New Skills Needed to Address Marketing Gap

by Lauren Carlson

CRM Analyst, Software Advice
August 19, 2011

Here’s a staggering statistic: B2B organizations are losing upwards of 10 percent of revenue per year due to their inability to properly align sales and marketing around the right processes and technologies, according to IDC. To put that in perspective, that would be a $10 million loss for a $100 million company. Ouch.

These numbers reflect what we have been hearing over and over again: We’ve got this powerful software in marketing automation, and yet, marketers are still missing the boat. So, what are we missing, here?

Many of today’s marketers were brought up in the traditional marcomm, PR and event-driven marketing that consisted primarily of a one-way communication: vendor to buyer. That kind of approach is no longer effective in the modern buying landscape where the buyer is now in control of the conversation.

“It’s no longer about lead generation, it’s about engagement. You’ve got this buyer who is now so well-connected. They can go to sites like Software Advice, Quora, Focus and even Twitter to connect with other buyers. That’s how buyers are now finding information.” – Carlos Hidalgo, Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute

So the real question is, how do marketers bridge the gap between getting buyers interested and truly engaging them in a dialogue to give them the information they need?

That is the question Hidalgo set out to answer when he founded the Marketing Automation Institute (MAI). The goal of the MAI is to educate, equip and enable marketers with the skills, practices and principles they need to be successful at their jobs. Marketing automation is more than a tool. It is a strategy. One that requires content marketing, attention to revenue and other skills and details that marketers never had to pay attention to in the past. Individuals that participate in classes offered by the MAI will become Certified Marketing Automation Professionals.

Education at the MAI takes place via an active user community, as well as classes taught by thought leaders who specialize in areas such as marketing operations, inside sales, social media, lead management and implementation basics to name a few. While these classes cover a wide range of skills, we wanted to know which ones were the most important to the modern marketer’s success. Here are the essentials:

Analytics and metrics: More and more, marketing is becoming a numbers game. The introduction of marketing automation software switched marketing from a gut-feeling, creative discipline into a numbers-driven, measurable activity. Marketers are now able to measure campaign performance, track conversions along the sales funnel and make accurate forecasts. This has elevated marketing’s value proposition to address the C-level’s top priority: revenue. The modern marketer must be metrics-driven and have a strong understanding of how to turn analytics into actionable insight that can help improve marketing’s contribution to overall revenue.
Lead management strategy: Marketers who define their job as filling the top of the funnel will not be successful with marketing automation software. Lead management has to be built on a strategy that focuses on managing the entire pipeline, not just one end of it. Marketers have to work with sales to define the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Then, they must develop a process that will best lead the buyer down that path. This signals a paradigm shift in the marketer’s focus, from quantity of leads to quality of leads.
Content marketing: As we know, today’s approach to marketing is about engaging the buyer. That is where content comes in. Content is any information that touches the buyer. It can include white papers, blogs, email, case studies, newsletters, video and social content, to name a few. Relevant content is the key to engaging the buyer and getting them interested. Marketers have to be able to build a content strategy around their buyer’s journey. Understanding the buyer’s behavior and path to purchase will help marketers map the right content each step along the way. Marketers must also understand that content is what fuels the entire marketing automation engine. A content development plan has to be part of your strategy in order to be successful.
Social media: Love it or loathe it, social media is here to stay, and marketers and organizations that choose to ignore it are already left behind. A recent report by Pew Research indicated that adult engagement on social networks has risen from 11 percent in 2005 to 65 percent in 2011. More buyers are getting social, providing a viable medium for engagement. Being successful with social requires thought, strategy, content and consistent execution. Additionally, you have to measure your efforts. See what works and what doesn’t, modifying your approach appropriately. The marketer that gets social media right will be an invaluable asset to any company.

The B2B market is in a constant state of evolution. Marketers that hope to keep up will have to master these skills, not only to add value to their organization, but to stay relevant in a competitive job market.

Let us know your thoughts. What would you identify as weak areas where marketers need improvement? What skills are crucial in a technology-enabled, buyer-centric world? Leave your comments in the space below.

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http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com Ardath Albee

Hi Lauren,

Nice review of MAI. And I agree there are gaps in skills that marketers must address. All four of yours are right up there, but I think in order to embrace them, marketers also need to do some work to shift the way they think about marketing in a digital world where buyers have taken control.

I wrote a brief about 5 Mind Shifts for Effective eMarketing over on Focus.com that your readers might find interesting food for thought.
http://www.focus.com/briefs/5-mind-shifts-effective-emarketing/

Hope it’s okay that I shared this…
Fanfoundry

Lauren, Ardath, et. al.,

Great discussion here. According to AdAge, the number one challenge to adopting and exploiting marketing automation in any enterprise, and especially in the SMB marketplace, is resources – people, process and technology.

We are seeing the rise of a new animal: the Chief Marketing Technologist. This role involves use of analytical and data management skills and tools to read the digital tea leaves – - those disparate streams of data emanating from all those online channels – - and gleaning insights to help drive marketing strategy.

Like Ardath, I too write and rant about the subject at my http://www.fanfoundry blog. Just do an article search on “marketing automation” and you’ll see that I’ve been wrestling with the issue on behalf of a number of clients and companies for some years now.

As the customer gets more sophisticated, their digital footprints begin to tell us the story of their behavior, which can then lead to insights on how to more effectively engage, serve and satisfy them.

If you’re doing any marketing and selling online, it’s a voice worth heeding. People are talking about you now; why not chime in and help out?
http://www.dondalrymple.com Don Dalrymple

Leadership and strategy are the key critical components to success. Software is glamorous and makes detached executives feel better they got a new technology. At the end of the day, many of the systems can be interchanged. The results that matter will show up in the leadership and strategy.

We wrote about this topic in a similar post a few months ago in this post as well http://blog.ascendworks.com/5-reasons-marketing-automation-fails/

Thanks for focusing the conversation, Lauren. On the front lines where we implement marketing automation strategy and campaigns, success is achievable if the projects are set up well.
http://www.etrigue.com/ Tony Tissot

I can’t argue with the conclusion that “B2B organizations are losing revenue …… “

So what’s the problem here?

The right processes and
technologies do exist. Marketers can and do grasp the concepts, and when
left unfettered do succeed to great advantage.

Is the gap because “marketers were brought up in the
traditional marcomm, PR and event-driven marketing” world, or is it because the tools have become so resource intensive, bloated and expensive that they are unusable?

Have complex MA implementations with inflexible organizational rules actually become impediments to nurturing buyers through a mutually beneficial journey?Can marketers sell upper management on tools that masquerade as one thing (revenue performance) while actually being another?I see the problem as a bit of each. Hopefully the MAI will focus marketers on developing and implementing effective strategies.
Jspilka

resources – people, process and technology.What is needed, aside from educating marketers on how to develop customer relationships in this digital age, is simplicity. If the MA software were easy to learn, process non-disruptive, and light from a technology standpoint, then the load on marketing resources would be greatly reduced. This would allow them to concentrate on the marketing part of the job and not the automation part. (For more on this see my blog:The marketer’s silver bullet! Looking for an integrated marketing solution that does it all! at
http://bit.ly/qptjBC)
http://www.brainrider.com/ Nolin LeChasseur

Here’s another take, and it ties into what both Ardath and Tony assert.

B2B marketers have always been bad at strategy. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but overall, everything done in the vast majority of B2B marketing organizations has been extremely tactical and lacked any sort of unified framework or plan. You can see it very quickly if you look at their budget structure and their reporting structure.

They used to be able to get away with this by and large, because they were executing and measuring everything manually. Remember when there was a full-time person on the marketing team whose job it was to run queries to pull phone numbers and email addresses out of a database, and Excel pivot tables were the best answer to “drill-down reports”?

Now marketing tools are cheap and easy to buy: sales CRMs, marketing automation platforms, email marketing platforms, web analytics tools, and more recently social media management/monitoring tools and content curation platforms. Short/no contract, pay-as-you-go, software-as-a-service. The vendors are great at selling the benefits. However none of them are in the ongoing services business, so beyond the initial technical implementation, there’s nobody there to help you actually overlay your own business/marketing objectives, processes, and resources to operate these things in a way that generates results.

So it’s part of the solution to recognize the skill gap, and to draw the framework on a whiteboard for someone. It’s also part of the solution for experts who understand how to both plan AND execute content development, marketing programs, and marketing technology operations to be involved on an ongoing basis.

Some marketing organizations are doing this with internal resources, some are outsourcing to smart professional services shops, and some are combining the two. Many have yet to do any of these three things though, and getting started is the most important next step.