Know your partners: Friday’s Daily Brief
Plus customer education and refreshing your websites.
MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, it’s all about partnerships.
In some cases, the partnership refers to a glorified customer-client relationship. But more times than not, the relationship isn’t just about the sale. There’s more on the line. As author Nassim Nicholas Taleb would have it, there’s “skin in the game.”
Even when building and updating websites, it’s important to know who your partners are. This is according to Acquia CMO Lynne Capozzi, some of whose thoughts are below. Build alliances to meet your goals, and in the give and take, your direction will become clearer. With partnerships, you have strength in numbers.
To prove the point, we’ve also taken at the importance of customer education as part of customer experience. Educating your customers takes things beyond that quick sale. It invites them to become partners in your company’s mission.
Chris Wood,
Editor
Customer education is a vital part of the customer experience
“We offer a tool for advertisers of all kinds – it could be ecommerce, HR companies, travel agencies – for them to advertise much easier on all sorts of platforms; Amazon, eBay, Google Ads, Google Shopping, whatever. We automate it for them, basically,” said Floyd van Zoelen, Knowledge Specialist at Channable.
With learning hub Channacademy, “What we try to do is educate our customers on everything we have to offer – different functionalities, different features – and make it easier for them to get started, or if they’re looking for a new feature to make it easy for them to learn about it and start using it successfully.”
Channacademy is accessible only through Channable, but it’s built on the Northpass customer education platform. Channable’s content creators are able to work independently in the Northpass platform, uploading content and tweaking design. Emphasizing the importance of pushing data on customer engagement with education hubs into marketing systems of record, Northpass recently announced a partnership with HubSpot CRM.
“We know that initiatives pick up steam when marketing gets ownership – that makes HubSpot so instrumental,” said Northpass CEO Steve Cornwell. “They own the marketer, they own the mid- and small-size businesses. We think the HubSpot/Northpass partnership has the opportunity finally to make customer education accessible to companies of all sizes.”
Website refresh? Now is the time
“Think of your website as a 24/7/365 lead generation engine,” said Lynne Capozzi, CMO of digital experience powerhouse Acquia. “It sells while you sleep. And the cost of producing website content is 62% less than traditional marketing and it generates about three times the leads.”
An internal study conducted by Acquia found that in 2020 over half of transactions with its customers were digital, said Capozzi, speaking at a recent MarTech conference.
If you were thinking of holding off on a website refresh during uncertain times, or because you think customers will find you somewhere else in the digital or mobile realm, keep in mind that for many companies, the website is still central to how your customers experience your brand.
“The website is the heart of your digital experience,” Capozzi said. “The technology to build your site is probably the most important [in your stack].”
If there’s resistance on your marketing team toward tackling this seemingly overwhelming endeavor, don’t stress. The task can be broken down into manageable pieces. You might not have to redesign everything head to toe.
And for those businesses who make the website a priority, Capozzi’s method of approaching a relaunch simplifies the process when you take it up in the future.
CDPs soar in 2021
Customer data platforms have had a banner year in the first half of 2021, according to the latest report from the CDP Institute.
The CDP industry has ballooned to an estimated $1.6 billion in revenue, according to the report. This includes worldwide CDP product sales, as well as CDP components within marketing suites, message delivery systems and ecommerce platforms, but doesn’t include related services or in-house data development projects.
Some experts predict an increase in marketing budgets and hiring for the second half of the year. But marketers haven’t been wasting any time, boosting their tech stack with CDPs ahead of this big push.
As a result, CDP vendors have added 6% more employees in the first half of 2021, compared with 1% employment growth in the second half of last year. Investors are also bullish on this particular data technology, pumping 11% more venture funding into CDPs in 2021, while we saw only 3% funding growth in the second half of 2020.
Quote of the day
“Great companies don’t offer us something to buy. Great companies offer us something to buy into.” Simon Sinek, author, business expert
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