title: pepper_ebook_marketing_technologies_us

A GLOBAL COmputershAre COmpAny

marketing technology & automation to power your marketing machine

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Creative thinking, strategic resultsAt Pepper, we truly do walk the walk and talk the talk—meaning our tagline creative thinking, strategic results actually is the way we do business. Follow this guide, and you’ll see how to put calculated strategy behind every creative idea. Here, we take a look at what goes on behind the scenes—the technology that drives marketing today, making campaigns more precise so your marketing machine can keep producing great work that gets noticed.

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY & AUTOMATION

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MARKETING TECHNOLOGY & AUTOMATIONmArketinG evOLutiOn

MARKETING EVOLUTIONHow technology has paved the way

According to Gartner, by 2017 the CMO will be responsible for more technology spending than the CIO.1

It’s no secret that customer data is exploding, and marketers need to figure out not just how to harness and manage it, but how to use it to make smart decisions. On top of that, today’s customers have more control over how they engage with brands (and through which channels they engage) than ever before. They’re self-educated. They’re socially connected. And they access information from wherever they can find it most easily—making marketers’ jobs harder and much more complex.

As a result, IT and marketing end up having to collaborate. In what Forrester dubs the Age of the Customer, this paradigm shift takes the competitive landscape, “from one in which operational and informational advantages drive power to one in which obsessing about your customer will set you ahead of your peers.”2

Those in the C-suite have taken notice, too. IDC predicts that they will demand the CMO produce a strategy and a plan for how market-driven data will significantly contribute to corporate objectives.3 And that’s where your marketing machine comes in.

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CMO

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MARKETING TECHNOLOGY & AUTOMATIONthe mArketinG mAChine

THE MARKETING MACHINEWhat is happening behind the scenes

When you have technology—specifically automated processes—going on behind the scenes, it could feel something like a Rube-Goldberg machine—you know, those ones that seemingly make a simple task much more complex by way of a bunch of goofy gadgets all strung together. In fact, it’s just the opposite: imagine if you had to do all those automated tasks manually. You’d probably just… not do them.

What’s more, part of the novelty of a Rube-Goldberg is how cool it looks—a fitting analogy for what we do as marketers: this machine wouldn’t be able to be so visually stunning without all the machines working together inside. In the same way, creating standout creative is difficult these days without using automated processes behind the scenes.

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The ROLODEX represents Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software—the technology to help you organize and manage contacts, whether they’re merely leads or long-term clients.

As social media and content marketing continue to grow, CHATTERING TEETH represent social tools and aggregators that make it easier to share content—whether you’re pushing it out or taking it in.

Dividing your contacts into appropriate segments and different contact paths is precisely what marketing automation achieves for you— shown here, the ball can fall into one of three CUPS.

As content continues to be the crux of staying relevant, it’s more and more important to keep communication channels up to date. The TYPEWRITER represents Content Management Systems (CMS), which work to ensure your web presence is as current as possible.

Finally, we look at the CALENDAR to remind us of all the project management software available to marketing teams to make sure the strategists align with the designers, the technologists align with creative and so on.

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MARKETING TECHNOLOGY & AUTOMATIONmOvinG pArts

MOVING PARTSMaking the machine work

As we zoom in on each piece of the marketing machine, we’ll look at how each part moves to affect the creative communication you push out. What’s important to note is that these processes are not mutually exclusive, nor are they necessarily sequentially dependent. In other words, you don’t need to adopt them all at once and you don’t need to implement them in a certain order—but having them all employed behind the scenes is what can give your marketing machine perpetual motion on the backend and positive results on the frontend.

Because it is, more or less, the heart of the operation, marketing automation—the sorted cups in the machine—lies in the middle of our marketing machine. By far the most impactful to an organization and the most difficult to understand, we’ll focus primarily on that part of the machine as we progress.

Within our machine, marketing automation is at the center because it most naturally integrates with all other pieces of the sequence.

MARKETING AUTOMATION

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Marketing automation

The powerhouse of the technologies and at the heart of today’s and tomorrow’s marketing machine, marketing automation helps you move leads from the top of the marketing funnel to the bottom by understanding where buyers are in the buying process and providing them with what they need at the right time. The goal of marketing automation is to improve the alignment between sales and marketing, mostly during the passing of leads from marketing to sales.

Key players: Tools like Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot, SilverPop, Pardot, and more help sort your contacts (working seamlessly with your CRM solution) into segments based mainly on behavior so you can push out content (pulled from your communication aggregators or your content management system) that is relevant to each individual contact at a given time.

Why you need it: Broadly speaking, marketing automation allows for a more individualized approach to targeting, timing and content. In other words, it brings technology to the way you look at each and every lead in your database while also helping you:

• Develop and implement email marketing campaigns

• Automate repetitive business tasks like determining when/how to contact people

• Build automated campaigns to increase business sales

• Improve metrics like lead conversion rates, average deal size and forecast accuracy4

...and why you’ll fall behind without it: We’ve already discussed that data is not only growing but also becoming more available to us as marketers. In order to keep moving forward and keep your efficiencies and efficacies in line with your competition, you need to harness this data and use it to your advantage. The future looks more reliant on data than ever. IDC predicts that in 2013:3


50% of new marketing hires will have technical backgrounds

The CIO will become more actively involved with the CMO in all marketing automation decisions that have cross-functional implications

Automation could approach 10% of marketing’s discretionary budget in 2013—split 67:33 between marketing and IT budgets (for “best practice” organizations, this will shift to 50:50 by 2014)

Even when cooperating with the CIO, many CMOs will find that their positions are in jeopardy as they failed to produce a robust data analytics function (or a game plan to get there)

High-tech pipeline conversion metrics will continue to improve; expect a 20% improvement in target-to-deal ratios and a 10% reduction in time to create a customer, with both due to better automation and analytics-driven process improvement

50% 50:50 20%

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How ready are you? So, on the spectrum of marketing automation readiness, where is your organization? Evaluating yourself on this scale—dubbed the Marketing Mix Optimization (MMO) Maturity Model by Forester5 will help you figure out what your next steps are in implementing a solution along with an agency partner or service provider that can automate you:

How it will benefit your next campaign: Of course, automation allows for a more individualized approach to targeting, timing and content. If an emotional connection is what you’re after, using automation will help ensure you’re contacting your leads and customers at the right time with the right content. You’ll see noticeable benefits on both the marketing and the sales sides.

You’re aware of the need to adapt, but you lack the organizational framework, processes, and infrastructure to execute. Instead, you make marketing decisions based on instinct, competition and

prior budget allocations.

You should focus on routinizing the gathering and

organization of customer data sets, evangelizing

the need for a new overall strategy.

Companies like yours establish a fresh framework that places the customers’ journey at the center. Advice seekers are not quite ready to leverage hard data sets to make decisions but understand the value of it.

You should focus on feeding customer data sets

(taken from all sources) to create a unique view of your target audience. You are not

mature enough to create a full-blown automation model yet.

You are starting to build quantitative frameworks to understand how your marketing efforts perform as a whole. You collect, standardize and analyze data as a stepping stone to build models that describe performance of budgets,

tactics and channels.

You should continue to live and breathe data. Keep relying on it to validate

investments, quantify performance and measure quantitative results of your

campaigns.

You have developed detailed processes and standards to collect data and have marketing technologies that are fully deployed across the organization and at partner agencies.

You should focus on increasing speed to insight

and making sure the planning and budgeting teams act on the insights

from the model.


SALES BENEFITS MARKETING BENEFITS• Lead scoring and grading, prospect tracking,

and lead nurturing ensure that the right leads go to the right reps at the right time.

• Gives sales the talking points they need with detailed prospect tracking and analytics.

• Frees up time to focus on sales-ready leads by placing inactive leads on nurturing tracks.

• Smart lead capture forms make it easy to collect the information you need.

• Reduces human error and takes the manual labor out of segmentation and nurturing.

• Can increase sales staff productivity.

• Since the entire process is fully automated, the quality and quantity of leads being funneled can be adjusted by marketing at any time.

• Decreases labor cost by automating the process of qualifying/routing leads and measuring the effectiveness of campaigns and programs.

• Helps manage gaps in content creation and maintenance by showing which leads need to be contacted and in what way.

• Can increase marketing staff productivity.

Guess-timators Advice seekers Spreadsheet junkies Predictive analyzers

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While these technologies are probably already implemented throughout your organization, you might not have direct access to influence them; however, when you plan your next marketing campaign or initiative, make sure you explore your capabilities regarding these technologies to a) make sure these tools are not overlooked and b) ensure optimal dissemination of content.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

These systems—common examples are Salesforce.com and CRM solutions from Oracle, SAP and Microsoft—manage your interactions with customers and prospects. It combines marketing efforts with business processes to identify and manage valuable relationships. You probably have a robust CRM solution set up—but it’s important for you as marketers to get involved in how the system is used. For instance, you can influence how sales follows up with leads generated by marketing and what their service levels are for various prospects, leads and customers within the system.

However, despite already having CRM in place, IDC predicts that the demand for greater insight into the revenue impact of marketing and sales will require that older CRM systems be replaced this year—so if that change does happen in your organization, it’s important for marketing to be involved in the discussion.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)

Four other marketing technologies to drive your machine

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Sharing/communication tools

In a world in which everyone is constantly connected via content, it’s crucial to have the ability to take in content, share content and push content out. This includes pushing content out via social media, sharing files with clients and vendors, sharing content internally to increase knowledge and more. Tools that can help automate the process of sharing and communicating better include:

• App/cloud connectors: Tools and apps that help seamlessly cache your content and let you choose whether one piece of content will be sent out through just one channel or several.

• Social media aggregators: These tools, such as TweetDeck or HootSuite, help aggregate all feeds so you can take in knowledge and keep your entire marketing organization up to date on news, trends and new tactics.

• Digital asset management: Sharing files and transferring assets is increasingly important when time is of the essence. These days, you’re late if you’re a few hours behind a trend, let alone a few days or weeks. So having a way to work with clients and vendors as quickly as possible is essential. Be careful when choosing a service for file sharing, though—you’ll need to collaborate with IT to understand if you already have something set up or if you can explore your own safe file sharing solution.

SHARING/COMMUNICATION TOOLS

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Content management systems (CMS)

We all know it’s increasingly imperative to keep content as up to date as possible. Every time someone visits your website, he or she should be able to find something new. On the other hand, you don’t want to redesign or rearrange your site to keep it fresh—that’s not only expensive, it resets the learning curve for your visitors. As an alternative, you can implement a CMS—a tool (or a way of designing your website) that assists users in adding, editing and managing content.

Using a CMS such as Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla! allows you to maintain a professional, highly creative and customized look for your visitors—but behind the scenes, content is managed much more simply, even blog-like or WYSIWYG, allowing you to focus on the creative while automation drives all content changes.

Of course, using a CMS makes it easier for non-technical users who can have professional developers create the initial site—and then they themselves can update content whenever necessary.

It’s likely you have a CMS that drives your corporate site—it’s your job to make

sure a) content is created to fuel regular updates and b) any minisites, microsites

or campaign-specific sites you build consider using a CMS. In fact, IDC predicts

that in 2013, CMOs will be pragmatic, shifting focus less to be on big platform

projects and more on linking access to audience needs.3

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS)

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Project management software

When time is of the essence, keeping all team members—internally, externally or both—on the same page helps you plan projects, understand resources, track budgets and calculate profitability. Using project management tools like SharePoint or Basecamp lets you transparently manage all campaigns in the back of the machine while integrating creative on the frontend.

Of course it’s easy to see the benefits of organization and scheduling. But as far as its relevance to the marketing machine, project management helps keep all processes—including the automated ones—in sync so the creative can more easily align.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

ASSEMBLING THE MACHINEHow the technologies work together

In marketing, final creative is just part of the picture (the part that your audience actually sees)—what marketing technology and automation does is take care of the rest. There will always be some experimentation involved and somewhat of a learning curve when adopting new technologies. But the result of implementing them is worth it:

More customized marketing messages that can resonate with more targets (this begs the question, though: do you have the resources in place to create enough content to serve all of them?).

Quicker time to close —IDC predicts that companies can expect a 20% improvement in target-to-deal ratios and a 10% reduction in time to create a customer, with both due to better automation and analytics-driven process improvement.3

Greater efficiency, as you’re able to do more with fewer people and smaller budgets (once the initial cost of implementing automated technology is recouped).

Productivity improvements as a result of adopting data-driven decision making and marketing—around 5 or 6%, according to MIT.6

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1 http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2012/07/20/cmo-vs-cio-ibm-072012.aspx

2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/09/22/marketers-embrace-your-technology-peers

3 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23901813#.UT9cotbqlfB

4 “Marketing Automation 101: Ensuring Early Success with the Basics; Maturing Your Deployment for long-term ROI” by Aberdeen Group, June 2010

5 “Evaluate Your Marketing Optimization Readiness | Assessment: The Marketing Mix Optimization Playbook” by Michael Glantz with Luca S. Paderni, Nate Elliott, and Alex Hayes, November 2012

6 http://www.cmo.com/articles/2011/5/26/survey-results-impact-of-data-driven-marketing-on-business-performance.html

©2013 Pepper. The contents of this document are confidential and may not be disclosed to third parties. All content, ideas and tools within the offer are the copyrighted works of Pepper and subject to standard copyright law. Any redistribution or reproduction of any materials herein is subject to approval by Pepper. Some pictures, illustrations and photos may be subject to copyright and trademark rights of third parties. All registered trademarks are the properties of their individual companies and organizations. All brand names are the intellectual property of their owners. All registered trademarks are acknowledged, even if they have not been expressly labeled as such.

Pepper, an international marketing and communications agency, delivers full marketing automation support, from communication strategy to technical implementation and creative development. This blend of strategy, technology and creativity enables Pepper’s clients to engage their targets along the entire lifecycle—from lead generation and development to CRM activities such as loyalty programs, cross- and up-selling opportunities and customer retention.

Your Contacts at Pepper:Markus Dunz (EMEA) Email: [email protected] Phone: +49 89 30903 584

Brennen Roberts (USA) Email: [email protected] Phone: +1 312 588 4774

Caroline Lim (APAC) Email: [email protected] Phone: +65 6635 3939

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