Forecasts from 14 Experts (in 100 Words or Fewer)

2014 Marketing in the Express Lane

Moving Marketing ForwardEach year brings new marketing technologies and tools, but keeping up with the tactics and strategies can seem like another daunting task added to your growing to do list. Much like grocery shopping and traveling on the highway, some things are just easier in the express lane. So we called on 14 marketing experts to bring you key forecasting strategies for 2014 and beyond. Don’t have time to sift through your lengthy marketing wish list? Each expert offers tangible insight in 100 words or fewer, so you can get in and muster up your next big marketing idea.

Who owns your brand’s story?

Corporate storytelling needs to be thought about from many perspectives. It’s

not just shaping the story, but developing the distribution and engagement

opportunities that will be used to share it and grow audience involvement. The

CMO and CCO are obviously top choices, for they must bring the big-picture to

life in many ways for a variety of audiences. One person not often considered is a

UX professional. Customer experience is rising in importance, yet more thought

is given to creating content than designing the experience the user will have. For,

without a compelling experience, your story will flop.

ARDATH ALBEE B2B Marketing Strategist and author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

MATT HEINZ President, Heinz Marketing

Don’t go for the plethora and discount process

The difference from 12 months ago—in terms of the tools and opportunity to use

social and content to create 1:1 conversations with prospects and customers—

has exploded. But the single-most important requirement to maximize its value for

your organization is process. Yes, process isn’t the sexiest part of B2B marketing,

but it’s required to deliver consistent results, at scale, and execute on a daily basis

across a complex sales and marketing organization, and multi-channel marketing

program. Define your process up front, and execution will be both faster and

higher yield in revenue moving forward.

Buyers as the new content creators

A big shift in buying behaviors emerging in 2014, is buyers will move beyond just

conducting research and consuming content. They will be active content creators

and information providers to their organizations. For marketers, this will create

significant challenges as most technologies support one-way digital transmission

of content. Marketers will need to build technologies, which now support buyer-

generated content creation and create bridges to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

and sales, making it an imperative to know personas deeply.

TONY ZAMBITO Founder, Buyer Personas

RICHARD HILL Managing Director, Demand Generation, QUARRY

3 email must-dos for 2014:

1 Go mobile. With mobile now accounting for more than half of all email opens, it’s (past!)

time to embrace responsive email design to deliver better experiences for

small screen viewers.

2 Get to the point. With attention spans (and screen sizes) shrinking, marketers must focus

readers on what’s most important. Prioritize. Use copy sparingly. And place

CTAs closer to the top.

3 Be more engaging. Emails shouldn’t be boring. In 2014, cut-through with video (or video-like

experiences using animated gifs), real-time content feeds, and location

based personalization.

JAY BAER President, Convince and Convert and Author of Youtility

Create “Youtility”

The best way for companies to communicate their value proposition is to not focus

on the value proposition. Instead, create marketing that is truly and inherently

useful. Create marketing that is so useful, customers would pay for it, if you asked

them to do so. Create Youtility. The best way to break through the extraordinary,

unprecedented messaging clutter is to talk about yourself and your company less.

Find a way to provide information, advice and assistance your customers really

need, and watch them beat a path to your door, eventually. In 2014, to the useful

go the spoils.

LEE ODDEN CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Optimize social content

Marketers’ plans for social media should support customers and business goals.

The days of social media purely for SEO are dying fast. So, what does social media

have to do with SEO? Ironically, if you focus on creating value with relevant, high

demand content that drives social experiences, the by-products in the form of

engagement, links and social shares can yield numerous indirect benefits for SEO.

There are many ways to technically optimize social content including Google

Authorship and micro-formats. At the same time, focus on optimizing social

experiences and growing community with content that’s easy to find and share.

CRAIG ROSENBERG Editor, Funnelholic

Nurture beyond activities

Buyer-persona based lead nurturing programs have proven to be the highest

performing. Move lead nurturing from activity-based (focused on what activities

a lead does) or cadence-based (focused on just hitting an editorial schedule) to

designing the content and flows around a company’s target personas. When

persona based nurturing is put in action, results are often 3-5x than before. In order

to do this, you will have to have a process to properly identify the personas of your

leads early in the process, content mapped to each persona’s interests and buying

processes, and a well-designed lead management process.

CARLOS HIDALGO CEO, ANNUITAS

Connect the dots of your buyer insight

Insights into the mind and buying patterns of buyers should be the driving force

behind any marketing and sales strategy. There are still to many in B2B sales and

marketing who are not taking the time to do the hard work of developing key buyer

insights, steps of a purchase path and putting themselves in the shoes of the

buyers as they move through their purchase. Technologies such as social listening,

marketing automation and optimization tools can provide the information that can

lead you to that insight and allow for a better buyer connection.

NICK EDOUARD EVP Business Development, LookBookHQ

Refine engagement

B2B marketers have increasing engagement with their content as a primary

objective in 2014, as engagement really is the foundation for marketing ROI.

Interactive content may well have a role to play in that, but it doesn’t matter if the

content is interactive per se, but rather that it’s aligned to your buyer’s journey

and meeting their requirements. Are you delivering the right content to the right

people at the right time—and in the right way? That, and generating the metrics

and data that marketers need to go alongside it, is going to be challenging for

B2B marketers.

AMANDA MAKSYMIW Content Marketing Manager, Lattice Engines

The next wave of data science

So many insights and signals hidden within CRM, marketing automation platform,

and the web are incredibly predictive of buyer intent. By using data science and

predictive models to analyze data available from internal and external sources,

marketers can optimize their revenue funnels, improve conversion rates, uncover

more opportunities and improve drive more revenue. For example, predictive

models can be trained on recent transactions and closed-wins to identify who is

likely to purchase next and offer insight on how to close the deal.

DENNIS DAYMAN Chief Privacy and Security Officer, Oracle Eloqua

Top 3 recommendations for managing email deliverability in 2014:

1 Prioritize quality over quantity with email lists

2 Segment consumers wants based on their Digital Body Language™ to reduce

deliverability complaints. Send each customer their own personal email based

on their interactions with your brand.

3 Dedicate time for careful analysis of campaign results and metrics.

MEAGAN HEUER Marketing Therapist, SiriusDecisions

Accountability and alignment

Struggles with execution generally come down to two issues: What to do and

who gets credit. The first one is all about goal setting. Account Based Marketing

execution falters if marketing can’t be specific about what needs to be done

and why, with whom, and when. This is mostly a marketing problem. Sales is

accustomed to having specific, account-level goals. Marketers are not, but they’re

learning. That leads to the second issue: Who gets credit. Marketing must be open

to valuing influence, not just lead volume. Influence tracking is the only way to

show ABM success.

ROLAND SMART VP, Social & Community Management, Oracle

Social Relationship Management

It’s been said about strategy and it applies equally well to an integrated social

marketing strategy: “culture eats strategy”. My advice is to focus on building your

team and culture rather than on a specific strategy. Social moves quickly and

teams can move quickly but the wake of change is littered with strategy. Further,

social is not a channel but rather a layer that should run across almost everything

you do as a marketer. As to the behavioral data derived from social engagement,

your culture should foster the use of this data to validate each incremental

adjustment you make to your programs.

KOKA SEXTON Senior Social Marketing Manager, LinkedIn

Empower sales with shared content

One of the easiest ways social marketers can empower sales reps is by

implementing a sharing process for content. Send out regular communications

or create a specific social channel of new content where the sales people can

share from.

The social marketing teams should have a great idea of who the influencers are

in their space and work with sales to identify the social media profiles of their

customer and prospects. It’s the future of sales. If it’s merely following and sharing

updates from influencers or engaging with prospects, social sales professionals

will build their professional brand and their pipeline.

Oracle Eloqua is the leading provider of modern marketing automation and revenue performance management software that helps ensure every component of marketing works harder and more efficiently to drive revenue. Eloqua software is now the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Companies across a wide range of industries rely on Eloqua’s cloud-based software, professional services and education programs to help them automate marketing processes across multiple channels, target and nurture prospects and deliver highly qualified leads at a lower cost to sales teams.

For more information, visit www.eloqua.com, subscribe to the ”It’s All About Revenue” blog, call 866.327.8764, or email demand@eloqua.com

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