How to Adapt to Marketing Complexity

Flexibility, collaboration, and personalization are the cornerstones of a successful digital marketing strategy, four leading marketing strategists told a May 15 webinar hosted by DNN.

The panelists were responding to DNN’s recent white paper, “Marketing Got Complicated: Challenges (and Opportunities) for Marketers at Mid-Sized Companies.” The white paper reported on a February 2014 survey that captured the experience of 300 marketers in companies with 50 to 5,000 employees.

The research confirmed what many of us already suspected: it’s a tough business for marketers in mid-sized companies facing a huge pool of competing content, a dizzying array of marketing platforms, and multiple priorities for scarce marketing dollars.

Here are the five burning questions that panelists addressed during the webinar.

1) The Antidote to Content Shock

“Brands and individuals are now publishers,” said session moderator Dennis Shiao (@dshiao), DNN’s Director of Content Marketing, and that transformation has made content shock one of the hottest content marketing topics of the year. The survey showed that “all marketers are seeing the same dynamic,” Shiao said. “How do you get the attention of your target customer, how do you even find them, and how do you stand out from the crowd?”

Technology marketer Sandra Zoratti (@sandraz), CMO of The Marketer Network, noted that the average adult attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight since 2000. “Just as a point of reference, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.” To cut through the noise, she advised participants to rely on visual content, deliver scalable content, and rely on data to understand their audiences.

Ian Gertler (@IanGertler), CMO of Symplegades, agreed that visual storytelling is “really the evolution of how people find content,” allowing users to skim large volumes of input until they find the material they want to focus on.

“We’ve come very far from the old, traditional mindset of broadcasting a message and trying to reach everybody,” he said. “Now, it’s very important that we interact with people.”

Author and marketing consultant Jeff Korhan (@jeffkorhan) said organizations can succeed by inventorying the stories they already tell in selling situations, “tightening them up, and looking for the intersection of those stories with the pain points that customers have.” The best stories “are memorable, which means they’re transportable, which means they’ll be shared on the social web,” where they’ll reach a wider audience and attract more business.

2) Five or More Solutions, so Pick One

DNN’s “Marketing Got Complicated” report revealed that the majority of marketers in mid-sized companies are juggling five or more marketing solutions. The panelists’ advice was to find one platform, make sure it’s the right choice, get to know it well, and build up from there.

“Technology is supposed to be empowering, and it certainly has been that in a lot of ways,” Gertler said. But “it’s very important to not just collect data, which a lot of people do, but to collect it, analyse it, and then actually apply it back into the [marketing] equation.” That way, the right marketing solution helps guide business decisions and shape customer experiences.

Scott Wilder, Global Nation Builder at Marketo, encouraged participants to talk to marketers in similar-sized companies that aren’t competitors, and ask about the budgets and internal resources they need to work with different products.

Korhan suggested a “list and limit” approach in which companies inventory the tools and resources they’re using, keep the ones that best serve their objectives, and “forget everything else until you master those.”

Zoratti agreed that marketers need “solutions that are a fit for you, versus ones that boil the ocean,” and urged participants to test-drive new solutions before committing to them.

3) Marketing Priorities: Harnessing the Tornado

Shiao pointed to the large number of marketing objectives that had received a high or very high rating from at least three-quarters of survey respondents. “When you have so many priorities as a marketer, you essentially have no priorities,” he said.

Zoratti agreed that “in the tornado that is marketing today, it’s becoming really, really difficult” for companies to set a course and stick to it, but she added a priority to the list: in addition to customer acquisition and retention, increased brand awareness, new market development, and ROI measurement, she stressed the opportunity to reactivate customers who defect from a brand.

Marketers must “learn to say no so you can make room for yes,” she said, and adopt an agile, flexible marketing approach that “allows them to be nimble and use speed as a competitive advantage.”

Wilder said marketers should take a step back from multiple tactical goals and keep an eye on a single corporate objective. “Focus on one specific thing in terms of your goal and how you want to be evaluated, and start there,” he recommended.

4) Online Communities: Business Has Always Been Social

With 90% of survey respondents reporting that they had introduced their own online communities, or planned to by the end of 2015, Shiao asked what steps companies should take before launching.

Wilder said marketers should make sure they can count on enough participants to make a vibrant community, and understand what the different people in an ecosystem, from prospects, to customers in different verticals, to strategic partners, to product champions -- can bring to the discussion. If an online community isn’t the right answer, he added, “there are other ways to get users to collaborate together.”

Gertler said social networks have finally moved online technology away from a self-service mentality. “Business has always been social,” he said. Online communities are “finally reinforcing interaction and people connecting with one another again,” thereby “becoming the heartbeat of how each business connects with its customer base.”

Korhan said marketers must always give online communities their absolute best and strive to personalize the experience for members of different communities and tribes. “People in those communities will be very active,” he said, and that should trigger marketers to “invite them in to be major contributors” to building the brand and attracting other community members like them.

5) People, Not Account Numbers

Shiao said marketers in mid-sized companies “might feel like they’re the underdogs,” competing against organizations with bigger teams and budgets. Wilder responded that “we all need to start thinking about customers as people, and not account numbers. The more we do that, the more they’ll want to interact and speak with us.”

Gertler said mid-sized organizations can differentiate themselves by understanding and delivering what customers need. “Value is such an important thing, and the other part is relevance,” he said. “If something isn’t relevant to what people need, you lose them right away.”

Korhan agreed that personalized service is a great way for smaller companies to beat national brands. In his own past work as a landscape architect, “we built up that trust level. We gave more personal attention. We collaborated with the customers and really helped them understand possibilities that they didn’t know.”

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Zoratti said smaller organizations can benefit from internal and external collaboration, “so you can solve challenges with an extended team of resources.”

Conclusion

If you missed DNN’s live broadcast, you can still register to view the on-demand replay. In addition, DNN published the webinar slides, which are included below.