The omnichannel struggle is very painful to orchestrate and manage. Companies need a unified and seamless approach that eliminates siloed user experiences, making things more efficient internally and effective externally.

Marketing professionals now wear many hats. We need to be part marketer, part operations officer, part technologist, part data analyst, part revenue officer, part experience officer, consensus builder, diplomat, etc. We have to do more with less, as Gartner’s 2022 CMO Spend Survey found. 

While marketing’s budget is rising (with over half of it going to digital channels), that same study reports that 61% lack the in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy. Part of that is because of the tech budget, or rather its constraints. A lack of resources — human, financial and time — poses challenges.

But managing all the cross-channel, interconnected moving parts can be overwhelming, particularly when working on many channels and trying to analyze all those disparate technologies. 

How do you orchestrate ecommerce, campaign management, digital asset management (DAM), customer relationship management (CRM), customer data platforms (CDP) and personalization tools?

This is where a unified system — a  digital experience platform (DXP) — can help make your marketing ops more efficient and effective. It does so much for you, not only saving you time and money but optimizing your marketing operations in the process.

What is a DXP?

Today’s customers expect seamless experiences as the baseline — so a DXP might sound very appealing. In a nutshell, a DXP promises an integrated way to manage all your tools and technologies in one place, from rich content to customer relationships to marketing automation and even internal workflows. 

With so many tools, metrics and systems to keep track of to successfully deliver great customer experiences, a system that brings everything together might sound too good to be true. 

But if you are ready and set up to use a DXP properly, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for:

• Updating content across all your channels and platforms.
• Carrying and inputting CRM data across multiple touchpoints.
• Helping you deliver consistent, personalized experiences to customers and internal stakeholders.

DXPs promise holistic, cross-platform seamlessness — but you must be prepared

While the promise of an integrated way to manage all your tools and technologies in one place is appealing, you need to be prepared. Ask yourself, is your company ready for this dynamic shift and prepared to invest long-term?

Many companies work very hard to prioritize customers getting that seamless experience. Yet, internally, they’re in a state of chaos because they don’t prioritize seamlessness holistically. It is critical to craft integrated and consistent solutions that are modular but connect the dots (and fill the gaps) of the digital experience. 

This requires a shift in mindset. The organization must embrace a holistic, integrated approach and strong scenario planning to better predict what your business and stakeholders may need. 

Dig deeper: Reinventing the digital experience platform

The 4 key building blocks to success

Being prepared can mean many things, but in my experience, it comes down to four things.

1. Internal and external alignment

A DXP functions best when there are clear priorities, tasks and functions across the company. You need all stakeholders to align on:

• What you’re doing.
• Who it’s for.
• Why you’re doing it.
• How you’ll do it (internal audit).
  • Before building out your DXP apps and toolset, evaluate exactly what you have now. Then map out which ones you are already using, the functionality within them and what you are currently using them for. 
• When you’ll do it.
• What success will look like.
• Roles and responsibilities.

Remember that buy-in and alignment require a data-backed strategy.

2. User-centered thinking

Always ask, “How do we meet our audience where they are in a way that’s relevant and easy for them to understand?” This comes down to empathy for:

• Your audience, employees, partners, stakeholders, etc.
• Their needs, pains and concerns.

Meet them where they’re at in their journey and deliver the right content to the right person at the right time, in the right place.

DXPs are massive, complex systems. It’s easy to get lost in the mechanics of integration and automation. With every new piece of functionality, you must remember the people you’re trying to serve and what their needs are.

Don’t let the system bog you down or make you lose sight of that. It’s about every stage of the interaction. The best user experience is one you don’t even know you’re having.

3. A consistent brand experience

If you’ve achieved alignment and created the map for the DXP, unifying your brand experience across all touchpoints will be a logical next step. Brand consistency is crucial as it can increase revenue considerably.

Why bother? 

• Build loyalty and recognition.
• Branding will increase client trust in you.

Your brand is your business’s most valuable asset, but it’s an asset you never wholly own. Your customers also play a part in the opinions they form of you. A consistent experience is more than look, feel, voice and tone. 

Externally, it’s about making sure that across touchpoints and platforms, every piece feels like it’s part of the same whole. Internally, it’s enabling your employees with the tools to do their jobs more effectively.

Let’s say a customer buys something in-store, signs up for an email list, gets an email, clicks through it, lands on a blog article and ends up on a product page where they’re pushed to your Instagram account. All throughout, the visuals and language need to be consistent. You need clear rules to make it easy for your team to uphold these standards. 

Still, the key to a consistent brand experience for all your stakeholders stems from that alignment and user-centered thinking. It’s about being true to those goals through everything you do, how it gets expressed and how it’s implemented.  

4. Creating a culture of feedback

DXP integration can make it easy to build opportunities for feedback into your processes across the board. However, designing a feedback culture isn’t something that just happens — it’s intentional. Build clear feedback processes to improve operations and performance.

No doubt, over time and probably right away, too. You’ll learn how to make significant improvements. Encourage your internal stakeholders to provide feedback on how these initiatives and tools are helping them in their day-to-day, but also what could be improved. Remember, it’s not enough to simply collect feedback. Action needs to be taken based on employee input. 

Is it time to invest in a DXP?

Suppose you’re only investing in creating a seamless experience for your customers, while internally, you’re running around like chickens without heads. In that case, you’re doing yourself, your partners and employees and even your customers a disservice.

Eventually, something will fall through the cracks. You and your people are also today’s customers (for other companies), and you likely value seamlessness.

Are you experiencing any of the following?

• Siloed data across multiple platforms prevents you from really understanding what your customers are doing.
• The customer experience across your digital and physical channels is not personalized and disjointed.
• Decisions made are not data-driven and are based on guesswork.
• The cost of the tech stack needed to be efficient and effective is hard to justify.
• The cost of new customer acquisition is too high and you want to focus on retention and growing share of wallet.

If you’re hearing these points and nodding your head, your company is probably ready to invest in a DXP. Good luck!

Dig deeper: Does your marketing team need a digital experience platform (DXP)?

The post Digital experience platforms: 4 building blocks to success appeared first on MarTech.

Globally, ecommerce sales saw a 27.6% growth rate throughout 2021. With these growth numbers, Insider Intelligence expects that the worldwide ecommerce market will reach $5 trillion in 2022, and $6 trillion will be hit only two years later in 2024. This is largely fuelled by the fact that online sales continue to grow.

Even as stores reopen, the percentage of customers that opt to shop online is getting larger. Many industry leaders assume that these online shopping habits are here to stay, especially given the projected growth in online sales year over year.

The impact of accelerated ecommerce growth on retailers

In our always-on, buy anything anywhere world, customers want their shopping experiences to be personalized, dynamic, and convenient. As a result, many businesses are trying to reinvent themselves, adapt to new business models and technologies, adhere to new consumer expectations and keep pace with their competitors.

Given that retailers have had to pivot their business models to online (if they weren’t there already), the competitive landscape has become even more difficult to navigate. There has also been a notable “death” of brand loyalty amongst consumers due to market fragmentation, and the ease with which consumers can switch and find brand alternatives if they are dissatisfied. As such, retailers are facing a challenge in their efforts to differentiate themselves and stay competitive in a tough market.

Trends and challenges shaping the ecommerce industry in 2022

The growth across ecommerce sectors

As many ecommerce businesses experienced firsthand, COVID-19 caused a boom in online shopping. What was already a high-growth industry was catapulted into hyperspeed as the world adapted to changing regulations, societal norms, and customer needs. While the rapid growth across global ecommerce markets and ecommerce categories is projected to eventually even out to pre-pandemic numbers, that time is still far off. For 2022 and into the next two to three years, we will continue to see large upticks in ecommerce growth worldwide.

Ecommerce marketing trends

1.        The rise in importance of zero- and first-party data:

• Data is used to make decisions and help companies reach their goals—but how data will be collected in 2022 is drastically different from how it was collected before. The rising importance of zero- and first-party data has changed the way ecommerce businesses will collect information from consumers.
• With customers becoming aware of how much data they’re giving up to businesses every day, and with the dramatic change to data privacy initiated by the likes of Apple and Facebook, Data collection is becoming more and more challenging.
• For online businesses, third-party data has been a critical component of marketing data strategy in recent years. Now, marketers will be forced to rely on zero- and first-party data.

Why we care. Ecommerce companies will need to prioritize the collection of zero- and first-party data in order to sustain the marketing efforts needed to succeed. It will also require marketers to shift and look at metrics differently than before.

2.      Personalization in a cookieless world:

• As regulations make data tracking harder, consumers will continue to demand data privacy AND highly personalized brand experiences. Ecommerce businesses need to determine how they will continue to collect the necessary consumer data to foster these personalized brand experiences.
• The most important thing for brands to understand is that the way consumers perceive specific data interactions is heavily dependent on their relationship with the brand. What does that mean? Consumers will be willing to exchange their information with brands if they know it will be used to deliver relevant content and a personalized customer experience. It all comes back to prioritizing customer trust above all else.

Why we care. Brands must be transparent about their data collection efforts and show that there is shared value in the data exchange to stay afloat in the cookieless world.

3.      Social commerce:

• Ecommerce activity is migrating to social media platforms, from brand marketing to customer service to shoppable advertising.
• After more than a year of working from home, people around the globe are spending even more time scrolling through social feeds. The typical social media user now spends about 15% of their waking life using social platforms.
• Sales through social media channels around the world are expected to nearly triple by 2025.

Why we care. Social media platforms are presenting new ways for ecommerce businesses to engage with customers and create unique experiences. If they haven’t already, ecommerce businesses need to get a grasp on social commerce and how to integrate this touchpoint into their overall strategy.

4.      Data reporting tools:

• Ecommerce companies are spending a countless amount of time analyzing data. Tracking everything from online store performance to return-on-ad-spend requires various tools to collect and analyze various metrics that matter to an ecommerce company’s business performance.
• Today, ecommerce businesses have access to a large amount of data reporting tools and software to analyze their digital performance. While having so many options can seem like a positive thing for businesses, the reality is that most tools available only have selective reporting capacities. Without a reporting tool that has the capacity to pull all information into one central space, it is impossible to gain one single source of truth to make accurate conclusions and optimizations.

Why we care. Data reporting software/partners that centralize all metrics from all tools into one place will simplify the data analytics process, yield more accurate insights, and help ecommerce companies make better, more informed decisions.

5.      Delivery expectations

As online shopping activity continues to increase, consumers’ preferences and expectations for delivery have also increased. Free delivery is becoming expected and waiting any longer than two days for delivery can be a deal-breaker for most consumers. Some must-haves for today’s online shipping experience include:

• Speed.
• Low-to-no cost returns.
• Painless returns.
• Transparency and flexibility in the shipping process.

Why we care. Consumers are evolving right before retailers’ eyes. Understanding their behaviors and expectations and being nimble enough and committed enough to address and delight them in a timely fashion will be the differentiator online retailers need to stand out in the years to come.

As consumer expectations for shipping become more insatiable, shipping and logistics processes for ecommerce businesses become more complex and expensive. As such, selecting the right shipping platforms and partners is more important than ever for ecommerce businesses.

Summary: Finding success in this rapidly evolving space

The events of the past few years have changed every part of the ecommerce buying journey, from what consumers expect and how they engage and buy online, to the rising complexities. The path to ecommerce growth means pivoting quickly to meet new customer and societal expectations.

For ecommerce businesses, finding success in 2022 revolves around 3 key areas:

1. Striking the right balance when it comes to consumer data collection and personalization in a cookieless world: figuring out a way to make the exchange of zero- and first-party data more valuable to the consumer and worth their while will result in stronger customer relationships and business success.
2. Providing a fast, free, seamless, transparent shipping experience sets an ecommerce brand apart from the crowd in the eyes of consumers. Evolving from traditional models, digitizing as many steps as possible, and finding the right delivery ecosystem partners is what companies must focus on.
3. Adopting the right kinds of emerging technologies can help ecommerce leaders manage the rapidly evolving world of online retail, ensuring they are showing up in the ways that consumers expect them to and facilitating positive buyer journey touchpoints and experiences throughout.

In the race to offer a more exceptional online experience, striking the right balance between marketing, shipping and logistics, and technologies to provide an exceptional customer experience can feel daunting. Those retailers that figure it out will create a competitive advantage and win the mind- and wallet-share of consumers.

The post What you need to know to grow your ecommerce business appeared first on MarTech.

Because of this it’s essential to have an Account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. This focuses on targeting top potential customers and uses both marketing and sales initiatives to capture the prospect’s interest and nurture them through the buying journey. Here’s a guide on how to do that.

As many ecommerce businesses experienced firsthand, COVID-19 caused a boom in online shopping. What was already a high-growth industry has catapulted into hyper-speed as the world adapted to changing regulations, societal norms and customer needs. While the rapid growth across global ecommerce markets and categories is projected to even out to pre-pandemic numbers, that time is still far off. We will continue to see large upticks in ecommerce growth worldwide in two to three years.

Most of the B2B buying journey is conducted anonymously until the buyer gets closer to the point of purchase, which is why a tech-driven “zero-touch” demand gen strategy is critical for growth. And with ABM tech platforms becoming mainstream, it is much easier to implement (think of platforms such as Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot).

Pro tip: Before I go deeper, instead of looking at an ABM program as a lead scoring initiative, it’s best to shift to a mindset where you look at ABM as a sales intelligence initiative. It’s about uncovering prospect behavior and weighting sales intent/intel and brand engagement rather than “funnel lead scoring” (engagement is a better metric to forecast revenue).

The shift and the case for ABM: Anonymous buyer’s journey

In our always-on, buy anything anywhere world, customers want their buying experiences to be personalized, dynamic and convenient, and B2B buyers are no different. As a result, many businesses are trying to reinvent themselves, adapt to new business models and technologies, adhere to new consumer expectations, and keep pace with their competitors.

It’s a great time (and opportunity) for a B2B company to support those shifts — but it’s tough to get mindshare (let alone wallet-share). More and more, the buyer journey is conducted digitally:

• Two-thirds of B2B buyers say they are now “self-serving” more information before contacting vendors.
• 63% of purchases have more than four people involved in the buying group (up from 47% in 2017).
• The number of buying interactions during the pandemic jumped from 17 to 27 (the number of buying interactions reflects one individual’s buying journey to obtain information about competing offerings or providers).
• 74% of B2B marketers say they are seeing customers taking more control over the buying process.
• 62% say they can now develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list — based solely on digital content.
• 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales.

When you consider the above, you start to understand why a “zero-touch” approach is so important; it allows the prospect to buy the way they want to buy and not necessarily the way you want to sell. And that’s where ABM comes in. A zero-touch approach that still delivers the highly personalized and curated experiences B2B buyers want.

What to aim to achieve with ABM

Aim to identify a composite pattern of digital cross-channel account behavior that suggests interest and enables a very focused sales engagement into those targeted segments/accounts. Specifically:

• Translate ABM brand awareness from target accounts into website traffic.
  • Continue to hyper-segment accounts that demonstrate interest with a secondary tactic and messaging (e.g., a case study, additional zero-touch tactics/assets, etc.)
  • Implement funnel-based personalization through funnel/DRIP system.
  • Optimize ad spend and activity towards accounts showing website and ad engagement.
• Evaluate the impact on traffic to points of conversation (such as the “Contact Us” button or a “zero-touch” contact form) and re-target accounts that don’t convert.
• Meet pipeline objectives and key results (OKRs) for ABM campaigns.

ABM program governance: Ground rules

It’s time to make friends! ABM requires rules of engagement between everyone involved (particularly marketing, sales and IT) to work as painlessly as possible and drive alignment throughout the organization. Misalignment is a problem because it affects every phase of ABM — planning, execution, and measurement. This can be solved by aligning on goals and incentives. Determine the ABM Team, and sit down to figure it out:

• Cadence of team touchpoints: Weekly updates, monthly check-ins, quarterly reviews.
• Updates: Audience and account data updated bi-weekly
• Audience naming conventions: Vocabulary can vary from department to department; ensure consistency to keep the data clean.
• Account grouping: Agree on classifying ecommerce companies (SMBs/SMEs, Enterprise, etc.) beforehand.
• Hierarchical taxonomy: Ensure the prioritization of the audiences is clear and documented.
• Opportunity weighting: Sales and Marketing need to align on sales intelligence weighting at the account level (company) and the contact level (individual).
• Progression: Agree on how ecommerce audiences are operationally and philosophically tagged and moved through the buyer journey.

Ideal e-tailer profile

Defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) beforehand is critical. Meaning, what types of e-tailer buyers are present in the ecosystem, and which ones should you be focused on? How are you tiering targets? Some factors to consider:

• Industry
  • Size of company
  • Volume of goods shipped
  • Product type
  • Fulfillment model
  • Location
  • Revenue potential
  • Country of origin

Segmentation tips:

• Hyper-personalize where possible (where people know you).
• Segment where possible (where companies might not know you but have common attributes so that you can craft language around their ecommerce sector).
• Create more mainstream messaging if you don’t know the sector and therefore need something a little more general.

Contact strategy

Marketing and sales need to work together to identify, select, and prioritize target accounts. The buying group will also have to be identified; as an example, in a buying group of four, who is:

• The user: Usually, the actual user of the product (focused on workflow).
• The influencer: Researches the different options available through the buying process (focused on best practices and vendor comparisons).
• The decision-maker: Usually the manager of the influencer (focused on ROI).
• The IT subject matter expert: The person who must determine any impact on tech infrastructure (focused on seamless operations/integration).

Personas

Buyer personas are a semi-fictional representation of your ICP, based on market research and existing customer data. Why use them?

• The information that goes into creating a buyer persona helps to personalize your target customer, building a clear picture of the real people who buy products or services
• A company’s expertise touches a range of audiences with various needs. Audiences may not see the immediate value if content speaks to what the company does vs. what it does for its specific audiences

Targeting WITHOUT personas puts more onus on the prospect to decipher your offering and complicates the customer experience, eroding confidence and trust. Targeting WITH them improves the customer experience, shortens the decision cycle, and maximizes the impact with more targeted content.

There are many persona templates available online; here is an example of one HubSpot offers:

Content strategy

Inbound is guided by the philosophy that every customer is on a quest to accomplish something, and as marketers, our job is to act as trusted advisors to help them get where they need to go. The goal of inbound, then, is to create one-to-one relationships with customers (new and existing) that have a lasting impact on them and your brand. ​

​Inbound marketing is about building value and trust, NOT about selling.​

​Content delivers the message of your inbound marketing strategy; in other words, content acts as the voice of your brand while helping customers on their quest to solve a problem. The content strategy should empower your ecommerce customers to entertain and educate them, as it contributes to creating the long-lasting relationships that inbound marketing is focused on.​

Inbound marketing seeks to produce content that follows a three-step methodology: attract, engage and delight. When layered onto the steps in a typical buyer’s journey, the result shows the pathway for converting strangers to your brand into promoters of your brand. Consider deploying this framework:

But how to do that as effortlessly as possible? Automation.

Programmatic and tech

The power of ABM is due to the advantages of digital marketing; automating data collection and connection enables the customization of interactions with those customers. It also allows B2B marketers to reach large volumes of customers with greater precision and personalization.

Tech now makes it easier to identify the ecommerce customers most likely to spend and have a high spend. It isn’t about developing an extraordinary number of leads. It’s about sales intelligence that allows you to develop the leads that really matter.

Crawl before you walk before you run. If you have a smaller contact list (e.g., <100 contacts), you can use your (likely) existing tech to implement an ABM program, including your:

• CRM structure
• Email system
• Deal flow/lead platforms
• Data modeling
• Ad performance dashboard

However, once your target lists grow (100–1,000s contacts), you’ll want to look at platforms that can do programmatic ABM:

• Marketing automation (e.g., HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot)
• Predictive analytics (e.g., Bombora, 6Sense)
• ABM ad-targeting platform (e.g., Terminus, Demandbase)

You’re not alone in figuring it out!

Roles and responsibilities: Friends, not foes

Marketing and Sales need to work differently if ABM is going to work and drive alignment (i.e., more collaboration and fewer silos). Marketing needs to develop personas for both a) individuals and b) buying groups and use those personas to engage with prospects deliberately and proactively. Sales should shift from a fragmented, manual process and lean into the automation made possible through tech. As stated earlier, the shift from being lead-centric to account-centric is key, and using combined sales and marketing data will yield better intel.

Measurement

Data is used to make decisions and help companies reach their goals — but data collection in 2022 has become drastically different with customers now aware of how much data they’re giving up and with the dramatic changes to data privacy initiated by the likes of Apple and Facebook. 

The rising importance of zero- and first-party data has changed how ecommerce businesses collect information from consumers. However, ecommerce companies must prioritize collecting this data to sustain the marketing efforts required to succeed.

It will also require marketers to shift and look at metrics differently. It is time to move away from tracking traditional (and at times, vanity) metrics like impressions, CPMs, click-through rates, web traffic, etc. and move towards tracking that speaks to revenue:

• Program performance (target account activity, opportunities, pipeline)
• Program strategy (revenue, win/loss rates, funnel velocity, cross-sell and up-sell, and retention)

In summary

Ecommerce businesses face many trends and challenges when striving to succeed in this rapidly evolving marketplace.

Now you know how to use tech to identify cross-channel account behavior, translate Account-Based-Marketing brand awareness into website traffic and evaluate its impact on points of conversation that will drive growth. ABM is key to competing in today’s B2B world, and it works — because a more targeted, personalized, and exceptional customer experience always does.

Developing an ABM strategy that focuses on targeting top potential customers and uses both marketing and sales initiatives to capture the prospect’s interest and nurture them through the buying journey is now a foundational part of any go-to-market plan.

The post Drive growth with account-based marketing appeared first on MarTech.

Looking back, Forrester’s Predictions 2018 considered 2018 a “year of reckoning” for digital transformation. This was to be the tipping point when inaction on transformation would start putting firms at risk. One of the surprising insights was that this risk wasn’t necessarily from an inability to attract new customers. It was from churn – from existing customers leaving for better experiences.

Skip forward a year to the 2019 edition, and Forrester is telling a similar, slightly tweaked story: 2019 is the year digital transformation “goes pragmatic.” If 2018 was all about recognizing the risks of failing to digitally transform, 2019 has been about mitigating those risks by putting plans into action.

These trends will have major implications in 2020. For firms that are trailing behind on CX, going pragmatic seems like a no-brainer. But how does the customer fit into this approach? Not very well, unfortunately. The same report states that 20 percent of brands will abandon their customer experience initiatives in 2019, opting for more traditional strategies, like price reductions, to achieve short-term objectives.

As marketers, we’re obsessed with the pain points customers face making their purchasing decisions. However, in our drive to reduce friction in that buyer’s journey, it’s easy to lose sight of the post-purchase experience. Like the CEOs, CIOs, and CMOs turning to pragmatic pre-purchase strategies to capture market share, transformation of the actual product or service experience becomes an afterthought.

Unsurprisingly, these risks are not a B2C-only concern. A 2019 Episerver survey revealed that nine out of ten B2B decision-makers identify increasing digital expectations from their customers or partners as their top external threat. Even worse, 50 percent of those same decision-makers say they lack funding to execute digital transformation programs in their organizations, echoing the Forrester predictions that more pragmatic tactics such as price will be the go-to strategy to spur growth.

What gets lost in this reactive mindset is the key to keeping (and expanding) market share: existing customers.

In B2B, where purchases are both complicated and time-consuming, this post-purchase customer service landscape can be particularly barren. End-users often have their product and/or service decisions made for them by senior managers, and the customer experience itself often reflects that power imbalance. This isn’t an unknown, of course. But if everyone agrees it’s is an issue, why isn’t it a priority? Currently, 59 percent of B2Bs point to legacy or in-house software as the primary reason for not being more digitally agile. That, combined with the lack of capital expenditure, maps out a grim path to declining customer loyalty.

Expensive and complicated purchasing decisions, typically made by senior managers, leave the end-user out of the equation, which in turn means that a user’s only interaction with a brand may be in the vacuum of the post-purchase experience. For many organizations, the product and/or service experience is the brand. And if the experience is poor, the brand perception will follow suit, no matter how low the purchase price might have been.

Perhaps the subconscious hope is that users will relent to a sort of digital Stockholm syndrome, where they develop an alliance with the tools they’re forced to use. More likely, though, the lack of attention to user needs will manifest as a bottom-up revolt, cultivating resentment and ill-will toward the brand responsible for their ongoing poor experience. And when those users become decision-makers, it’s not a leap to see how this can negatively impact business relationships and long-term profitability.

Clinical research has shown that emotions impact logical reasoning. And reasoning suffers the most when emotions are negative. At its base, a brand relationship is an emotional one, formed – and continuously informed – by the customer experience. When that experience is negative, it clouds every aspect of decision-making. Your product and/or service will look unappealing no matter how compelling its feature set or stated benefits.

So, B2B brands have a choice to make: Focus on the short-term gains that traditional price and features may garner, or invest in the long term, creating emotional engagement through meaningful brand interactions that speak to the needs of not only the purchasing decision-makers but also the end-users. Because the latter won’t always be just users—one day they’ll make the decisions. 

And with 2020 on the horizon, here’s where B2B companies can take another lesson from B2C: An emotional connection is much stronger than a pragmatic one.

The post Is it wise to rob CX to pay for growth? appeared first on MarTech.

Creative must be grounded in a sound strategy, underpinned by a singular insight about the audience. This means going deeper – figuring out the intrinsic human need that’s driving the consumer, and showing how you’ll meet that need or solve that pain point. Look at the data available to you, get the data that isn’t, and plan things out in a way that makes sense.

Why bother? Strategy empowers creativity. When you give a creative team a strategic, authentic and singular insight, they’ll push the creative that much further. Creative teams need a defined sandbox to work in; otherwise, the unlimited choice and scope can be paralyzing and actually stifle great work. Context is always king. Without a sound strategy up front to inspire the creative, you often get – at best – mediocre, unsuccessful creative tactics in search of a strategy. At worst, you get a poor buyer’s journey and a brand experience that ticks people off. And once you lose someone’s interest, it’s very hard (and expensive) to win it back.

When it comes to effective marketing, a big spend and eye-catching creative isn’t enough; spending time and money on strategic planning is the key to success and worth the investment.

Soapbox is a special feature for marketers in our community to share their observations and opinions about our industry. You can submit your own here.

The post Soapbox: Hope is not a marketing strategy appeared first on MarTech.

But just because there are more agencies can do, doesn’t mean they should be doing it.

In fact, research revealed the following conclusion: the future of effective content marketing is, well, less content.

Blog content, for example, isn’t generating the kind of gains marketers expect given the time and money they put into it. A BuzzSumo analysis of one million blog posts revealed that 50% of randomly selected posts received only eight shares or less.

New apps aren’t faring much better. In fact, few consumers find branded apps useful at all, with more than 90% of branded apps having fewer than 10,000 downloads.

So, why are brand leaders still introducing content to new channels despite the low payoff? The competition for attention has never been steeper.

Now, consider the impact of one of the most celebrated marketing acts in recent memory: Fearless Girl. Billions of impressions generated from a single, culturally relevant brand expression. And yet the marketing team for State Street Global Advisors only spent $250,000 – and that includes working media and production.

This proves that by limiting your scope of work and focusing on the critical moments in your customer’s journey, two things happen: you increase your odds of delivering an exceptional experience (instead of a potentially mediocre one), and you avoid diluting your resources. It’s a win-win.

The post Soapbox: Your customers are everywhere, but here’s why you don’t need to be appeared first on MarTech.