This month B2B Marketing and Marketo held an exclusive marketing Leaders roundtable to discuss the transformation of customer engagement, how it has changed the way marketers do their jobs, and how it is likely to change the industry in the future.
Here are the five key takeaways from the conversation:
1) There’s still a long way to go
Senior marketers are absolutely committed to customer engagement and understand its essential role for making marketing efforts count. But, as they admit, most have a long way to go. In many cases, they feel they are playing catch up, moving from a position of having no measurement and little data to work with, to having lots of both in a very short space of time.
There is real desire to move away from the ‘spray and pray’ approach to marketing; and a good first step is making sure the marketing department is working towards clear KPIs that measure both the tactical success of engagement strategies (social media, website etc.) and the strategic contribution to the business (revenue, pipeline etc.).
2) Stop calling customers ‘users’
The only other people we call ‘users’ are drug addicts. Real customer engagement is about getting out of the mindset of marketing to faceless groups. Having the data for personalisation is a great start; but it’s also about making that data real. Many marketers find it useful to give real names and faces to their various customer personas/profiles. It brings the data behind the person to life and makes it easier for marketing, sales and others in the business to feel they truly know the customer.
3) Marketing/sales alignment is still vital
This is a perennial problem; but it’s still not been addressed to ensure organisations are engaging their customers as effectively as they should be. Marketing and sales need to talk to each other: sales have the direct relationship with customers and they need to let marketing know what customers are saying and what materials they need to succeed. Likewise, marketers need to take sales on the engagement journey, getting them to think of customer personas as real people and changing their approaches accordingly.
Marketing and sales should work together on setting the KPIs for customer engagement and must both be bought-in to the strategy.
4) It’s a two way process
Customer engagement isn’t something marketers do to customers. The key to customer engagement is facilitating conversations where customers can let organisations know what they need and what their pain points are, and marketers can learn from this to make sure they’re offering the right solutions.
This is why case studies are, arguably, the best tool for customer engagement. Ostensibly a marketing material, they are in fact pieces of content where customers can talk in their own voice – while still talking about how great your company is. Because they involve customer collaboration, they can be difficult to produce – but investing the time in the right customers to make them advocates should be an end goal for any customer engagement strategy.
5) Choosing the right tech has never been easier – or more difficult
There are still wide variations in levels of tech sophistication and adoption: some marketers are a number of years into using marketing automation to engage customers, some are yet to begin the journey. But the imperative to engage customers is profound and all the senior marketers at the table agreed further investments and changes in tech will be necessary to make progress over the coming years.
The range of marketing technologies is vast and can seem intimidating, particularly for those looking to invest in MA for the first time. But the advances made in technology mean marketers have the ability to choose solutions that meet their needs much more precisely. It is vital marketers know what they want to do with their data and the challenges they want to meet, before making tech decisions. They need to make sure tech is working for them, not the other way round.
