2016 Predictions: What Tomorrow's Marketer Needs to Know Today

Editor’s Notes

People don’t demand great experiences — they just expect them
New norm – Personalized experiences across channels
It’s a dialog – good listening and timely response

How do you drive real engagement? By communicating with known people on a very personal level with messages tailored to their specific asks/concerns/choices.

From your blog:
It’s about engagement marketing, not mass marketing: This has been a central theme for me in years past, but I really saw it come to life in 2015; smart brands that were not targeting consumers with the same messages over and over again were the most successful. Some of the organizations that I saw executing this best were sports teams. Franchises have succeeded in creating an ongoing dialogue with their fans to engage beyond game attendance. By observing that a football fan has taken his whole family to the big rivalry game every year for the last six years, teams are able to market more effectively both around that game and around other family activities. They have begun talking to *that individual* — not some generic, large group of “fans.” In terms that may sound too “inside baseball” (pun intended), this shift is captured in a move from a “third-party” world (pushing generic messages to someone else’s audience) to a “first party” world where the marketer and the organization are the keepers of individual behavioral and demographic information. This allows them to make *every* interaction – even paid advertising – completely relevant and personal. Just think of the potential!

– Marketers are now being asked to drive the *entire* lifecycle. Its about the whole, not just the parts.
From sowing the seed of awareness to growing the fruits of advocacy
Attracting and acquiring is just part of the story, retaining customers also falls under marketing’s purview
Tear down the walls between your customer acquisition and customer retention teams

From Sanjay’s blog:
It’s about the whole customer lifecycle, not just acquisition: Over and over this year, I saw – and felt personally in my own day-to-day role – a shift towards the marketing organization being responsible for and a driver of the entire customer lifecycle, not just the top of the funnel. I met with customers whose “acquisition” marketing teams weren’t even in the same building as their “loyalty and retention” marketing teams. And then I watched them dismantle those constructs to bring them all together. Yes, we want to think of new and engaging ways to obtain new customers, but we must place equal, if not greater importance on keeping the customers we have happy. More engaged customers spend more with us, they renew at much higher rates, and they advocate for us to bring in new customers in a way that our “clever marketing” could never do. Investing in that this year is just good business.

A higher bar – no longer B2B or B2C – new baseline is B2H and a combination of best practices from both disciplines
Engage with our customers in deep, relevant and varied ways

The lines and techniques are blurring. It’s the relationship with the customer—with the human being—that’s key.

Don’t ask the mirror, ask the customer on the other side of the glass door – what does he see – a B2B company or a B2C company?
Whether they are buying greeting cards, football tickets or ultrasound machines, customers expect a particular type of engagement with organizations
There’s a goldmine on either side – marketers should be willing and able to learn from both universes
Storytelling And Emotion Matter For Everyone

From your blog:
It’s about B2H, not just B2B or B2C: The old distinctions of marketing are disappearing. I repeatedly heard “consumer” marketers this year say things like, “I need to figure out how to nurture relationships like those B2B marketers do.” And, just as often, I heard “B2B marketers” say, “I need to figure out how to dynamically personalize all my messages and content on the website like those consumer marketers.” It’s no longer about how we see ourselves, (e.g., “We sell to consumers” or “We sell to businesses”), but about how consumers see us. Not only does this mean that marketers are “crossing the aisle” to learn from each other’s best practices, it means that they’re taking a more personalized approach to their interactions with the “humans” on the other end of their marketing messages. Dedicating ourselves to this broader definition of “must-haves” or best practices will drive higher conversion rates and more revenue for all of us in 2016.

5 minutes for slides 1-3.

Content marketing is (increasingly) becoming just… marketing. In 2016, content marketing exits its college years and starts growing up, becoming more strategic and real. That means getting the necessary planning, processes, frameworks, creativity, and metrics in place to legitimize itself.

From Sanjay’s blog:
It’s about the power of “and” vs. the tyranny of “or” when it comes to advertising technology and marketing technology: Prior to this year, “MarTech” and “AdTech” might as well have been on different planets as far as marketers were concerned. Programmatic was the big buzzword with advertisers in 2014, but in 2015, the buzz was all about the convergence of advertising technology and marketing technology. This was a particularly enlightening lesson from 2015 – that the world of paid advertising can and *should* directly be tied to direct marketing and the ability to connect with individuals. The result is the ability to personalize ads like never before. For example, sending a specific, relevant message to someone via a paid ad in their Facebook feed should be no different than sending them an email. In fact, wouldn’t it be great if I could send that person a relevant email based on their behavior on my website showing interest in product X, and then if they open that email, automatically put a follow up paid ad message in their feed – but, if they *don’t* open that email, I could put the original message in that paid ad? This also means that, as a marketer, our marketing spend will be tracked in new and improved ways. Instead of throwing dollars at programmatic and customers who fit a specific profile, but may or may not be interested in our product, we’ll now be able to better target our dollars to the people who really do care and are therefore are more likely to buy. In many ways, this is the “aha!” moment we’ve all been looking for.

Gartner Feedback – Why is Marketo a leaders on latest Digital Marketing Hub MQ?
“Gartner’s view, and what is driving our research these days, is that Martech and Adtech are coming together and will eventually be fully joined. Many companies don’t get this, and the worlds are very different – different language, different audiences, etc., so vendors can’t always bridge this gap. Marketo gets it, and this is one of the reasons you jumped into the leaders quadrant this year.”

FYR:
The AdTech Martech marriage is super important to Gartner. They consider Marketo to be at the forefront of this marriage esp with the Audience Hub.

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“Connecting the Dots” where the challenge is really making the Engagement Marketing thing happen across all these disconnected touch points and the rise of IoT touchpoints – one additional nuance to the section can/should be not just the touch points inside of marketing, but outside – getting the broader organization to get coordinated

Lots of different functions are trying to reach the customer
Holistic, one view of customer is must – for product, support, marketing, sales interactions to be an awful customer experience
Marketing First World – marketing driving the entire lifecycle

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Economist – Skills,

http://www.which-50.com/five-key-trends-gartners-2015-digital-marketing-hype-cycle/
http://www.which-50.com/cross-channel-automation-critical-cmo-success/

“Calling all Renaissance Marketers” – like Da Vinci, marketers have to be artists and *scientists* now – they have to be facile across all channels, not specialized channels or functions, they have to be comfortable in the data – they have to be conversationalists.

Technical skills required of marketers is changing
One of the most important skills marketers will need to possess in future is the ability to understand how to string a conversation together to build engagement across the difference places customers visit.
Someone with the ability to understand how to engage a customer in an email or in a Facebook ad and who is thinking about the difference between how these channels work.

From Sanjay’s blog:
It’s about renaissance marketers, not channel specialists: Building on the above, there’s a need for today’s marketers to be a master of many talents, instead of specializing in one area or channel. The topics of people, skills, and the prototype for the new marketer were perhaps the most frequent discussion I had with CMOs and marketers in 2015. Mostly recently, Lara Hood Balazs, SVP, head of North America marketing at Visa, described her talent search as looking for “human Swiss army knives,” i.e. “people who … can easily move between multiple work projects.” This folks are rare, which is why I predict that there will be greater emphasis on educating tomorrow’s marketer in the year ahead. This education will go beyond traditional marketing tactics to include mastering marketing technology.

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#1: Grubhub
To remain competitive, GrubHub is trying hard to figure out how to employ its insights to better customize itself to its customers’ needs. The company thanked its highest tippers via email, for example, using its data for targeting and segmentation. It also uses its data to target consumers at opportune times. For example, if it happened to be raining the last few times you ordered Chinese food from Seamless, be prepared for a personalized prompt with a deal to your neighborhood Chinese restaurant the next time clouds darken the skies.

Customer profiles are evolving at lightening speed, so programmatic doesn’t work anymore.

“Martech justifies the spend on Ad(tech)” – how much do I spend and on what?

Even ads need to be timely and personalized and allow continuous conversations

In 2016, here’s the new law in town – only personalized ads, generic stuff not permitted!

Be the renaissance marketer (data driven storytellers), but also use the right tools, like MarTech, to spend right.

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Training people differently.