prepare and report on campaign activity manually.”
“The trick is to work out which ones are strategic and are worth investing in for the medium term (long-term investment is not an option, given the speed of change in this sector), and which can be tactically helpful in the short term,” says Dan.
Workfront
Jada Balster, marketing director at Workfront, shares the reasons for choosing each piece of martech and explains that improving efficiency and information gathering to intuitively help people make better decisions was a particular focus in the decision-making process.
- Salesforce
Workfront uses this CRM system across the whole organisation, from sales and marketing to finance and customer experience; it ensures all parts of the business know what’s happening with each customer and prospect, meaning they have a far better experience with the company.
- Mintigo
This predictive marketing tool, which Jada says has been invaluable when creating its target account lists, helps ensure it’s truly targeting the right organisations that are the best fit for the brand.
- Workfront
Workfront’s own platform manages the whole marketing lifecycle, from requests to final approval and reporting. It’s how the marketing team ensures that the right people are assigned to the right project.
- ON24
Workfront uses ON24 as a platform for running its webinars.
“It’s critical each piece of technology we acquire fits with the other pieces which are already used inhouse,” explains Jada. “Prior to purchase, we evaluate how applications pass data between each other because that’s how we create exponential value against our technology investment.”
Workfront’s choice of tech means it can focus less on manually managing marketing tasks and more on being creative. “Our technology stack enables us to focus more time on the human part of marketing: strategy, creativity and conversations,” points out Jada. “Ultimately, it’s about putting the right information in the hands of the right people to make the right decisions quickly. Also, martech enables us to manage all of our marketing work, simplifying everything from campaign requests through to proofing and approvals. It allows us to enhance data, score and route leads, place data into the hands of decision-makers, identify problems and connect with our customers.”
