The Economist Intelligence Unit asked 6 experts how marketing will transform in the next 5 years.

What does this mean for ABM?

 

The Future of Marketing  

http://futureofmarketing.eiu.com/

An account-based marketing perspective

The usual suspects stand out - data, digital, social, mobile, analytics

But these need to drive a ‘pull’ rather than a traditional ‘push’ approach

“The traditional approach of push-based marketing is not going to work as well as it has in the past when there are more and more things competing for our attention”

Stop telling stories, think instead about narrative

Stories have a start, middle and end. But what happens when you let your customer decide the plot?

“Narrative is open-ended, about some opportunity…a call to action. It says, “How it ends is up to you. What are you going to do?”

Decision-making power is now dispersed across influencer networks and affiliates

The challenge is to tap into these networks across the social web

“Networks are powerful, as we’re seeing in the rise of the social web. And businesses are part of those networks. We need to understand what the networks are, which technologies join them together and where they overlap.”

The enterprise must catch up with consumer technologies

Making new connections between people’s work and personal lives

“Marketing bridges the gap between the lives of consumers and those of people in the organisation”

Return on Information is the new ROI, but marketers are drowning in data

This means we need to work out the value of customer data, sorting the good from the bad to get meaningful insights

“…It’s starting to track carefully how much it costs to accumulate information about a customer and divide that by what I can earn by using that information more effectively”

Content can still be king

But only when it’s crafted for customers, not your products

“help them think about their problem in a more sophisticated way, frame their choices, offer recommendations that are agnostic to a particular product push”

We need less technical, more art, with a big dose of passion

To ignite emotional responses from customers

“We’re going to see how our creative thoughts really handle digital in a creative way. It’s going to be more fun and more interesting, and the combination of the artistic and the technical will get us to a more emotional and engaging place”

Some enterprise technology companies are getting it right (we’re not surprised as these are our clients!)

By getting sales and marketing to work together

“Getting marketing and sales working together in enterprise software sales is critical because there’s a long purchase cycle, many decision-makers and influencers, and an increasing appetite among customers to research and digest useful and relevant content…”

© Momentum ABM 2015

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