Technology Marketing Blog

IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CMO 2017 Predictions

2017-01-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

The following predictions are excerpted from IDC's 2017 CMO FutureScape report which provides additional details and guidance. (Here's the summary webcast.) Of course, no one can have 10 top priorities, so pick and choose the one or two that will be most effective for your organization for the next 12 months and nail them. Then go on to some of the others. By working your way through as many of these forces you feel apply to your business, you will be able to offer customers value that your competitors simply cannot match. If you don’t, be prepared for the pain of being on the wrong side of that equation.

Prediction 1: Superhero CMOs Emerge - By 2020, the first superhero CMOs will emerge because they received C-Level permission to disrupt traditional go-to-market operations. IDC predicts that we will see pockets of break-through in CMO leadership. This will be demonstrated by individuals who have exceptional leadership skills and in the face of long-odds, have brought meaningful change to their marketing organizations. The "Superhero CMO" will be one who has executed real change -- not just the aspirational change that is depicted on a PowerPoint slide. Here are IDC's criteria to identify these Superhero CMO's; and where to look (or not look) for them.
Prediction 2: Boardroom Battle for the Customer - By 2020, 25% of CEO’s will appoint a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) in an attempt to unify the imperative of customer-centricity. Who on the C-Level leadership team will emerge as the most effective agent to deliver the customer’s growing persistence for a better experience? Is Customer Centricity a cultural value; is it everyone’s job; or should it be the domain of a single executive leader? If it is the latter, which one? This is the emerging “Boardroom Battle for the Customer”.
Prediction 3: "Free Range" Content Invasion - By 2020, more than 50% of a company's commercial content will be created outside of marketing's direct control. Content marketing – it's not just for marketers anymore. While content experts will determine the most strategic aspects of a company's commercial communication, CMO's must prepare to leverage content from a wide range of sources. Today, content marketing stops at marketing's silo walls. Full commercial content – all the content needed to conduct commerce, is much more. Opening up marketing's borders will cause initial angst, but it's a parade that won't, and shouldn't, be stopped
Prediction 4: Journey Budgets get Reshuffled - By 2019, one-third of today's “awareness” budget will be redirected to stages later in the buyer's journey. Marketing's programs budget is poised on the brink of a major overhaul. Historically, nearly 50% of a tech companies company’s marketing program budget is spent on awareness. However, CMOs are driving funds out of the traditional (but vague) job of "awareness building" to jobs later in the buyer's journey.
Prediction 5: "Dark Social" Shines - By 2018, 15% of companies will shift the majority of their social marketing focus out of the public sphere and into private groups and messaging apps. Once again, consumers are charging ahead of brands. Consumer use of messaging apps has already hit mainstream (worldwide use of the biggest messaging apps now surpasses use of the biggest social brands) and yet this medium is hardly on the radar of most marketers. But where buyers go, marketing will follow.
Prediction 6: Events are the Main Event - By 2017, events will surpass advertising as the top marketing program investment in more than 50% of B2B IT vendors. As marketers dash to digital in so many of their marketing program investments, events have emerged as an important counterbalance to this digital shift. Over the last three years spending on digital marketing has increased from 31% to 43% of the average marketing programs. Despite the rapid growth in digital marketing, events have remained the second largest marketing program investment only behind advertising. But this gap is shrinking and many industry leaders now have events as their number one marketing program investment.
Prediction 7: Marketing GO! - By 2020, 20% of IT Vendors will have augmented reality pilots in place that will serve as the foundation for immersive marketing. Through the advent of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies marketers are now able to add digital information and/or digital objects to their buyer's real world experiences, creating the holistic and encapsulating engagements that are at the foundation of immersive marketing. By allowing marketers to present relevant, personalized, and targeted information to a buyer based on his or her current location and/or activity engagement marketers are able to move beyond a single, one time, albeit (sometimes) memorable experience and into a continuous stream of value addition for their buyers.
Prediction 8: DX Fails without CX-OS - By 2020, 50% of digital transformation (DX) initiatives will fail due to the lack of an end-to-end customer experience orchestration service (CX-OS). CX-OS is IDC's term for the future platform on which enterprises will be able to successfully accomplish digital transformation. It is a low latency, high activation environment that connects applications and datasets across customer related activities in the enterprise. Through open APISs and microservices, It delivers a growing set of software services that manage workflows, decisions, interaction events, data, processes, audiences, customer IDs, security, etc. Executed well, a CX-OS will connect all interactions with the underlying processes that companies will use to communicate with customers and perform activities on the customer’s behalf.
Prediction 9: Bots Break Advertising - By 2020, 40% of e-commerce transactions will be enabled by cognitive/AI personal shoppers and conversational commerce.The next generations of digital personal assistants (aka Siri, GoogleNow, Cortana, Viv, Alexa, etc.) will be advanced cognitive agents able to conduct commerce on behalf of consumers. This will result in an explosion of bot-to-bot transactions.
Prediction 10: A Message in Every Machine - By 2020, 15% of display advertising will be executed via connected devices such as vehicles, wearables, facilities, and in-home. Smart devices will become pervasive in daily life. Almost everything including our homes, vehicles, shops, offices, cities even our clothing, appliances, furniture, product packaging and more will be capable of detecting our presence and interacting with us either directly or via smartphones. This will have huge implications for marketers and advertising. The opportunities to add value will rise but so will the risk of intrusiveness and blocking. Marketers that master to balance these conflicting elements in the new sense and respond world will have their audiences to themselves and pull ahead of the fast followers and laggards.

"Marketers will live or die depending on which side of the disruption sword they are on," according to Gerry Murray, Research Analyst with IDC's CMO Advisory. "CMOs need to get past the internal disruption caused by technology and start using all the new tools and data to create new ways of engaging customers. Marketers need to shift customer relationships from using context to deliver messages to ensuring continuity and delivering value. They must use data driven insights to make the professional and personal lives of their customers better."

Blowing Up the Funnel

2016-05-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

IDC predicts that by 2020, 1 in 5 marketers will abandon the traditional funnel for a buyer-centric approach. The funnel belongs to the 20th century. Back then, buyers were ignorant about their choices and sellers knew little about the needs and preferences of their prospective customers. Now, leading companies are embracing high-information strategies that are re-architecting the shape of engagement and in the process, blowing up the funnel. [Read my interview with Direct Marketing News]

Everyone hates the funnel

The traditional sales funnel was invented for a low information world. Invented in 1899, it served all through the 20th century when buyers and sellers knew little about each other. This low-information situation shaped commercial engagement into the funnel's distinctive silhouette – wastefully, painfully, wide at the top; desperately, frustratingly, narrow at the bottom; and with that nasty chokepoint between marketing and sales in the middle.

Wastefully wide at the top. Frustratingly narrow at the bottom: Because companies knew little about buyers, they had to "fish with nets" as Jon Miller, CEO of Account-based Marketing company Engagio, calls it. Cast wide to capture a range of suspects and then progressively filter to find those that really want to buy. Most of this effort was wasted, especially at the top of the funnel, as the number of prospects who made it through was astonishingly low.
The mid-funnel chokepoint: In the low-information era, filling the wide top of the funnel with prospects required a more cost effective (when compared to sales) one-to-many approach. Advertising and direct marketing attracts the masses. Once some knowledge was collected about prospects, they could be handed to the more expensive sales team to complete the job. The two teams constantly bickered over this serial handoff. Marketing invariably lost that battle.
Customer pain: While the funnel is wasteful for marketing and frustrating for sales, customers also suffer in the low-information funnel. Extensive outreach from ignorant companies is an intrusive time sink. Irrelevant marketing content and unprepared sales people requires buyers to do most of the heavy lifting during the buying process. Lack of information about customers perpetuates the insular inside-out attitude that permeates many B2B companies.

Blowing up the funnel

Today, disrupters compete on experience quality as much as they compete with products. Buyers are now in charge – not vendors. With the Internet as a high-information resource, buyers now need the vendor much less than before.

Companies must earn back the right to sell. They must reduce the customer pain that is indigenous to the funnel. They must offer buying experiences that customers view as advantageous. Leaders are seizing the opportunity with new go-to-market strategies. Not everything about these strategies is new. In fact, each borrows from earlier methods. But these 21st century versions all have one thing in common – they depend on data for their success. With a high amount of information about customers, these strategies blow up the funnel by destroying its familiar silhouette and properties.

Here are a few of these increasingly popular go-to-market strategies that do not build a funnel:

Account-based Marketing (ABM): ABM "flips the funnel" by offering a narrow-at-the-top and wide-at-the-bottom alternative. For large B2B accounts, vendors can get to know a few high potential buyers better and create bespoke programs that serve them and build business over the long-term. Account focus is not new – but the ability to do this at scale is. Data and marketing technology is required.
Analytics-based discovery and nurturing: Leading marketers are getting more sophisticated at using big data and analytics to locate high propensity buyers thus reducing the need to cast wide. Analytics and behavioral monitoring expands the pipeline by improving conversion. Painful intrusive filtering is replaced by relevant and useful nudging.
Virtual sales or a buying service concierge: This emerging hybrid of digital and interpersonal selling is a far cry from the historical "me and my quota" sales rep. Imagine a typical virtual sales rep sitting at what looks like the console of an air traffic controller. But instead of directing jets through the airspace, they using social media, advanced analytics, cognitive systems, and other information tools to guide buyers through their decision journey. The scalable, high-touch model completely removes the old chokepoint and broadens the lower funnel with better conversion.
"Loyalty" first marketing: A loyalty-first approach rejects the funnel with its casting and filtering altogether. Vendors use data to really understand their markets. They first build up a pool of fans with services, entertainment, and social benefits. The resulting brand loyalty gives them an opportunity to later monetize with products and services.

Maybe I'm being optimistic, but I believe that these high-information strategies will not only be more effective in today's world, they also have the potential to make it a kinder, gentler, place. Each requires that companies reach beyond a half-hearted marketing and sales "alignment" to a true information alliance. The mid-funnel chokepoint dies. In addition, knowing customers more deeply opens the possibility that companies will feel empathy for them.

The funnel may have been a necessary thing – but it's not a good thing. Time to get some data and blow it up.

(This post was first published on LinkedIn on April 28, 2016)

The Five Key Competencies for a Modern Tech Marketing Organization (via IDG Enterprise Marketing)

2016-05-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

Our current market landscape is being led by self-educated buyers, and these buyers are moving fast and marketers need to move faster. Rich Vancil, Group VP of IDC, kicked off his IDC Directions session on “Best Practices in Building the New Marketing Machine” with this sentiment. So how do marketers not just move faster, but smarter? Vancil shared five key competencies to consider for modern marketing organizations based on recent research.

1. Content Marketing
Given the session kick-off and the value of reaching the self-educated buyer, it is no surprise that content marketing is a top factor. However, companies are not being as strategic as they could be. In many organizations, there are multiple groups engaging the customer—product marketing, corporate marketing, field marketing, PR (earned media), and social—and unfortunately, tone and style often do not align. To reduce this “messiness” and provide a more omni-channel approach, a head of content or editor in chief should be considered. This position allows content paths/links to be created and a consistent message shared with your customers.Once this great content is created, work with your employees to be advocates and share the content socially to expand the reach.

2. Sales & Channel Enablement
This is an evergreen issue. Sales is often sent materials directly from multiple groups, like product marketing, which can be overwhelming to the team. This is where sales enablement through corporate marketing can be extremely beneficial. The sales enablement team can be the intermediary to ensure materials are, in fact, sales ready and provide ongoing content audits to streamline the path of sales-ready tools. Allowing the sales team to spend more time with final tools and most important, your customers.

3. Customer Intelligence & Analytics
Data is a must-have for understanding the buyer’s journey, unfortunately; that data is normally poor, or not parsed out effectively. To use data effectively, it is encouraged to build a marketing operations ambassador program, which allows non-marketing employees access to marketing data to leverage for decisions. For example, finance could use some data to determine customer lifetime value or for budgeting, whereas sales may be able to tie customer engagements to sales to learn more about prospects.

4. Integrated Digital & Social Engagement
Providing an omni-channel experience is an ideal scenario for most marketers; however, we are not there yet. Similar to the challenges of multiple groups producing content, traditional media teams and those responsible for social promotions face similar disconnects, and it’s noticeable. However, having individuals own specific tools and collaborate/streamline messaging is key for success in the quickly growing social world.

5. Loyalty & Advocacy
Many organizations live and breathe through a subscription economy, particularly when it comes to software. The challenge can be keeping customers happy as new competing solutions are constantly being launched. Building this loyalty and advocacy lies across the product, corporate, and field marketing teams. Customer success teams that care about a customer’s experience and determine ways to reduce response time and ease of use can play a major role in success.

Throughout the session, there were many nodding heads on areas that need to be improved in order to move to a modern marketing organization. Where are your competency gaps and what ways can your team improve the customer experience? Share them with @idgenterprise and @idcdirections.
(First published by IDG Enterprise Marketing· Apr 26, 2016)

The Marketing Personalized Lead and the Sales Buyer's Journey

2016-04-25T17:16:00.002-07:00

All B2B marketers know what an MQL is, but what's an MPL? It's the Marketing Personalized Lead and it reflects the needs of the individual sales resource to whom the lead will be distributed. This requires marketing to apply the same science to understanding the needs of the sales channel as it does to any external audience. Just as with external audiences there are many segments and needs within the sales force and they change over time. There are enterprise account reps, segment reps, product reps, regional/territory reps, vertical reps, strategic partner reps, channel reps, inside/telesales reps, and many more. Within each of these categories there is additional variation. Marketing typically does not micro-target leads to sales reps even though it requires less work than it takes to micro-segment an external audience. The same tools apply: social monitoring, community building, data collection, behavior tracking, even buyer's journey analysis.

Sales buyer's journey analysis could be the single most powerful way to align marketing and sales. Sales buyer's journey may sound like an oxymoron but the tactical application is a profound leap in the ability of marketing to deliver immediately useful output to sales. Marketing should think of sales as "buying" its leads. The buy is acceptance, follow up and entry into the pipeline. When sales ignores the leads they are not buying. The reasons they buy or not are very much the same as any other buyer. The lead (offer) does not fit their current agenda (sales attention.)

IDC defines sales enablement as:

Getting the right information to the right sales person at the right time in the right format in order to move an opportunity forward.

The two important concepts here are "information" includes leads and "opportunity" = already open in the CRM. Also, most marketers don't know the right time to provide certain leads to certain reps. The sales buyer's journey requires an understanding of exactly what each individual sales person needs right now. Most marketers think every MQL is an opportunity in the making and that's a huge misunderstanding of how sales works. An opportunity is a case that the rep is already working on. In order to provide MPLs to sales, marketing needs to know a number of new things about every sales rep:

Are they working on new or existing accounts?

Which opportunities are they working on this quarter?

Who are they meeting with/calling on in the next few weeks?

Do they need leads connected to current contacts?

Do they want accounts or contacts included or excluded in marketing campaigns?

What outreach is sales doing on its own?

Where are they in the sales process?

What do they already know about the opportunity?

Going to Sales with the ability to personalize leads for each rep is a game changer. It delivers exactly what Sales is looking for in terms of leads from marketing. It requires that scoring, distribution, contribution, and metrics be tuned to specific Sales activity. Typical symptoms of misalignment such as too many leads, poor lead quality, high rejection rates, and bickering will disappear. But it is critical to adjust metrics that drive lead volume in marketing. Instead of number of leads, marketing should be measured on lead to opportunity ratio, new opportunity to account ratio, contribution to pipeline. To the extent marketing remains engaged through the sales cycle other metrics such as time to close and deal size should also be considered.

MPL fills in the blanks left by the MQL. It delivers leads on a silver platter by ensuring fit between what marketing is serving and what sales wants to eat. It should be a fundamental model for marketing and sales alignment, and will be essential to the success of any account based marketing program.

Who Really Counts? Mapping Internal Influence in the B2B Buying Game

2016-02-11T17:21:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows that B2B customers buy as a team. Participants play different roles – technical, line-of-business, financial, etc. Marketers usually focus on individual personas. But buying is not conducted in isolation. It's social. By understanding not only the players but also the way the game is played, marketers will develop more compelling content and campaign conversion strategies.

Buying teams can be large. According to IDC's 2015 IT Buyer Experience Survey, the average buying team for companies with 1,000+ employees has 9.2 members. While each buying team member goes through their own decision-journey, they don't all march through in tandem. And like a sports team, different players contribute in different ways.

Using data from the IT Buyer Experience study, IDC mapped the relative influence of buying team members to understand the dynamics at the exploration, evaluation, and purchase stages of the buying decision-journey. IDC looked at the influence of the LOB executive, LOB staff, CIO, IT staff, CFO, and purchasing.

Here's a chart showing the rise and fall of influence for just two of these team players - the CIO and the LOB staff-level roles. Survey participants were asked to rank the relative influence of various buying team roles. The higher the ranking, the more influence the survey participants gave to different roles.

Influence Scenarios

Based on these influence ratings and other data such as use of content types at different stages, here's what IDC finds is happening during the buying decision stages.

Exploration stage: Exploration can be time-consuming. It's no wonder that staff-level "explorers" (both LOB and IT staff) do most of the work and thus have the most influence in this very early stage. The (LOB) executive who owns the problem is also very influential. IDC Guidance: Make a compelling case for change that will convince the executive who owns the problem. Also, educate the staff-level explorers so they can serve as internal experts. Spur the internal conversation with "shareable" content that says, "Hey, check this out. We really should be talking about this issue."

Evaluation stage: Many more influential players, including the CIO and purchasing, are added to the team during the middle stage of the decision journey as the enterprise works through the complexities of consideration and selection. IDC Guidance: Since vendors are infrequently present at the table to explain their messaging during internal discussions, there is a premium on clear, complete, easily accessible, and shareable information.

Purchase stage: Financial and contractual considerations are most important at this final stage. Purchasing function and even the CEO rise in influence, while other players move into spectator mode. IDC Guidance: Marketing needs to help sales close the deal. But also stay alert to social buzz. The closer the deal gets to the wire, the tension rises. On one hand, the buying conversation gets very narrow, personal, and specific to the deal, and on the other hand, it widens out to intensely search for any final verification of a good choice or any final hidden reasons to divert the process.

Continue to pay attention to the information needs of specific buyers. But to really serve the full customer experience, don't forget that buying is also a social activity.

See IDC.com for the full report (Subscription or fee required)

This post first appeared on January 11, 2016 on LinkedIn

Cognitive Marketing: The Future for Smart Marketers

2016-01-12T09:03:00.002-08:00

"Modern marketing is all about making the most compelling offers
to the best customers the fastest."

Cognitive computing has a big future in marketing. The ability to track virtually everything everyone does on line has elevated the analytical requirements for marketers to the scope of a global stock market. Billions of data points are flowing and changing minute by minute. It is not possible to manage in human time frames or processing capacity. Fortunately machine assistance is rapidly evolving from batch reporting to predictive analytics to automated analytics, natural language processing, natural language generation, machine learniing and cognitive computing. We're not quite ready to add sentient computing but it will probably happen in our professional lifetimes. While all this sounds like it might squeeze the human value add out of marketing quite the contrary. It creates a cognitive surplus for marketers to spend their time on higher value, "right side of the brain" decision making instead of crunching numbers and clicking software UIs all day. For the foreseeable future humans will be better at applying curiosity and creativity to problem solving.

Virtual telesales is a representative example. As marketers become more sophisticated in understanding customer behavior, they are getting better at managing acquisition cost. High-potential leads get higher-cost resources like a dinner meeting. Low-potential leads go into automated email drip campaigns. But there is a huge midsection in the lead curve that requires a very low cost, highly effective means of further qualification. Traditionally, this is done through telesales services, which can be opaque, inconsistent, and expensive. Enter the virtual sales rep, a digital, rules-based learning algorithm that can replace telesales (via solutions like Conversica. )

For simple email interactions, totally virtual reps are not only indistinguishable from humans, they are often preferred. Why? Because they can be set up to be courteous and respectful and are inherently reliable and scalable. For example, the time it takes several people in marketing and sales to follow-up on a Web visit by a prospect is typically more than a day and can depend on complex scoring, routing, and territorial designations. Studies show that delays of more than a few hours dramatically degrade engagement rates. A totally virtual rep can follow-up on every single Web visit with a personalized message within whatever time period it is programmed to do so. And it can manage several qualified exchanges to the point of setting up a human-to-human sales interaction or providing links for digital commerce. This eliminates delays caused by human availability and preference. The quality, efficiency, and cost of the virtual sales rep are simply compelling.

But the virtual rep is only one beginning for cognitive. The level of complexity in ad optimization and the logical future of personalization (individualization) in multichannel marketing will require millions of decisions to be made in real time. Again, the future is already here. IBM officially added Watson to its marketing cloud solution offerings in 2015. Cognitive services will become embedded in many marketing applications through open APIs, SDKs and community initiatives. They have to potential to solve a great deal of the inaccuracy and latency in how brands interact with customers. The question is not so much about when or how cognitive systems will become mainstream in marketing but whether customers will even notice.

IDC CMO FutureScape: Predictions for 2016 and the Digital Transformation

2015-12-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

Think marketing has already experienced the biggest impact from digital transformation? Think again. IDC CMO Advisory Service predicts that CMO jobs will turnover 25% per year; that 20% of marketers will blow up their funnel; and that cognitive marketing as a mainstream practice is not far away.

Here are our most recent predictions.

By 2017, CMOs will spend more on content marketing assets than they do on product marketing assets. For decades, the product launch has reigned as the kingpin content event. With a "bill of materials" stretching through multiple Excel pages, product marketing assets suck up a major portion of the marketing budget – and much of that content is wasted. The days of product content dominance are numbered. Product content will remain important but it will take its place behind the content marketing assets matched to decision-journey stages.
By 2020, 50% of companies will use cognitive computing to automate marketing and sales interactions with customers. A few leads go right to sales. But the majority need further qualification and extended nurturing. Companies will increasingly turn to smart systems that automatically assess and respond to buyers at the point of need. IBM recently added Watson to its marketing cloud offerings. The question is not when cognitive marketing will become mainstream – but rather, will anyone notice?
By 2017, 20% of large enterprise CMOs will consolidate their marketing technology infrastructure. Marketing has been absorbing marketing technology a bite at a time for more than a decade. Many organizations now manage dozens (if not hundreds) of point solutions. Just as marketing environments are hitting the wall of this operational complexity, marketing tech vendors are building solid integrated platforms – tailorable through a partner eco-system. A fortuitous convergence of supply and demand.
By 2020, 33% of CMOs will outsource some digital marketing activities via marketing-as-a –service. Marketing-as-a-service is a bundle of technology and marketing services that enable world-class digital marketing capabilities to be outsourced. MaaS offers CMOs an attractive, viable alternative to owning (and operating) everything.
By 2018, predictive analytics will be a standard tool for marketers, but only a third will get optimal benefit. Early adopters of predictive analytics for buyer behavior report amazing results. The benefits come from the ability to discover hidden segments that have a high propensity to buy. Marketers can also better serve these segments with behavioral targeting. However, the majority of marketers face big challenges to achieving the benefits. Chief inhibitors? Lack of statistical skills, stubborn organizational silos that won't integrate data, and a culture that resists truth when it goes against tradition.
In the tech industry, CMO job turnover will continue at the rate of 25% per year through 2018. In 2015, 59% of tech CMOs in companies larger than $50 Million in revenue had been in their job for less than two years. Some CMOs get pulled out of their job. The best and brightest get invited to join hot growth companies or exciting tech businesses sprouting as divisions in other industries. Other CMOs get pushed out. Some just can't live up to the requirements of digital transformation. Others are discarded by laggard CEOs who just don't understand modern sales and marketing.
By 2020, 20% of marketers will abandon the traditional funnel in favor of a customer-centric model. The light of data increasingly reveals the reality of buying behavior. That same light also reveals major flaws in the traditional funnel. The sales funnel is 114 years old and never meant for the digital era. Rabid funnel advocates cling to the past with ridiculously convoluted updates. But making the funnel more complex with extra loops and stages just puts lipstick on the proverbial pig. Forward-leaning companies now experiment with customer-centric models that respond to real buying challenges in innovative ways.
By 2017, 60% of CMOs will lag in implementing recommended benchmarks for marketing technology staff investment, increasing the rift between the CMO and CIO. Marketing is the fastest growth area for new technology investments, with growth projected at an average 9% per year through 2018. Given this situation, you might expect marketing to be ahead of the curve – leading the way towards technology investment and staffing. However, IDC believes that tech marketers are underspending and under hiring. Only 2.6% of marketing program dollars go towards technology and only 1.6% of marketing staff are primarily tech.
In 2016, 70% of companies offering cloud or digital services will increase investment in post-purchase marketing. Marketing is primarily associated with the early stages of the buyer's journey, the stages IDC calls Exploration and Evaluation. However, as the ownership economy evolves into a service/sharing/experience economy, companies will find that they need to market throughout the entire customer experience. For example, the fastest growing cloud software companies (those with 20%+ annual growth) have a more holistic approach. They spend about 16% of their total marketing budget on post purchase marketing.
By 2018, 50% of CMOs will make significant structural changes to their "intelligence" operations and organizations. "Intelligence" as a capability is growing in importance in modern marketing organizations. Intelligence includes market intelligence (MI), business intelligence (BI), competitive intelligence (CI), and social intelligence (SI). In the past, these four functions were spread around the enterprise. Now, IDC sees more companies consolidating into a larger, single, intelligence group – often combining with intelligence functions from other areas like sales. The elimination of silos in this important area is a positive sign.

For more information, check out our free webcast of the report highlights or download the full report. [Report download may require subscription].

Content Strategy: Think Utility Before Customization

2015-11-13T15:38:00.001-08:00

For a company with dozens of product lines, numerous possible personas, and a global presence, developing content can be a daunting venture. The number of permutations for information types and distribution sources can be overwhelming. But before going crazy, you might be surprised to know that customers may not need as much personalization as you think – what they really want from content is utility.

IDC's 2015 IT Buyer Experience Survey examined the content requirements and preferences of various types of technology buyers. We compared buyers who work in the IT function with those in various business functions. We compared buyers of cloud solutions with traditional on-premise technology solutions. What we found surprised us.

IDC does recommend tailoring content for specific audiences. It is helpful for ease of consumption, for relevancy, and attractiveness. However, the buyer research told us that covering some basics was even more important.

Highest priority – make sure content is complete. Buyer groups are much more similar than they are different. Buyers have one primary commonality – they are all human. Humans follow the same type of a decision-journey. All audience groups generally need the same kinds of information and mostly prefer similar sources to get that information. The highest priority task should be to make sure the core information is available. Clearly and simply answer the buyers' questions for all stages of their decision-journey. Lack of critical information at a point when a buyer needs it will slow or stop journey progress.

Make core buying information easily accessible through at least four communication channels. Those four channels are your website, your sales team, search, and some number of third party publications - preferably voiced by objective people. Your website is the buyer's default location for all information. Buyer's talk to sales people at the point when they really need detailed answers. If sales people don't have the answers, everyone loses. (Hint: a humble Q&A fact sheet for sales is super helpful). Discovery is the name of game in the earliest stage of the decision-journey. Search is by far the number one tool for discovery and buyers also like to find ideas for improvement perusing both general business and special interest sites.

These content tasks may be more challenging than marketers expect. Many of the buyer's questions are not answered by even the best thought leadership pieces or the most well-messaged product data sheet. For example, Product Service Reviews was the second most desired type of content at the earliest stage of the decision-journey – not something most marketers have at the tips of their fingers.

Before going through the (worthwhile) effort to customize content for different audiences, make sure you are covering the basics and serving your customers' the most important information needs.

More information is available in the IDC report, Categorizing the Content Needs of Different Buyer Types: IDC's 2015 2015 IT Buyer Experience Study (#258780) (Subscription required)

Audience Marketing: Death to the Product "Selfie"

2015-08-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

Companies may not intend to be narcissistic. But they unintentionally produce a lot of "product selfies." Marketers start out right. They consider customer needs when answering the question, "Why buy my product?" Then customer focus stops there. Most companies give only superficial attention to the context in which their audience will consume their message. However, an IDC study finds that the situation is about to change as leading tech companies ramp audience marketing to a whole new level.

Customers perceive content to be self-serving when it talks only about the features and benefits of the product with insufficient effort to match these to the buyer's context. What's missing are the answers to the question, "How can we help the buyer consume this message? What does the buyer need to hear, understand, trust, and accept our value proposition?" When content is offered without a true audience filter, product messages have the same tiresome, annoying, self-centered demeanor as your teenaged niece's 15th selfie. No matter how cute she looks in her prom dress.

Isn't Audience Marketing Pretty Basic?

While IDC found that almost all tech companies surveyed use some degree of audience marketing (indeed, segmenting customers should be Marketing 101) only about 26% of them can be considered advanced — and even the advanced companies have significant opportunity for maturity.

What is changing in the most advanced companies is the depth, degree, and focus on the audience. Said one expert interviewed by IDC, "Buying a list of hospital CIOs and slapping a photo of a nurse on your website isn't vertical marketing." Audience marketing requires today's marketing organization to take on a much larger and extra layer of work on behalf of the customer. Leading companies are stepping up to this task by dedicating audience-focused resources as an "ambassadors" for their customers.

Reversing the Effects of Sales Erosion

For B2B companies, it used to be salespeople who primarily filled the customer context gap. It was salespeople who were trained to listen for customer need. Salespeople translated the company offerings into something meaningful to the customer. Salespeople still have this role — but they can only perform it when they have the opportunity. And that opportunity continues to erode. IDC's annual IT Buyer Experience Study consistently reports that for the average IT purchase, buyers are nearly 50% of the way through their decision journey before talking with sales. The increased percentage of buyer engagement through digital communication channels has also eroded the critical customer context cushion.

Audience marketing is the function that replaces this cushion. By devoting staff and program dollars as audience ambassadors, marketers will identify this gap and execute appropriate programs to fill it.

What Do Audience Marketing Leaders Do Different?

The most distinguishing factors between companies advanced in audience marketing compared to average or beginner companies are the following:

Appointing an Audience Marketing Leader: Advanced companies are about twice as likely as average or beginner companies to have a named leader in charge of audience marketing. When a company puts a leader in charge of an initiative and makes a practice a corporate-wide mandate, the culture starts to change in a big way. Audience marketing gets visibility. Metrics get put in place. People begin to get recognized and awarded for skills learned and for achievements. Investments and resources are allocated.

Branching out to explore many audience marketing strategies: IDC examined the popularity of various audience marketing strategies and found that advanced companies use a broader variety than average or beginners. Overall, segmentation by Functional Role (C-level, IT, HR director, etc.) is the most popular strategy and is used moderately or extensively by 100% of advanced companies and over 80% in the other groups. Vertical Industry is a close second. Buyer behavior segmentation is the hot, up-and-coming strategy — but it is more difficult and more sophisticated than the other segmentation strategies studied and thus is used the most infrequently by companies at all levels.

However, advanced companies are moving ahead strongly, and IDC expects to see use of behavioral segmentation increase significantly in the next few years.

This blog first appeared on LinkedIn and is a summary excerpt from the IDC research report Audience Marketing: Replenishing Customer Context authored by Kathleen Schaub #257372. Subscription required.

Chief Digital Officers: Bridging the Innovation Gap Between the CIO and CMO

2015-07-07T06:29:00.000-07:00

The chief digital officer (CDO) is no longer an exotic, quixotic, flash-in-the-pan role. In some of the world's leading brands, the CDO is now the general manager of a large digital business unit with significant revenue targets reporting to the CEO. This is one of the fascinating conclusions from IDC's latest report on the CDO role based on interviews with CDOs from: Caterpillar, CVS Health, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Meredith Corp., SAP Digital, Travelex, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Under Armour.

The title of this study should in no way insinuate any lack of innovation on the part of CIOs or CMOs. Both roles are managing digital transformations that are reshaping everything about their organizations. Those efforts can be all consuming, so some brands are establishing the CDO to lead strategic innovation. Free from the operational KPIs of the CMO and infrastructure demands of the CIO, the CDO is expected to invent the digital growth engines of the future.

Information and software-based companies are moving into services and support areas across industries. They are bringing new business models based on data services, sharing economies, and mobility much faster than established companies can. This is a huge threat as these areas are major revenue growth opportunities in industries that may be in low single-digit growth mode. Legacy brands typically don't have the core competencies in software development or data and analytics needed to bring information-based products to market. In addition, cultures at many large enterprises are not used to the extreme cadence of digital business. As a result, leading companies are not only driving internal innovation and developing their own talent, they are investing and acquiring start-ups.

Based on our interviews, we have developed three archetypes for today's CDO:

The digital GM: Reports to the CEO and leads the establishment and/or transformation of a significant business.
The digital Disrupter:Reports to the EVP or equivalent and leads a dynamic team charged with driving product and service innovation and cultural transformation.
The digital Evangelist:Reports a level or two down but is highly visible to the executive level. Leads a small team designed to raise digital IQ throughout the organization.

In practice, the CDO role spans a spectrum of overlapping responsibilities. The digital GM also drives innovation and raises the digital IQ of the entire enterprise. The digital disrupter is also in charge of raising digital and social adoption across the company. The digital evangelist is more of a support role that helps senior leaders drive digital transformation.

Two key questions every company should ask itself during the annual executive planning cycle are:

If we wanted to completely disrupt our industry, what kind of company would we start?
How do we become that company?

The executives running the companies profiled in this study have asked themselves these questions in one form or another. They may not have all the answers yet, but they have dedicated themselves to finding out before they get "Appled," "Ubered," or "Airbnbed." New mantras for the digital era are:

The only way to control the pace of change is to set it — that's the primary mission of the CDO
Always be disrupting
Follow the money: find out where the VC money is going in your industry and watch those companies closely, partner with them, and invest in them or buy them if you can

For more information about this report please contact me: gmurray(at)idc(dot)com.

The 4 big reasons you need an ABM strategy right now

2015-05-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

There are four significant trends making account-based marketing (ABM) a major focus for B2B marketers:

Rising customer expectations are the most disruptive trend in business today. Customers no longer make categorical distinctions between their personal and professional brand relationships. They expect all companies to provide highly valuable personalized experiences all the time. Companies that differentiate their customer relationships on the basis of account-specific insights and responsiveness raise customer expectations and create competitive advantage. Expectations are set very early in the buyer's journey long before they interact with Sales, so marketing plays a crucial role in demonstrating value add from the very first touch.
Customer acquisition costs have changed dramatically. Saturation is a problem for many technology product categories, especially second platform solutions in the enterprise arena. As segments near or reach saturation, new customer acquisition costs soar and it becomes imperative to more efficiently find new customers, get the most out of existing customer relationships, and defend them from competitors. The scale efficiencies of marketing vs. sales are critical to accomplishing these objectives cost-effectively.
Subscription revenue models dramatically extend the time it takes to recoup cost of sales. Ideally, revenue and profit increase over time, but that is dependent on retention and expansion of the relationship which require constant care and nurturing. As a result, marketing must play a central role in optimizing the ongoing customer relationship.
Technology has enabled an increasing number of account based marketing program components to be scaled beyond a small group of select customers. Online communities, micro sites, personalized content, crowd sourced product features, and other digital elements are easier to offer at scale. As a result, they enable companies to gain additional margin and raise expectations in segments beyond their largest customers. These are the tools the digital marketer must leverage for delivering value to the account.

Despite its name Account Based Marketing is not an exclusively marketing function, far from it. At its most mature it is part of a larger program that coordinates all customer facing resources (from marketing, sales, finance, fulfillment, product development, service, support and partner organizations.) Prior to getting there, it can take a number of different forms depending on resource commitment from content curation, to verticalization, to sales enablement. Regardless of the stage of your ABM activities, the ultimate goal remains the same: to deliver a highly differentiated, deeply customized, supremely successful experience for every account. When executed well, ABM is a vital tool for increasing customer lifetime value and raising the bar for competitors.

Contact me to request more information on IDC's Account Based Marketing Maturity Model - gmurray(at)idc(dot)com.

A New Year's Fitness Plan for Your CMO (Content Marketing Operations)

2015-01-27T08:16:00.002-08:00

Over the past few months, IDC has worked to define "Content Marketing" and to espouse its vital role in the execution of marketing campaigns.

If you're not on-board yet as to the necessary role of Content Marketing -- read no further ! But if you are, your next step is to assess your operational readiness for Content Marketing Operations. In a nutshell: does your marketing organization have the people, the tools, the process competency, and the leadership mandate, to roll-out Content Marketing capability across campaigns and product-lines?

IDC defines Content Marketing Operations as: "The execution of repeatable and coordinated processes to plan, create, develop, curate and distribute, and maintain the content assets and properties used for content marketing."

Using IDC's new MaturityScape framework, here is a 5-step model to help you assess where you are on the arc of "CMO" competency:

Stage 1: Ad Hoc — Business as Usual

Description: Business as usual — Content marketing does not exist. Assets are created by marketing, but they are mainly product marketing and corporate marketing assets and very rarely content marketing assets (refer to Figure 2). There is no strategy, governance, or process around asset creation, and most activities exist in silos of execution.

Business impact: Marketing, and in turn the entire company, is misaligned with the buyer. There is a lack of successful engagement with the marketplace, which leads to diminishing bookings and, in marketing's case, defunding.

Stage 2: Opportunistic — Houston, We Have a Problem !

Description: Houston, we have a problem ! Marketing acknowledges that content marketing as a function must be developed and that it must be differentiated from product marketing. Movement begins around content marketing, mainly focusing on the initial steps to understand and organize around the topic. Efforts are made to assess what assets currently exist within the organization.

Business impact:The marketing organization begins the process of reorganizing around content marketing; this includes new executives, new titles, and new initiatives. Significant "wins" do not occur in this stage, but initial momentum toward change can be observed.

Stage 3: Repeatable — Content Marketing Works!

Description: Content marketing works! — Strategy and governance (rules, tools, and schools) take form. With growing sponsorship and results, content marketing is well on its way to becoming a respected and important part of the marketing organization. Tangible results are being felt and, more importantly, seen from content marketing.

Business impact:The marketing organization and the company as whole begin to see their messaging and voice be accepted in the marketplace. Through data, marketing is able to decipher between effective and ineffective content marketing assets.

Stage 4: Managed — Content Marketing Is Job Number 1

Description: Content marketing is job number 1 — Content marketing is globally accepted as an important part of the marketing organization. The CMO or head of marketing is fully aware and supportive of content marketing operations efforts. Formalized staffing processes and budgets are in place.

Business impact:Marketing is able to use content marketing to show pipeline attribution. The content marketing assets produced are well received by the buyers and influencers in the market. The company has a leading voice.

Stage 5: Optimized — Content-Driven Success

Description: Content-driven success — Content marketing is an integral part of every line of business and each region's marketing activities. The corporate center of excellence (COE) works in harmony with all marketers, and marketers hold the COE in high regard. Content marketing is recognized as one of the most important parts of not only the marketing department but the entire company.

Business Impact:Marketing is able to use content marketing to show direct revenue attribution and can utilize content marketing assets to predict business impact prior to the asset going live. Content marketing operations has created efficiencies and cut costs from the overall marketing budget. The company is seen as a thought leader on content marketing.

IDC's future outlook is that Content Marketing -- as much as it has been a buzzword of the past few years -- will eventually be so fundamental to marketing execution that it will lose its current "star" status. And, if your marketing organization is not moving up this maturity curve in 2015...you may be putting many other elements and practices of your entire marketing execution at risk.

The New CMO's First Hundred Day Playbook

2015-01-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

In a 2014 study, IDC found that 51% of CMOs at tech companies have held their position for fewer than two years. We predict many new CMOs again this year. How can a new executive start right? IDC interviewed 10 wise, seasoned, CMOs for a glimpse into their first hundred days playbook.

Transitions are vital moments when even the smallest executive actions have a disproportionate effect on outcomes. It's a risky time for a new CMO who starts with neither the knowledge nor the alliances necessary for success. Fail to build momentum during the first hundred days, and a CMO will struggle for the rest of his/her (probably short) tenure. Job loss is not the only blow that may be suffered by a poorly conducted start. Many more CMOs fail to reach their full potential in their current position, thus putting a promising career on a slower track.

Success in the first hundred days, on the other hand, sets the stage for a brilliant performance. The 10 heads of marketing interviewed by IDC collectively recommended these six plays.

Play #1: Understand your real job.

Marketing is very closely tied to business context. A new CMO must assess quickly what work is really needed. Does the company need more awareness, a brand refresh, or a full product portfolio transformation? Each of these strategies requires a radically different approach from marketing.

Peter Isaacson, Demandbase: "What are the business goals of the company and the expectations for marketing? What are the business priorities and where is the company going? Get this straight from the mouth of the CEO. What is expected of you? Are there any unrealistic expectations that you need to set straight [such as] build a new category in the first two months? Get on the same page right from the beginning."

Elisa Steele, Jive Software: "There is a big opportunity and a big problem. No CMO in any company has exactly the same responsibility [as another CMO]. You know what a CFO does, what sales does, HR, etc. CMOs are different. Are they responsible for communications? Strategy? Product? Customer service? CEOs can create a spec of their own definition. But that requires a very mixed pool of candidates and it's difficult to understand what any candidate's power skill needs to be."

Greg Estes, NVIDIA: "Building an executive team is like building a sports team. Different players are good at different things. [CEOs] might find they hired a great shortstop when they needed a good first baseman."

Play #2: Speed up your learning curve.

The amount of information that needs to be absorbed in the first hundred days is prodigious. It's best to approach learning in a direct and methodical way.

Paul Appleby, BMC: "To remain relevant, our number 1 priority must be to drive a new level of engagement with our customers. We are headquartered in Houston, Texas. However, our customers are based globally. As such, we need to engage with them globally. In my first three months, I travelled the globe and met with over 500 of our largest customers to understand the dynamic impact of digital disruption on their businesses. I also met with our teams in every major city where we operate. We listened and pivoted our engagement model, market positioning, and service delivery model based on what we heard."

Play #3: Get the right people on the bus.

Waste little time in building a crackerjack team. Make tough decisions on whether existing team leaders should stay, go, or be repositioned. Make great hires quickly, too, as leaders will need people to achieve early success.

Christine Heckart, Brocade: "First, get the right people in the right job. I meet everyone on the team if I can. For key people, it's one on one — all direct reports, all top talent, all people in key roles. I meet the rest in group reviews at least once. [In these group reviews] everyone gets two to three hours to present — What are you proud of? What's working, what's not working, what's broken? Think of the future, what does success look like? In parallel, I run a change management process. The result is a new org structure, roles described, a people plan (gaps, promotions, etc.). You would be shocked at how often I've found that attention to the right organization has been ignored."

Jonathan Martin, EMC: "The first few weeks in any role should be spent assembling a new team and listening. In the first conversations, nothing makes sense, but after a while you see the same challenges. You need to be creative about finding solutions. With a large global team, it's likely that someone somewhere has solved those problems. Use the scale of the organization. Raise up the super capable in the regions. I found a social expert in India and a guy in Italy who used Twitter to set up CEO meetings. Then, overcommunicate. I tweet. I blog internally. I hold a TV town hall once or twice a month."

Play #4: Make a visible difference.

Early wins create momentum. Promote early wins widely and loudly so that the CMO and the marketing team are seen as the heroes.

Andy Cunningham, Avaya: "You need a few small wins. Before you can get the big jobs done, you need to earn your credibility. During the first hundred days, you are mostly focused with getting the organization to a place where they will follow you. The small things must be meaningful. Earn your way into the fold. Then you have a chance to get the big jobs done. The more the organization sees you having an impact, the more likely they are to take you under their wing.

"You have to pick the right initial wins. For example, building the funnel or repositioning might be really important, but it will be months before the company sees the impact. At Avaya, I focused on the corporate narrative first because it was really needed, progress could be made fast, and having it would be transformative. It was and now I can focus on longer-term issues."

Play #5: Expedite key initiatives with operational rigor.

Identify the five-to-eight must-do initiatives that will create the needed business value that the CEO really wants. Institute a culture of operational rigor. Overcommunicate. A mantra, such as "Jive Forward", can to be a container for the change that is coming and will energize the company.

Christine Heckart, Brocade: "You've got to think big — most companies are looking for a new positioning. But you need to start small. It's hard to get the whole thing done on the first turn of the flywheel. Identify the small number of things that will establish marketing as the growth engine. Establish a rolling two-quarter plan and keep relooking at how it's working."

Play #6: Develop critical alliances.

CMOs will never be successful without forging alliances and coalitions to support initiatives. The CEO is the most important, alliance. His/her support will make or break the CMO's success. Alliances are also needed with the CFO, the head of sales and, especially in this era of digital transformation and data-driven marketing, the CIO.

Lynn Vojvodich, Salesforce.com: "Build relationships with key stakeholders. What are the common objectives? Where is the ROI? These are the areas that need transparency. Everyone feels they don't have enough resources. It's important to be up front about marketing investment and performance so that people understand why necessary trade-offs are made."

More recommendations for the road ahead.
IDC believes that great CMOs will continue to seek, and to be poached, for plum opportunities. These shifts will set in motion a domino effect. Therefore, CMO turbulence will continue. Turbulent environments favor the brave, the persistent, the resilient, and the lucky. While there is no checklist for success, IDC recommends that CMOs and CMO wannabes keep their eyes on the changing landscape and their resumes and networks current.

Kevin Iaquinto, JDA: "The turnover issue is all because of the pace of change. As I look at my own career, I have been in seven different tech firms. I've been acquired four times! This type of change inevitably means change in the management team including the CEO and, following that, other C-suite executives."

Lisa Joy Rosner, Neustar: "This is the golden age of marketing. With the constant innovation of new technology the focus has centered on the CMO. Some CMOs jump to a different company because they want to continue to innovate. 'I've just built out my stack and I want to do it again based on what I learned and with newer/better tools.' This is how they get recruited away. There are very few CMOs who really 'get' digital — so they are in demand. If you are really, really, good, your work is visible and the headhunters call — then each time you move, you get a new opportunity to build a better team and you get 'more tools in the sandbox' to build the perfect marketing machine."

Call for Participation: IDC's 2015 Cloud Marketing Barometer Survey

2015-01-08T12:44:00.002-08:00

IDC's CMO Advisory Service is excited to announce that we are breaking new ground with a survey focused on marketing benchmarks within Cloud Software and Digital Services companies. This is brand new research for us, and an opportunity for your company to help IDC define the next set of important marketing KPIs.

If you are a marketing executive at a cloud software company or within a cloud software business unit, this survey and the corresponding results will help you identify how to set your organization up for success.

What are the benefits?

• A complimentary copy (value of $3,500) of the resulting report, which will define new KPIs for Cloud marketing organizations.

• An invitation to a client-only telebriefing featuring key data and essential guidance from this study.

Who Should Participate?

Marketing executives in a position of responsibility for the worldwide marketing practices related to cloud or digital services at the company-level or these product line(s), or business unit(s).

How Long Should it Take?

Depending on several factors, as quick as 15 minutes!

What's the Deadline?

Tuesday, Feb 13, 2014

How do I Participate?

To assure the highest data quality we carefully screen our participants. Please email Rich Vancil (Rvancil (at) IDC (dot) com for the survey link.

Confidentiality: All answers will be kept confidential within IDC's CMO Advisory Service and all data will be aggregated for the purposes of trend analysis. IDC has executed similar surveys for over 12 years with participation from the largest public tech companies ranging to pre-IPO companies. Confidentiality is of the upmost importance and has never been breached.

IDC's 10 Predictions for CMOs for 2015

2014-12-16T09:38:00.001-08:00

What does IDC predict for tech CMOs and their teams in 2015 and beyond?

Our recent report IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CMO / Customer Experience 2015 Predictions highlights insight and perspective on long-term industry trends along with new themes that may be on the horizon. Here's a summary.

1: 25% of High-Tech CMOs Will Be Replaced Every Year Through 2018
There are two dominant drivers behind the increased CMO turnover over the past two years. One driver centers on the cycle of new product innovations, new companies, and new CMO jobs. The second (but equal) driver centers around the required "fit" for a new CMO in the today's tumultuous environment and the short supply of CMOs with transformational skill sets.

Guidance: Everyone in the C-Suite needs to "get" modern marketing to make the CMO successful.

2: By 2017, 25% of Marketing Organizations Will Solve Critical Skill Gaps by Deploying Centers of Excellence
The speed of marketing transformation and the increased expectations on marketing have left every marketing organization in need of updating its skill sets. In the coming years, CMOs will not only have to recruit and train talent but also create organizational structures that amplify and share best practices. Leading marketing organizations will become masters of the centers of excellence (CoE).

Guidance: Get out of your traditional silos and collaborate.

3: By 2017, 15% of B2B Companies Will Use More Than 20 Data Sources to Personalize a High-Value Customer Journey
Personalization requires a lot of data. CMOs do not suffer from a lack of data — quite the contrary. Today's marketer has dozens, if not hundreds, of sources available. However, companies lack the time, expertise, and financial and technical resources to collect data, secure it, integrate it, deliver it, and dig through it to create actionable insights. This situation is poised for dramatic change.

Guidance: One of your new mantras must be – "do it for the data".

4: By 2018, One in Three Marketing Organizations Will Deliver Compelling Content to All Stages of the Buyer's Journey
CMOs reported to IDC that "building out content marketing as an organizational competency" was their #2 priority (ROI was #1). Content marketing is what companies must do when self-sufficient buyers won't talk to sales people. While it's easy to do content marketing; it's hard to do content marketing well. The most progressive marketing organizations leverage marketing technology and data to develop a buyer-centric content strategy.

Guidance: Remember that it’s the buyer's journey – not your journey for the buyer.

5: In 2015, Only One in Five Companies Will Retool to Reach LOB Buyers and Outperform Those Selling Exclusively to IT
IDC research shows that line-of-business (LOB) buyers control an average of 61% of the total IT spend. LOB buyers are harder to market to and are even more self-sufficient than technical buyers. To succeed with this new buyer, tech CMOs must move more quickly to digital, incorporate social, broaden the types of content, and enable the sales team to maximize their limited time in front of the customer.

Guidance: Worry less about how much video is in your plan and worry more about your message.

6: By 2016, 50% of Large High-Tech Marketing Organizations Will Create In-House Agencies
Advertising agencies have been slow to recognize the pervasive nature of digital. While many digital agencies exist and many have been acquired by the global holding companies, these interactive services typically managed as just another part of the portfolio of services the agency offers. Modern marketing practitioners realize that digital is now in the DNA of everything they do and are ahead of their agencies.

Guidance: Don't wait. Take the lead.

7: By 2018, 20% of B2B Sales Teams Will Go "Virtual," Resulting in Improved Pipeline Conversion Rates
Buyers won't talk to sales until late in the game. But for B2B companies, a completely digital solution may not be answer either. Some solutions are so new, so complex, or customized that a human concierge must intervene. Enter the "virtual" sales rep. This emerging hybrid of marketing, sales and tech service is a far cry from the historical "me and my quota" sales rep. Think of them as a B2B Genius Bar. CMOs must equip the virtual sales rep with success tools.

Guidance: Find the fledgling "virtual" reps in your company and make them heroes – and make yourself one in the process.

8: By 2017, 70% of B2B Mobile Customer Apps Will Fail to Achieve ROI Because they Lack Customer Value-Add
Apps are maturing rapidly into utilities that can greatly enhance customers' personal and professional lives. Brand value is being redefined by value-added services such as monitoring, reporting, best practices, communities, and guidance. Nearly every brand has an app today. But not all apps are created equal. Some apps provide tremendous value, and others will end up on the island of mobile misfits.

Guidance: Allow your competitor's app to be the "go to" resource and you are essentially locked out of that consumer's life.

9: By 2018, 25% of CMOs and CIOs Will Have a Shared Road Map for Marketing Technology
The CMO and CIO relationship will shape the future of both roles. CMOs must accept that their infrastructure is more effective when it is integral to enterprise IT. CIOs must reinvent their missions to support unprecedented innovation in line-of-business IT. CMOs and CIOs must work together for vendor selection, data governance, backup and recovery, security, and a host of other issues.

Guidance: CMO and CIO should jointly lobby the CEO to overinvest in marketing technology.

10: By 2018, 20% of B2B CMOs Will Drive Budget Increases by Attributing Campaign Results to Revenue Performance
With the sharp lessons of the Great Recession still fresh in their minds, CEOs and CFOs want to make sure every dollar leads to results. If marketing can achieve full revenue attribution promise, this will not only to satisfy demands for accountability but will result in budget increases. But marketing's path to full attribution requires a complex orchestration of technology, data, and marketing skills and can't be accomplished without partnerships with IT, sales, and finance.

Guidance: Start with attribution of individual campaigns and tactics and eventually you'll build this Holy Grail.

Meet the Virtual Sales Rep

2014-12-02T17:50:00.001-08:00

Robert sits in an office near Provo, Utah at what looks like the console of an air traffic

controller. But instead of directing jets through the airspace, he's using Twitter to guide a software company's buyer through her decision-journey. Part marketer, part sales, part tech service, Robert is one of an emerging breed of "virtual" sales reps. Could this be the dream team that B2B has been waiting for?

The B2B "Genius Bar"® as a Role Model

The "virtual" sales rep role in its ideal form provides the personalized, anticipatory, service of a five-star hotel. Think of it as the B2B version of an Apple Genius Bar – using virtual tools. The Apple executive team modeled the Genius Bar after Ritz-Carlton's customer service. Hallmarks of this exemplary concierge service include a personal touch; a warm, friendly, attitude; and attention to satisfying customer needs at every step. Sales expert Anneke Seley says the "virtual" sales rep culture is a far-cry from the historical "me and my quota" rep.

Sales teams are finally coming to grips with digital age facts. The culture shift recognizes that engagement must be sensitive to the appropriate stage of the buyer's decision-journey. "Buyers aren't ready to buy until they are ready to buy". Marketers all know by now that buyers prefer self-sufficiency and they avoid talking to sales people until the decision-journey is substantially complete. IDC research shows that for tech products averages this distance averages about 50%. Now sales is also starting to appreciate that buyers are alienated when by placed prematurely into the arena. At the same time sales leaders don't want to waste an expensive sales resource on someone who isn't ready to buy.

Digital May Not be Enough

Content marketing is what companies must do to fill the gap when buyers won't talk to traditional sales people. Content marketing is a hugely important communication strategy and companies will not be successful without mastering it.

Yet, for B2B companies, a completely digital engagement solution may not ever be the right answer. For one thing, content marketing capabilities in most companies is still ramping. Even when content marketing becomes excellent, digital may never be personal enough. Some B2B solutions are so complex, customized, or require so much trust that a human must intervene for the buyer to be truly served. It may also be in the vendor's best interest to involve a good sales person early. One tech CMO told me that although the company could offer eCommerce, a human touch tripled the size of the deal.

The End of One-to-One

Sales must abandon the image of the lone hero acting alone. A distinguishing feature between traditional sales and marketing has been that sales covered one-to-one interactions and marketing covered the one-to-many. The evolving "virtual" sales model is somewhere in-between. Maybe we can call it some-to-one.

Because the Apple's Genius Bar is not just a person. It's a chain of orchestrated interactions constructed not only with people but also with data, technology, knowledge, content, training, and culture. It takes a village to offer five-star concierge service.

This shift means new responsibilities for marketing. To engage in a buyer-sensitive way, marketing must provision "virtual" sales reps, train them, and merge them into new types of campaigns. These new reps will be power users of CRM and marketing automation. They will be adept at social selling. They will depend on behavioral data and pitch-perfect content. Depending on the company business model they may generate leads, qualify them, develop business, close sales, or offer technical buying assistance.

IDC believes that the challenge of aligning with sales and instituting sales enablement will seem like baby steps compared to the full-on role integration of this new function. CMO's should jump on this trend now.

Genius Bar is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc.

What is Content Marketing? IDC's Definition of Content Marketing

2014-11-21T12:17:00.002-08:00

If you looked away for a split second you may have missed the rise of Content Marketing from "buzz word" to "must have". In fact, at the beginning of 2014 CMOs at the largest technology companies reported that "Building out content marketing as an organizational competency" was the 2nd most important initiative, only behind measuring ROI. Since then, they have responded by putting more budget, staff, and energy into the area, yet there is still confusion around the topic. What exactly is Content Marketing? Is it a type of marketing asset? Is it a process or a technique? Or something else?

IDC's CMO Advisory Service, has seen this issue first hand and to help remedy the situation the group has published a document, What Is Content Marketing? IDC Defines One of Marketing's Most Critical New Competencies. Included within is a formal definition for Content Marketing.

IDC's Definition of Content Marketing

Content marketing is any marketing technique whereby media and published information (content) are used to influence buyer behavior and stimulate action leading to commercial relationships. Optimally executed content marketing delivers useful, relevant information assets that buyers consider a beneficial service rather than an interruption or a "pitch."

What is Included Within Content Marketing?

A definition is a great start, but the question that follows is, "What is, and is not Content Marketing?" To help marketers become more grounded in this definition of content marketing the CMO Advisory Service has also published a guide for "Types of Marketing Assets." In the graphic below you can see the break out of marketing assets into three categories:

Content Marketing Assets
Product Marketing Assets
Corporate Marketing Assets

Each is important to the company and within the marketing mix, but only content marketing is new in purpose and new in form. Also, key to remember is Content Marketing Assets are not replacements for Product Marketing Assets or Corporate Marketing Assets.

Why Content Marketing, Why Now?

For decades the marketing team produced communication assets about its products, services, and about the company itself. Before the digital era, sales people were the primary persuaders and these assets were used as sales tools. Marketing conducted some persuasive outreach, primarily through direct mail. However, this little thing called the internet changed everything - as digital technologies have progressed, buyers have become increasingly self-sufficient, the contribution of the sales person has eroded. This erosion leaves a gigantic gap in a vendor's go-to-market capability. How do companies build these relationships with buyers if they won't talk with sales people? Content Marketing fills this gap.

At IDC we believe that marketers must continue work to keep pace with their buyers. To be successful, not only is agility required, but clear guidelines and processes on how to execute new and exciting practices like Content Marketing.

Sam Melnick is Senior Reasearch Analyst with IDC's CMO Advisory Service, follow him on Twitter: @SamMelnick

IDC's Worldwide Marketing Technology 2014-2018 Forecast: $20 Billion and Growing Fast

2014-10-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Organizations worldwide will spend approximately $20.2 billion on software solutions for marketing in 2014. The marketing software market is expected to grow to more than $32.3 billion in 2018. It will be one of the fastest-growing areas in high tech, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4%. Over the five years from 2014 to 2018, organizations cumulatively will spend $130 billion on software for marketing departments. This forecast includes a wide range of solutions in four broad categories: interaction management, content production and management, data and analytics, and marketing management and administration. (For more information see Worldwide Marketing Software Forecast 2014-2018: $20 Billion and Growing Fast, IDC # DOC #251902, October 2014.)

Worldwide Marketing Technology Spending by Category, 2014–2018

Source: IDC 2014

The emergence of Marketing as a Service (MaaS)

While innovation continues, the era of consolidation has begun. Many acquisitions have been made by software industry majors to bring together key pieces of the marketing and advertising software landscape. This activity has been coincident with the transformation of the larger IT industry to what IDC calls the 3rd Platform where technology and maintenance services are offered "as a service." This model is a game changer for marketers and marketing software suppliers. Even though almost all current marketing solutions are cloud based, they are just beginning to be integrated enough to provide seamless operations and reporting across the diverse activities of a large marketing organization. Furthermore, newer platform solutions can be leveraged by third parties such as agencies and marketing BPOs to provide value-added services in a bundled offering, which IDC calls "marketing as a service." (For more information on MaaS, see Marketing as a Service (MaaS): A New Route to Market, IDC #247587, March 2014)

5 Action Items for CMOs

Construct a technology road map based on business drivers to guide investment
Consolidate applications into a platform with data and process level integration to improve efficiency and effectiveness
Work to integrate marketing technology with the enterprise infrastructure to reveal deeper insights into customers, partners, and market opportunities
Establish inter-disciplinary teams and processes to combat the silos point solutions can create
Learn to leverage corporate IT to improve vendor management, due diligence, and governance practices

For more information, please contact me at gmurray(at)idc(dot)com.

9 New Terms Modern Marketers will want to Know

2014-10-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

New practices need new language to describe them. When IDC's smart, experienced, forward-looking, clients and special guests got together at our recent Marketing Leadership board meeting in New York, I jotted down these terms they used as particularly useful for describing their challenges and ideas.

Product selfie: A type of content where it's all about the product and nothing about the buyer/user (Guidance: Keep to a minimum – you know why.)
Snackable content: Short-form, easy-to-consume, desirable, content (Guidance: As attention spans get shorter, you'll need more of this.)
Brand-as-a-Service: Offering beneficial, free, and minimally-self-serving, customer service that extends your brand promise. Examples: USAA offering car-buying services, Pantene offering tips for creating celebrity hair-styles during an Academy Awards social media campaign; (Guidance: Powerful! Find yours.)
Budget slush fund: Holding back 5-15% of your budget so that you can respond with agility to unexpected opportunities such as a social media fire or an idea from a regional marketer that is worth testing. (Guidance: Great strategy to you get beyond the same-old, same-old, but you'll need a seeking and vetting process to make sure this doesn't go to waste)
Off-domain: Use of non-owned capabilities such as content syndication, outside point-of-view, 3rd-party voices; curated content, and community/social/partner media or events (Guidance: This fast growing practice will require a different mind-set than the traditional "owned and ads first" Start with some pilots now and plan to expand.)
Hunting in the zoo: A derogatory term for the frustrating propensity for sales people to prospect only in well-known territory and ignore leads from new companies (Guidance: While I'm reluctant to promote language that contributes to the marketing - sales conflict, I think we have to give witness to this reality. It's not likely to change without CEO intervention, so build reality into campaign and metrics – work with it or around it.)
Multi-screening: Consumers are learning to use multiple devices in complementary ways to achieve their goals. Example: Using a mobile phone to research and buy a product seen at a tradeshow kiosk. (Guidance: One more reason to get beyond your internal org structure and think about what customers are trying to accomplish. Break down silo's within marketing. But also bring marketing closer to all company functions that touch customers.)
RACI: This acronym (pronounced "racy") stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. A RACI grid is used to clarify roles in cross-functional practices. (Guidance: Accept that almost all tasks today can't be accomplished in a vacuum. RACI is an indispensible tool for helping people work across silos)
Orchestrate: Arrange and mobilize multiple diverse elements to achieve a desired result. (Guidance: Think of campaign managers as orchestra conductors who lead groups of experts each playing an instrument critical to the beauty of the concert. This model is more in tune (pun intended) with agile marketing than traditional top-down management.)

2014 Tech Marketing Budgets Showing Strength - Led by the Shift to the 3rd Platform

2014-10-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

IDC's CMO Advisory Service recently completed our 12th annual Tech Marketing Benchmark Survey and just last week had our client and participant webinar readout. With the results in, tech marketers should be excited; there are clear signs that marketing is gaining more respect, more responsibility, and more budget! For the first time since 2006, Tech Marketing Budgets will increase at the same rate as revenues (3.5% increases for budgets, 3.7% for revenues.) Coupled with this, the absolute number of companies increasing their marketing budgets continues to rise. Party time, right?

Well, maybe not quite.

The tech industry has hit an inflection point around the 3rd platform (cloud, social, mobile, and big data & analytics.) In fact, IDC is projecting that within the next 5+ years the 3rd platform will cannibalize revenue growth from the 2nd platform. Meaning, not only will 3rd Platform driven products account for all the revenue growth within the tech industry, but they will take market share from what was previously 2nd platform revenue.

What does this mean for marketers?

A lot actually, tech marketers are in the fortunate (or fortuitous) position of being smack in the middle of this shift to the 3rd platform. Not only are the technologies being marketed transforming, but the day-to-day job of a marketer is being greatly affected. This is because the true impact of this shift is within next generation types of applications, industries - and ultimately - capabilities that the 3rd platform provides. Moving forward every marketer and every marketing organization must be updating skills, technologies, and processes. A lot is at stake and budgets are a clear indicator; 3rd platform marketing organizations are being funded at 6 to 8 times greater than 2nd platform organizations (see image below). The largest tech companies in the world are shifting to the 3rd platform and often (as they should be) the marketing organizations are exerting significant energy to be a large part of this company-wide shift. IDC sees moving to the 3rd platform as mandatory and marketing is no exception.

What can a marketing organization do to make sure they succeed in transforming rather than succumbing to turmoil?

Understand which parts of the business are 3rd platform: These are the areas that should be supported with stronger marketing spend. These are the areas to integrate new marketing technologies and processes in first. These areas will make or break your entire company. Use this opportunity to position marketing as a driver for the company's future success!
Invest in 3rd platform staff and programs: Supporting 3rd platform products is key, but marketing also needs to shift the way it operates. This means investing in 3rd platform technologies and skills like: marketing technology, sales enablement, content marketing, and data & analytics. These areas create leverage and efficiencies for the entire marketing organization. In short, putting the right people, in the right positions, with the right tools gives your marketing organization its greatest opportunity for success.
Have a plan, but be realistic and be patient: The larger the company the more time should be allowed for this organizational shift to the 3rd platform. Marketing leaders must definitively set the end vision for their 3rd platform marketing organization, but at the same time must have the patience to see the entire process through. The path may be non-linear and there will certainly be failures and misdirection along the way, but despite the time and effort needed, the end results will pay back the marketing organization (and company) many times over.

If you are interested in how your company's marketing organization stacks up as this shift to the 3rd platform continues, reach out to me directly at smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com.

You can follow @SamMelnick on Twitter

Social Buying: The Importance of Trusted Networks during the B2B Purchase Process

2014-09-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

Everyone's hot to leverage social selling and social marketing. But what about the other side of the equation? Do B2B buyers use social media for purchasing support? An IDC study says yes! And contrary to common assumptions, it’s the senior executives who are most enthusiastic.

The most senior buyers are the most active social media users. IDC's Social Buying Study, completed in February 2014 in collaboration with LinkedIn (Slideshare version) studied the online social practices and preferences of B2B buyers. The study concluded that 75% of the B2B buyers studied and 84% of C-level/vice president executives use information from social media and interaction on social networks to make purchase decisions. I'll be talking about this study at the sold-out Sales Connect conference later this week.

Social buying improves decision confidence. The operative benefit in social buying is the ability to access trusted networks to increase confidence in high-stakes decision making. When asked about their agreement with various statements about social media, respondents gave these top three answers:

They want to use vendors that have been recommended by people they know
They want to work with sales people who have been referred to them
Their social networks are critical for checking references

Social media make accessing trusted networks easier. Buyers have long trusted their offline professional networks for this purpose. Online social networks improve access to trusted existing networks and open up networks that more easily extend beyond traditional boundaries. The bigger the buying decision, the more important social networks become. The study found that social buying correlates with buying influence. The average B2B buyer who uses social networks for buying support is more senior, has a bigger budget, makes more frequent purchases, and has a greater span of buying control than a buyer who does not use social networks.

B2B buyers use different types of social resources at different stages of the decision-journey. It's important not to lump all social media into one big stew of a category. "Social" is a media attribute that enables peer-to-peer audience participation. Some media are highly social and others not at all.

Early Stage: when buyers are exploring whether to solve their problem, they favor news-type resources. Industry-specific media are #1, internet search (a socially-curated information service) is #2, and microblogs like Twitter are #3.
Middle Stage: when buyers are evaluating solution options, 3rd-party experts become #1, industry-specific media are #2, and internet search is #3.
Final Stage: Online professional networks (e.g., LinkedIn) are buyer's the #1 preferred information source in the final stage of the purchase process, when stakes are highest. This final stage is the riskiest stage because by this time, buyers are teetering on the brink of commitment where they will soon reap the benefits of a great decision or plunge into the abyss. It's at this point that they most need the confidence advice provided by their professional network. Online network services like LinkedIn make this easy. Third-party recommendations are #2 and topic-specific communities become #3.

ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE

Relationship building, referrals, and recommendations are shifting online, so make social marketing and social selling a priority. Social marketing and social selling are not responsibilities that can be relegated to a special team low in the organization. Marketing executives should consider social aspects to be an integral attribute of all campaigns. Sales professionals and others in key customer-facing roles need to be active on social networks. At best, companies will miss an important opportunity to connect and at worst could incur real damage.
Respect the context of social interactions. Understand that when using the digital channels, buyers are seeking access to their trusted networks for information to increase decision-making confidence. Social channels are not simply a new avenue for spamming or cold-calling. Instead, each individual must earn his or her place within the trusted network of people that buyers will invite to participate in the purchase decision.

Organizational Tips for Leading the Marketing Transformation

2014-08-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the marketing transformation? You aren't alone. An IDC analysis of tech marketing staff changes since 2009 reveals that CMOs have had to squeeze traditional staff functions to accommodate five new roles: analytics/business intelligence, marketing technology, social marketing, sales enablement, and campaign management. In 2013, these new five roles collectively made up 14% of the total marketing staff.

IDC invited organizational change expert, Dr. Rick Mirable, to advise our clients on insights for leading more successful organizational change initiatives. Here are some of the tips that Dr. Mirable, who has more than 20 years of diverse business consulting and academic experience, offered:

What we believe about change determines how we will respond to change. People hold beliefs about the capability of both company culture and individual people's ability to change. Good change initiatives raise awareness of these biases.
Successful change initiatives require that leaders be included. It's not only individuals deep in the organization that need transformation, but leaders must also be role models for the change they want to see.
People resist change for many reasons. Change can threaten our sense of security (What will happen to me?) and our sense of competence (Can I learn new skills?). People may worry they will fail. They may not understand why change is needed. Companies may inadvertently reward people who resist change by penalizing people who try new things and fail.
Some resistance to change comes from unspoken resentment. Companies must allow for expression of the relevant "inner conversations" that people have with themselves about the change — views that are not explicit to others. Resentment is like dirty laundry — if you don't get rid of it eventually it starts to smell!
Some change initiatives fail simply because the organization isn't ready. Assess your readiness and then bring those areas found lacking up to speed before embarking.
The communication portions of most change efforts are weak and not consistent over the long haul. The communication must be open and bidirectional. Messages and goals need to be regularly repeated and reinforced.
Company culture is essential to sustaining success over time. One cultural attribute proven to accelerate change is the empowerment of individuals to make decisions that further the change goals. It is a best practice to ask people what they want to do (and ask for management permission to do it) rather than telling them what to do. This practice encourages innovation and accountability and drives change deeper in the organization.
Don't confuse "movement" with progress. When you get off the freeway during a traffic jam, you may be able to move faster; however, that movement doesn't guarantee that you are actually moving toward your destination or will get to it any more quickly. IDC notes that marketing teams that measure activity rather than outcomes are making this error.
Create circumstances for people to motivate themselves. Motivation can include extrinsic rewards such as money. Proven to be even more effective are intrinsic rewards — challenge, learning, responsibility, contribution, and career path advancement. Intrinsic rewards tap into the power of people's passions. Companies are advised to structure people's work so as to allow passion to surface.
Reduce resistance by creating a "burning platform." Clarify the risks and benefits of the change and involve the collective wisdom of the group. Give people a role in the change. Involve a person's "head" and "heart" as well as the "feet" of required actions.

B2B Audience Segmentation Strategies that Work

2014-06-29T18:04:00.000-07:00

As companies develop buyer-centric communication, one of most important questions is - how do we effectively group buyers into segments? We perceive that somewhere between the one-size-fits-all dinosaur and the unicorn-like "market of one" exist segmentation strategies that work better than others. But which ones? The secret is discovering self-identifying groups.

Great segments are built around groups that have naturally formed and are already connected.

For B2B marketers, the most effective audience segmentation strategies are vertical industry (e.g. hospitals, banks, retail), job function (e.g. CFO, head of HR, VP of Analytics), and geography (e.g. location, language, culture). In some cases, communities of interest can also be valuable. Communities of interest evolve around passions and may exist only online. Examples of communities of interest relevant to B2B marketers may include those interested in security or privacy or a tech company's installed base. These attributes are ones that buyers will not only easily recognize about themselves but tend to be the stimulus for group formation.

Using self-identified groups as a primary segmentation strategy has two huge benefits.

Content will be more relevant and can be leveraged and streamlined. Self-identifying groups such as the ones described above respond to the same value propositions. They tend to have similar opportunities and/or problems. They will have similar compelling reasons to buy and are served by similar solutions. They tend to have similar business models, organizational structures, and environmental conditions. They share a common vocabulary. They ponder the same questions. They read the same editorial. They understand the same stories; respond to the same examples and analogies. They react to the same warnings. You can create highly relevant, effective, content and sales messages for these groups and that content will work hard.

The social network will market and sell for you. People with the attributes described above (vertical industry, job function, geography, communities of interest) are connected in social networks. They go the same trade shows and recruit each others' executives. They respect the same experts and analysts and use the same suppliers. Social media has revealed to the world what we all know from our own buying experience - people rarely make big decisions by themselves. We seek help and advice from those we trust. We look for stories about how "people like me who have had this problem" have succeeded or failed. We collaborate with like-minded adventurers to try something new. Imagine your message as a small marble. Throw your marble onto a Kansas wheat field. Throw another. What are the chances that those two marbles will hit each other? Now imagine throwing your marbles into a shoe box. They bounce into one another with the slightest jolt. Already connected groups create an echo chamber that can dramatically extend your own outreach effort

Consider company size, buying role, and risk profile as secondary audience segmentation strategies.

Buying role and risk profiles are very useful but used alone are insufficient. Within the overarching audience segmentation strategy, you may want to create sub-segments such as different kinds of buyers and influencers (e.g. financial buyer, technical buyer, decision-maker, researcher, or advisor) or risk profiles (e.g. early adopter, majority, conservative). Content will be less relevant and you will get virtually no support from the social network. Both of these segmentation strategies are helpful. Buying role helps identify the different objectives and questions that must be answered by content. Risk profile is useful for content tone. For Early adopters tend to respond well to opportunity-oriented messages ("look how great you can be!") whereas conservative companies tend to respond well to risk-avoidance messages ("look how much pain you won't feel!"). However, unless you are a very large company with brand dominance and a horizontal solution, these strategies are less effective by themselves for winning new business than those described above.

Company-size segments help sales but not marketing. Dividing buyers into tiers defined by company size such as enterprise accounts or small and medium sized business (SMB) may be a useful strategy for some business decisions. It informs sales management tasks such as territory definition, quota setting, and sales methodology selection. Company size is also useful for pricing strategies. However, Wal-Mart and GE have little in common other than size and complexity. However, company size provides almost no support for audience messaging.

For B2B audience segmentation strategies, your ideal group is the triple crown of vertical, functional role, and geography, or in some cases, communities of interest. Your particular situation may have some unique requirements. However, whatever segmentation approach you consider, make sure it passes the litmus test – self-identify as a group that experience similar problems and shares a social network.

Marketing to the Data Driven Customer

2014-06-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

Customers with digital DNA expect data driven value

The digital native generation is bringing new expectations to brand relationships. They are mobile first, crowd sourced, and data savvy. Their first and most frequent interaction with your brand will be digital and mobile. They find out what's cool, what's trending, and what's most likely to work best for them from their social networks. They don't have emotional attachments to brands because the product is compelling or the advertising is cool. Their emotional engagement comes from unexpected insights that make them more successful. This is the new basis of customer loyalty, advocacy, and lifetime value.

Of course you still need a compelling product and cool ads (or messaging.) But once the prospect is a customer, continual engagement depends on over the top data driven insights. It's no longer enough to just sell the hammers and saws and let the buyer go build their house. You need to monitor how they are using the hammer and saw. You need to deliver success by guiding their use of your product based on the behavior of your most successful customers. You need to leverage your position as the center of your customer universe to share best practices quickly and efficiently. The only way to do that at scale is through data.

Data Ownership vs Data Stewardship

In between the lines, you should be hearing a new philosophy with respect to customer data. Even though legally you "own" it, the data driven customer expects you to act as a data steward. You must treat their data as an asset to be used for their benefit, not just as the basis for driving revenue. Everything you provide to your customers should be designed to bring data back. Your customers should learn that the more data they provide, the more value they get in return - without negative side effects like having their data sold to an irrelevant ad network. Give to get and maintain the trust.

This has tremendous implications. Not only for marketers. Data marketing requires coordination with product development, IT, finance, fulfillment, point of sale, customer support, consulting services, sales. All these groups interact with customers and capture data on different aspects of their behavior - product usage, purchasing, problem resolution, planning, advocacy, etc. They all need to be understood to identify the most successful customers and the traits that drive their success. You can create tiers of services based on the level at which customer provide data. You can create cohorts of customers that exclude direct competitors. You can support exchanges within your customer ecosystem that enable strategic accounts to benefit from preferred peers. You can be extremely creative about how you structure your data marketing services.

The message is that in a world of shrinking product cycles, cheap knockoffs, and copycat services, data marketing is the new source of differentiation. No one else has the data you (should) have on how customers can be most successful with your products. Use it to attract and retain the best and leave the rest to your competitors.

To continue the conversation on data marketing and the data driven customer, contact me: gmurray (at) idc (dot) com.

Call For Participation - IDC's CMO Advisory Service's 2014 Tech Marketing Benchmark Survey

2014-05-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

It is that time of the year - IDC's CMO Advisory Service is in the field with our Marketing Benchmarks Study. This is our 12th year conducting this study that is used by leading marketing organizations to benchmark their marketing spend and organizational structures. Now it's your chance to join in this important research; I would like to offer an invitation to participate in this survey.

Below are the essential "need to knows" around our survey and further down I'll dive into all the great value of benchmarking your marketing organization:

What are the benefits?

Complimentary copy of our 2015 Marketing Investment Planner to benchmark your company's marketing data against industry data.
Receive an invitation to our exclusive client telebriefing held by IDC Analysts.
Access to IDC's industry standard marketing taxonomy.

What is needed?

Email me (smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com) to get our survey instrument and taxonomy.
A "lead" marketing executive with access to marketing budget and staffing allocations.
Complete the survey by August 1st.

What is the Quality of Data and Confidentially?

This is the 12th year IDC has fielded the Tech Marketing Benchmark Survey and will include participation from many of the 100 largest tech companies - this depth and expertise is unmatched.
All responses are 100%, no questions asked, confidential. We take this part very seriously.

Bonus to all Participants

All participants will be eligible for our 2015 Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix and will have access to their placement on the Matrix. A great way to easily compare your marketing progress against the rest of the industry's.

Need More Information: View this excerpt from Kathleen Schaub's excellent post, IDC Tech Marketing Benchmark: Behind the Scenes. It explains all the intricacies (and value of benchmarking).

Why do companies benchmark? A benchmark provides context for decision-making. You spend a million dollars a year on social marketing. So what? If your CEO asks you this question, what will you say? Tech marketers tell us that they like to benchmark for the following reasons:
Improve the quality of annual planning: Last year’s program budget and gut feelings are no longer sufficient input
Gain insight into critical trends: Learn what industry leaders and competitors are doing – and how you stack up
Reallocate costs: Identify areas of overspending and opportunities for better value
Transform with confidence: Answer questions such as how much to invest in new areas like social marketing or how should I re-organize my department?
Drive with data: C-level executives increasingly expect marketing leaders to manage their business with the same level of operational excellence as other corporate functions.
Get an independent view: Benchmark data provides IDC analysts with a wealth of information that make guidance to clients personalized and accurate guidance

Feel free to reach out and let's have a discussion whether it's the right time for your organization to participate!

Email me at: (smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com) or find me on twitter @SamMelnick