Welcome to the Marketing Impact Vlog!

Today, we’re dipping into the fascinating world where customer experience and marketing converge because the future is here, and yet, customer experience is one of those areas where most companies don’t have a person looking out for that. So we’re here to define the opportunity a little better and hopefully inspire you into taking bolder action.

Five years ago, I led a workshop at one of our Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange events. At the time, the research by the Economist on how marketers’ roles would shift by 2020 said that “75% of marketers believe they will be responsible—i.e., measured, judged, rewarded, promoted—for the end-to-end experience over the customer’s lifecycle.”

As a result, we would be measured on “engagement”, and marketing would become responsible in some way for marketing, sales, repeat sales and referrals.

It seems that the future is here.

The 2019 Salesforce State of Marketing report stated:

“A Unified Customer Experience Is This Year’s Leading Strategy. As marketers take the lead on more end-to-end customer experience initiatives, they are broadening their focus down the funnel, deepening relationships with other teams, and tracking metrics that extend beyond customer acquisition into purchase and post-purchase. The number of marketers tracking lifetime customer value (LTV) is projected to grow 107%.”

We are now in the era of full-funnel marketing.

If you haven’t already, we as marketers should be raising our hands internally to own customer experience. This is our domain and places marketing in a serious power position which we all should relish! But – this provides a dilemma. How do we fit this into our already over-scheduled day to day? Marketing automation and AI continue to improve our efficiency, but  it’s still a lot. How do we set reasonable expectations around what services and support marketing provides our organization?

First off, there is no arguing in our opinion that marketing DOES play a critical role in customer experience, but it’s as simple as just about spreading our messages across all channels at every stage of the funnel and customer journey to cast the widest net.

The customer experience IS at the center of our work, but engagement is not our final measure of success.

Yes! Marketing actually has a BIGGER role than customer retention, sales or return on investment…that bigger job is to see our role as driving INNOVATION.  When you are a key player in the customer experience and looking at Customer Lifetime Value, your job is no longer about defending your programs’ ROI. You become focused on creating value for your customers, which translates into creating value for your company.

Are you starting to see how being customer-focused can become your strategic, competitive advantage?

I couldn’t agree more. It’s a paradigm shift each organization must make and we’re here to help you get started.

1. Ask great questions. As marketers, we love customer research and insights, but we often feel we don’t have enough. So the work here is to invest time in aligning with the teams in your company that are gathering customer and product-usage insight, and make sure they are asking really great questions. Make sure they are asking questions that help you get inside the heads of your customers. In this way, you’re investing less in “one-off” customer research and embedding smart research into your operation.
2. Analyze with an eye for adding value. Once your organization is gathering and sharing customer insights, put your analytical skills and creativity to task. Analyze the data. Then ask more great questions—Do we make this easy for our customers? Did our customers say, “Wow!”? If not, what are we doing really well that needs to be amplified, and where do we have opportunities to innovate brand new approaches?
3. Stoke the creative fires inside your organization. Armed with better customer research that you’ve analyzed and synthesized, next you want to uncover the skills, knowledge and expertise within your organization that you can leverage to help innovate new solutions to address your customers’ evolving problems, needs and desires. Position yourself to close information loops within your organization—bringing unlikely teams together—and empower teams to rally around these challenges, get creative, and innovate in the name of customer delight at every stage of the customer journey.
4. Create a bigger “Why” for yourself and your work. Every passionate marketer I’ve met is equal parts dreamer and doer. You welcome challenges as opportunities to learn. You join with others and recognize that the success of one requires the success of many. You see that marketing today is not only influencing purchases. The marketing initiatives you create have the ability to create visceral connections between people, to inspire movements, and to lead our world to a better place under the namesake of your brand. In one light, you and your marketing team have been given the pen to author a version of the future you’d like to see.  Embrace this and you will secure your strategic advantage for a long time to come.

Now, if that’s not a reason to get up in the morning and do our best, I don’t know what is!

So there you have it. A call-to-action for you to step up your game and lead the way forward using customer experience as your strategic advantage. Interested in learning more about CX? You gotta check out CX Ecosystem. This is a Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange and if you’ve never attended one, you MUST place this event on your calendar. Visit CXmindxchange.com or click the link below for more details.

Until next time, remember to Grow your Brand….…and Drive Demand.

Thanks for checking out this week’s episode. If you clicked on today’s topic, then I’m sure you’re asking the same question we are: Does the traditional content marketing funnel still work?

The answer is an emphatic NO.

Funnels like this one are a dime a dozen and for the past 20+ years have been the backbone to our content marketing strategies.

Yes – some of the top, middle and bottom of the funnel marketing strategies still fit into our modern-day content mix, BUT it’s honestly no longer a traditional linear model. The buyer journey today is WAY more complicated and reflects a looping decision journey where buyers move down, up and sideways on their own terms at their own time.  Why? Buyers are using social media, web, mobile and more during every stage of the traditional funnel.

I think about how I personally research and buy and you’re absolutely correct.

I love this quote by Nick Worth at MarketingLand: “Now more than ever, consumers expect brands to understand them and treat engagements as evidence that they are committed to knowing them better as individuals. Whether it be through recommended products, engagement channel preferences (like social media or email), more relevant content or selecting better promotions, brands will benefit from going the extra mile.”

From a B2B perspective, I feel confident that we’re trending in the very same direction. The B2B sales cycle has begun to mimic our own expectations on the consumer side. As marketers, we MUST embrace this shift if we’re going to continue to be relevant to our customer base and prospect communities. Our buyers aren’t looking to get to know us, they want us to get to know them.

The core value of understanding the pain points of our buyers is as critical today as it was 20 years ago, but personalizing our marketing to their specific needs is an expectation that they have before they even engage with us. How we rise and respond to this challenge is now a key indicator of our future success.

So what does this new content funnel look like? The best version we could find is this one by Campaign Monitor.

It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the traditional funnel. There is still a flow to the focus of our interactions but provides the necessary opportunities for buyers to come in and out on their terms.

The key take-away of killing the traditional content funnel is buyers want to consume content whenever, wherever, and however they please. We need to offer valuable content, in the right place, at the right time, with personalized iterations across a variety of distribution channels.

Excellent point, but it’s also critical to remember that our content assets are not linear either. Today more than ever, our buyers are utilizing a wider variety of mediums to consume content. They include traditional text of course, but ever-increasingly include video, audio, and graphics. As marketers, we must be creating content for each of these asset types, as well as be thinking about adjusting our SEO content strategies to include voice and SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results to maximize engagement.

Diversifying the type of content asset is huge, but equally as important is to diversify your distribution channels as well. They should include a mix of paid, owned, and earned. We must be hosting and sharing content in multiple locations. Some of those channels can do both like LinkedIn or YouTube. The key is to offer a place for the content to reside long term where your prospects will self-select, engage, follow and hopefully share with their community.

Remember – the process is no longer about creating a content strategy that is top-down. Allow yourself to move away from this rigid model to build a more personalized and fluid approach that engages your buying and customer communities on their terms – when, where and how they please.

Until next time, Remember to Grow Your Brand. And Drive Demand!

Welcome to the Marketing Impact Vlog!

A few months ago we did an article detailing ten ways to engage your prospects so they respond to your sales follow-up attempts. Today, we’re going to focus on the three most important strategies you have to get right in order to see success in your marketing and sales follow-up attempts.

To keep it easy to remember, we’re calling this the Three T’s of follow-up mastery: Timing, Tactics and Tools.

Adam, what do you think about these three things? Will they actually help more prospects respond to our sales teams’ follow-up attempts?

ADAM: Yes, I really believe they do! I think each one of these is important by itself, but they also work together.

I’ll start by talking about the first essential strategy: TIMING.

With TIMING, we’re referring to all of the touches and interactions you have with a prospect after they subscribe or engage with your company. This means you’re following up promptly after that first connection either with marketing automation or sales activity, or both, and that the timing of your interactions after that first touch is just enough to keep your company top of mind, but not so frequent that your marketing or your sales team becomes annoying.

A word of advice here, even if you think you know how long your teams and systems are waiting to follow up, it’s important to keep tabs on this stat. It’s easy for automations to get turned off or expire, or for follow-up times to lag if they’re not monitored well.

NICOLE: Good point. So once you get your timing down, the next T to increasing lead response is to master your TACTICS.

In other words, leverage best-practice methods that are proven to get your outreach noticed. We covered a whole list of tactics at length in the blog article, but at a minimum, you want to make sure you’re using Relevancy, Transparency and Reciprocity.

• The Relevancy tactic means your communication is staying dialed into the right topics for a given contact.
• The Transparency tactic means you are giving them a “what to expect” so they start to see themselves doing business with you before you close the deal.
• The Reciprocity tactic makes use of our human nature to reciprocate when offered something of value.

These three TACTICS alone can transform your follow-up engagement if you’re not doing them.

ADAM: Yes! And speaking of value…that’s a great lead-in to the last T of Follow-up Mastery: Use TOOLS

Making every interaction memorable is key to increasing response rates, and finding innovative ways to provide value to your prospects is a win-win.

Instead of sending content marketing in the form of articles and reports, provide insightful surveys, tests, ROI calculators, and other tools for your prospects to use to help them move along your process.

Another great tool is simply your sales team’s calendar! Think about offering the ability to schedule a meeting with your team early and often. Putting the power of scheduling into your prospects’ hands keeps them feeling in control of the process. When they are in control, they are paying attention! People are far more likely to keep commitments that they actively signed up for than those that were given to them.

NICOLE: That’s a great point, Adam. As I said in the beginning, you can check out the full blog article for more ideas to get your prospects to respond to follow-up attempts.

But if you’re short on time, or wanting a quick way to assess where you might have gaps, use this three T’s framework: Timing, Tactics and Tools to cover your bases.

We’d love to know YOUR top strategies for increasing lead engagement, so share them with us in the comments below!

Until next time, remember to Grow Your Brand…and Drive Demand!

I’ve been working in the events industry for longer than I care to mention, cough… 20+ years! I’m a strong believer in the value of events and the ROI face to face marketing provides.  I’ve produced and marketed ALL types of events, so I feel like I’m in a unique position to share my marketing perspective on the distinct events models you can and should take advantage of.

Here at Frost & Sullivan, I’m responsible for our digital strategy, MarTech and demand generation, so I’m also a huge proponent of leveraging technology to identify, engage, validate and close business. However, I can’t stress enough the importance event marketing plays in our overall strategy. Dollar for dollar, it continues to drive the strongest marketing ROI.

Why? Nothing can replace the ability to shake hands, look someone in the eye and establish meaningful relationships. Then, post event we leverage technology platforms, automation and personalization (based on those face to face interactions) and you just can’t duplicate the investment returns, which include shorter sales cycles, larger contracts and increased renewals.

If you’re not seeing similar results, then the events you’re investing in aren’t aligned to your marketing strategy and that’s the focus of today’s Marketing Impact Vlog.

Each event model serves a valuable purpose. It’s critical to understand the pros and cons of each model to properly align your event schedule to your marketing strategy. We’re going to run down the main B2B event models by size, from largest to the most intimate.

Trade Shows & Association National Events:

Pros:

• Brand Awareness – exhibiting at an industry trade show provides amazing brand building and improves the industry’s overall awareness of your products and services
• Lead Generation – lots of people = lots of potential lead gen opportunities
• Market Research – you’ll grab a quick pulse of the industry, what’s trending and what your prospects are responding to, not to mention insight into what your competitors are focusing on.

Cons:

• Costs – Exhibiting at a large event is expensive and it doesn’t end with square footage charge. Add in booth design, construction, delivery, staffing, travel costs, electrical, setup and teardown…
• Quality of Leads – Yes you get a ton of leads, but you’ll need to work really hard to sift thru them for the decision makers you seek.
• Competition – how do you stand out in a sea of competition? Be sure and highlight what makes you unique and provides the ability to stand out.

 

Conferences

Pros:

• Qualified Audience – participation is only possible after purchasing a ticket
• Networking – ranging in size from 100s to 1000s of people provides the opportunity to build relationships whether thru receptions, sessions or at the venue bar.
• Specific Focus/Theme – everyone in attendance is there for the same reason and focus.

Cons:

• Options Galore – size, focus and event organizer credibility vary greatly. You need to do your research and investigate the overall value and history of the event.
• Costs – although less than tradeshows, conferences can still be expensive and come with similar expenses.
• At the Mercy of the Event Organizer – audience demographics, brand positioning, and event tools/apps are controlled by the organizer.

 

Hosted Events

Pros:

• Full Control – you have control over the entire event and audience
• Brand Front and Center – participants only experience your brand

Cons:

• Time and Energy – it takes a ton more energy than you think to plan, marketing and execute a hosted event.
• Costs – you are 100% responsible for all costs, ie: feeding participants, signage, marketing, etc.
• Brand Reputation – It’s your event, your brand’s reputation is on the line. Yes you have full control, but with events there are many variables out of your control that can negatively impact your reputation.

We’re running out of time and there are all kinds of other events to consider. The key is to align your goals and strategy with the benefits of the event model. Take the time to do your research not only on the type of event, but its history and the event organizer.  Review sponsor testimonials and feedback, as well as ask around to be sure the event will deliver on your expectations.

We’ll end today’s blog with some honest self-promotion. If you’re truly looking for quality over quantity, to be treated as equals on-site, along with the ability to establish meaningful relationships, then you must add Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange events to your event schedule.

Here is a link to our 2020 calendar of events, and I highly encourage you to check them out and get involved.

Till next, remember to grow your brand…and drive demand!

Welcome to the Marketing Impact Vlog!

In this episode we’re here to share a new and simplified customer engagement map for marketers because, well, let’s be honest—customer journey mapping can get very complex. While there’s certainly a place for that, it can also be very useful to step back and evaluate your customer engagement through this simpler framework.

We use this framework to quickly assess and ensure that our marketing efforts are effective at every stage of the customer’s buying cycle.

There are four stages of customer engagement:

1. Identify
2. Engage
3. Validate
4. Close

We’ve written four detailed blog articles on each of these, so today, we’re going to do a round-up of sorts in case you are short on time and want the key points.

First up, Identify.

This is really about how to identify marketing opportunities in your business sector. We cover many strategies including how to look at the competition and analyze the market landscape, but the most important angle to explore to identify marketing opportunities is your list of customers, prospects, and customers you’ve lost.

The insight you gather straight from your customers is literally some of the best insight to use to drive product and service enhancements, to develop supplemental product/service revenue, and to build stronger market awareness and increase customer loyalty.

If you want to see more on this and other ideas to support your Identify stage, read our recent article, How to Identify the Best Market Opportunities For Business Growth.

Next, Engage.

We care about engagement now; it’s not just leads anymore. According to our 2019 Marketing Benchmark Survey, marketers are being measured by sales results—qualified leads and closed deals—as much as they are by marketing results.

We also found out that the biggest lead conversion challenge is engaging prospects so they respond to sales follow-up attempts. If you are being held responsible for the end result, your best bet is to focus on keeping those new leads hot and engaged!

We wrote about 10 different strategies you can implement right away to increase connection, engagement and conversion of leads that are generated. My favorite strategy is to swap out content marketing articles for surveys or tools. I’ve seen case studies of companies that have switched to using a quiz or tool as an engagement tactic with impressive results.

Next then, is Validate.

This is all about asking if your marketing and sales tools are helping you validate that new contacts coming into your marketing and sales funnel are legitimate prospects. Lead validation fills the gap between marketing automation and sales efforts.

Lead validation can help you accurately evaluate the results of, and efficiently improve, your SEO, PPC, display advertising, email, content marketing and social media campaigns. It can also play the very important role of making sure you don’t overstate your marketing campaign ROI.

Our article, Lead Validation Can Make OR Break Marketing, will cover this in detail if you want to know more on this important topic.

Finally, Close.

This is all about seeing where you can focus to improve that very important conversion from Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), ultimately impacting higher close rates.

We outlined 5 ways to boost your MQL to SQL (to close) conversion rate in BtoB marketing. The first is:

Ensure your marketing and sales messaging are aligned. This essentially means that you want to make sure that as your qualified leads start interacting with your sales representatives the core values and key messages they are sharing remain consistent all the way through the sales process. If the sales team shares inconsistent messaging or too much information, it can create confusion, reduce credibility or trust, and slow down the sales process.

You can see the other four tips in our Close article, 7 Creative Ways to Increase MQL to SQL to Close Conversion in BtoB Marketing

And that’s a wrap on our New (& Simplified) Customer Engagement Map for Marketers. Let us know in the comments below which area you are prioritizing in this new year.

Until next time, remember to Grow Your Brand…and Drive Demand!

Happy Holidays from us to you! We can’t believe it’s December already! It’s been an incredible year. I’m astounded that this is our last Vlog of 2019 – our 27^th to be exact! We’ve done our best to cover the marketing universe for all of you watching. We’ve been studying the analytics from this year and will come back in 2020 with a bit more focus, based on those results.

For our final vlog of 2019, we’ve created our Marketing New Year’s Resolutions. More specifically, opportunities and adjustments marketers must make to keep pace with the industry.

1. Update SEO to Optimize Voice Search Results

As voice assistants become main stream, our SEO strategy MUST be updated. The statistics are incredible. Many experts expect 50% of all searches to be voice search next year. People type and speak very differently; you must consider the semantic differences in queries when updating your keywords and content development. We won’t get into the specifics, but Search Engine Journal is a great resource for more information on the topic.

2. Live Streaming

Every social media platform has added Live Streaming over the past few years and to truly engage your customers and prospect communities you should be leveraging that feature. Overall engagement significantly increases when leveraging live streaming and you can easily repurpose the video into smaller snip its, podcasts, blogs, etc. It’s a win-win for everyone.

3. Zero Clicks Search Results

Similar to voice search, zero-click search results are becoming the new norm as well. Zero-click searches refer to SERP (Search Engine Results Page), which answers queries within the results and the user doesn’t need any further clicks to complete the search. This is great for users, but bad for marketers as users no longer need to hit your site for results.  Here is an example of a search for George Washington’s date of birth.

If that is what you were searching for, the result requires zero clicks, hence the term. If you haven’t optimized your SERP SEO strategy, now is the time.

4. Review & Update Your Omni-Channel Strategy

As marketers, we must provide a seamless customer experience, regardless of channel or device. Our prospects and customers engage with us in a variety of ways. They can access products and services by calling us, using a mobile app, browsing our website, interacting via social media, etc. Each piece of the customer’s experience should be consistent and complementary. We’ll be taking time in the new year to review our customer journey, analytics, segmentation, content & messaging, use cases and emerging channels our prospects are leveraging to enhance our omnichannel strategy.

5. Live Events

In-person interactions with customers and prospects are still you’re best opportunity to drive interest and shorten sales cycles.  Take some time to access the events that best serve the communities you serve and budget accordingly. Each event model provides different value propositions, so be sure to understand not only what community the event serves, but as important, what opportunities you’ll have to interact with prospects and customers. Putting on my sales hat quickly, I highly recommend you check out our calendar of Executive MindXchange events. Our event model is completely different from typical tradeshows and conferences, with a value proposition centered around Return on Relationships and peer-to-peer inspiration where the standard powerpoint presentation has been ditched in favor of driving content and best practices through collaborative hands-on workshops. Check out the link below for a full list of Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchanges.

As always, we hope we were able to provide some food for thought or a nugget of valuable information you weren’t aware of prior. From our family to yours – we wish you a healthy and happy holiday season and an incredible New Year!

We’ll see you again in 2020! Until next time – remember to grow your brand…and drive demand!

 

With the holidays around the corner, we wanted to find out what marketers are wishing for as we close out the year. So we asked around, and today we’re sharing what’s on the top of our team’s list to inspire you to start thinking about your own Marketer’s Holiday Wish List.

So Adam, what’s first on your Holiday Wish List?

More Budget!

I’m sure this one makes every marketer’s list at least in one category or another. If you’re not in need of budget for marketing programs, maybe you’re wanting budget for technology upgrades or to invest in more human resources to accomplish your goals faster.

In our B2B Marketing Executive Benchmark survey, executives are wanting more budget to invest in SEO, Social Media marketing, and to launch new initiatives such as Account Based Marketing.

Investments in technology are also high on the list for me because anything that helps you get into market with your programs faster AND collect data and analyze performance in real-time are must-haves for any marketer.

It’s true that your tech stack can sort of make or break your success in your marketing. Which leads into another category of things we heard are on marketers’ wish lists:

Productivity Gadgets!

You may think of gadgets and such as nice-to-haves, but when it comes to managing your day and making the most of your time, there are a few that are making the top of our list.

A Standing Desk – these have been on the market for a while, but we simply can’t deny the latest findings that say sitting is the new smoking. If you sit all day at your desk, you are doing as much harm to your body as if you were smoking. A sedentary life these days is most harmful and standing desks are a really great addition to your office suite. Nowadays, standing desks come in all shapes, sizes and styles. The idea is that you are meant to change your position every 90-minutes or so. From research on ADHD and anxiety, movement intervals throughout the day were found to significantly improve focus and ability to feel calm—even more effectively than some medications. So a standing desk is a great item for any marketer’s wish list. It’s on ours!

Another cool gadget is actually an App that you can use with your Apple Smartwatch. You will have to dig out your Apple Watch that you stopped wearing months ago, But it’s called Workflow. It’s free and you get direct access to your favorite apps and agendas right from your watch face. It’s basically a wearable to-do-list, and the display is very sleek and makes your daily agenda/task list highly visible.  A great gadget for productivity.

On the high-end of marketing productivity gadgets, we got some votes for a Pelaton! I love this one because, for sure if your days are jam-packed and intense, you probably have something on your wish list to help you blow off some of that steam.

Pelaton is just one idea (and by the way, they have an app that’s far less than the bike or treadmill system itself, if you have a gym membership or home gym to use with the app). I downloaded the app just to try it out, and I can totally see how a little time doing the daily workouts on the Pelaton app could improve productivity!

It’s so true. There are gadgets that do work for us, and others that help us do our work better. Having some of both is a great idea. I like this wish list!

I’m going to add one last thing to our Marketer’s Holiday Wish List:

Time Off!

According to a study on sleep debt, it takes four days to fully recover from one hour of lost sleep. And if you’ve lost sleep, chances are your stress has also increased, your eating and exercise habits have waned, and overall you feel like you’re operating at a deficit.

The good news is studies have shown that the body can recover from a high-stress life with a total reset in about 10 days. That may sound like a lot to you, but if you think about it, it will take you a couple of days just to come down from the overwhelm of year-end activities, and then if you can take the next 6-7 days to sleep well, eat well, connect with people you enjoy being around, and set goals for the year ahead, you’ll be ready to go in the New Year. Time off from everything can seem hard to do, but it’s a great one to have on your holiday must-have list this year that will pay you back in dividends when you come back into the office.

That is so, so important. I’m glad you added that to our list.

Well, that wraps up our time for today. Let us know in the comments below what’s on your holiday wish list!

Until next time, remember to Grow your Brand…And drive demand.

Welcome to the Marketing Impact Vlog, where today, we’re turning our focus to the softer side of marketing – what are those interpersonal skills and self-management skills you want to focus on that really make a difference to your success as a professional marketer?

How does it feel when you are able to…

• Make better business decisions
• Keep your cool under pressure
• Resolve conflicts successfully
• Overall feel happier about work and your contributions?

Pretty great, right?! These are just a few of the benefits you can expect when you cultivate the soft skills of marketing we’re going to cover today. So let’s jump in. We’ve got NINE soft skills you want to master.

Soft Skill #1: Social Skills. This sounds like a big category, but really, it’s quite simple. It’s about how you listen and speak (both in speaking and in writing). Marketers are communicating all day long, and it’s imperative that you keep refining your social skills. Take time to hone your abilities to listen to what others are saying, develop your ability to understand others and empathize, and keep working on ways to communicate more effectively—BOTH in writing and speaking.

Soft Skill #2: Persuasion. Clearly marketers must be good at persuasion, and this skill is a lot easier to develop if your social skills are well developed because it means you are tapped into what people are thinking, needing and responding to.  Modern persuasion is far more subtle than the blunt sales and marketing approaches of earlier eras. Today, buyers have so many more choices and are savvier in their decision making, so persuasion is more about being able to adeptly match customer needs with viable solutions. You can develop your persuasion skills by asking a lot of questions and staying focused on problem-solving with the customer or colleague in mind.

Soft Skill #3: Leadership. Every marketer is using the soft skill of leadership, whether you have a team of direct reports or not. Leadership is the ability to have a clear vision of the task at hand, take initiative as required, empower others to step up as needed and to NOT micro-manage every last detail. At the pace most marketing projects move these days, not having great leadership skills will slow you down and impact your success. You can develop your leadership skills by

• attending leadership trainings or executive events with peers in other industries
• reflecting regularly on your strengths and how you can best use them; hand off the rest
• gathering 360-degree feedback on your success as a motivator, supporter, and enabler of others, so you know where you can improve.

Soft Skill #4: Adaptable & Flexible. This is a skill that certainly is developed with time, as you begin to see there are many ways to accomplish a given goal. But if you are too focused on following the rules or doing things the way they have always been done, you may be missing some huge opportunities for success. Instead, develop your ability to be adaptable and flexible. You can do this by asking more questions, read about others who have accomplished your goals in different ways, and take some risks—small ones at first if you need to—and see how trying new things can reveal new insights.

Soft Skill #5: Analytical. Modern marketing is equal parts art and science. These days, you simply must have strong analytical skills to be able to make sound recommendations to your upper management based on facts. You also want to be able to make solid decisions about your marketing strategy and plans. These all come from the ability to research and analyze what worked, what didn’t and why. If you are lacking in analytical skills and want to improve in this area, my best recommendation is to team up with someone in your company that has these skills. Or hire someone with that skill. Then, include them on an analysis project, and soak up everything you can, learning as you go. With practice, you’ll notice you’re thinking of the end analytics before you even begin! This is obviously a great way to ensure success in marketing.

Adam, that is so true. Start with the end in mind. So the next two soft skills in my mind kind of go together, so I’m going to talk about them together.

#6: Creativity and #7: Intuition. I want to talk about these together because you need them both working together to be super effective as a marketer. Creativity is about expansion and Intuition is about focus/clarity. If you are really strong in creativity, you may have a lot of ideas and be able to produce a lot of content, programs or projects, but how do you know which idea is going to work? That’s where having strong intuition sort of saves the day. Having intuition as a marketer, you just have a knowing, whether that is based on experience or understanding of the customer, or empathizing with the need your product is filling—that one idea is going to work. Having both of the soft skills of Creativity and Intuition working in your favor, this is when you can’t not only do your job well but also have fun!

So true, and I will say that your confidence in creativity and intuition WILL improve as your career progresses. I’m going to do the same and put the last two together because they also operate as a pair.

Soft Skill #8: Tech Savvy and #9: Multi-tasker. There are so many tech tools available to us as marketers that we simply must have proficiency in a wide range of technologies and be able to quickly learn new ones.

So it stands to reason, that you also want to make sure you are an effective multi-tasker because if you are not good at juggling many balls, balancing your growing tech stack, and the team, you will be overwhelmed very quickly. Let’s be clear, multi-tasking doesn’t mean you can talk on the phone while answering emails and listening to a training, all while analyzing last quarter’s numbers. Even though we’ve probably all tried that, no one can literally do that and do those things well.

But an effective multi-tasker DOES know how to leverage technology to do some of the heavy lifting, to set up processes and procedures for repeatable tasks, and is organized about how they manage all of the moving parts of the marketing organization.

So there you have it! Our 9 soft skills you want to use (or develop) if you want to be successful in marketing.  Tell us in the comments below which soft skill you use most often and how you developed it. We’d love to hear your stories.

Until next time– remember to grow your brand…and drive demand!

At Frost & Sullivan, we’ve been focused on customer experience for 20+ years. The topic and focus on flawless customer experience permeates our business culture, as well as plays a major content role at our Executive MindXchange events. That’s why I was so upset with myself, when we were looking at topics we have yet to cover in our twice-monthly Marketing Impact Vlog.

This is our 24^th vlog and we just realized we have yet to focus on CX. How is that possible? Maybe it’s because as Marketers we’re constantly trying not to drop all the balls we’re juggling. We’ve said it before and it applies today, we need to build time into our regular schedule to focus on strategy. Unless we block off the time, other fires will constantly rise to our attention and that’s why I think we’ve missed the topic of Customer Experience.

CX refers to the sum of every interaction a customer has with a business.  As marketing leaders, we are often an arm’s length away from our customers, which is why we MUST focus on CX Strategy – which defines the actionable plans in place to deliver positive, meaningful experience across all your customer interactions. If you’re not, then today’s Vlog is extremely timely for you. This year’s Digital Marketing Trends Report by Econsultancy and Adobe asked companies to indicate the single most exciting opportunity for their organization in the upcoming year. For the past two years, Customer Experience was at the top of the list. Additional research supports the excitement around CX. The Temkin Group published a study in 2018 that found companies that earn $1 billion annually can, on average, increase revenue by 70% within 3 years by simply investing in customer experience. Let me say that again, just in case you were reading a text while listening: Companies that earn $1 billion annually can, on average, increase revenue by 70% within 3 years by simply investing in customer experience. We MUST successfully implement customer experience strategies. If we do, we’ll improve customer satisfaction rates, reduce customer churn and increase revenue! Now that we’ve got your attention, maybe we should have started with this point, let’s review 7 simple ways you can improve CX at your organization.

1. Create Your Customer Experience Vision

The first and most important step in creating a CX strategy is to have a clear customer-focused vision that you can communicate internally at your organization. Zappos is a great example of a company whose vision fully integrates customer experience. The vision should drive your organization’s culture and drive the behaviors of every employee, especially those who interact with customers.

2. Know Your Customers

If your goal is to create amazing customer experience, you’d better understand and empathize with the needs and situations your prospects and customers face. Creating personas is an important step to truly knowing your customers.

3. Meet Your Customers Where They Are

If you’re not meeting your customers where they are, you’re missing an enormous opportunity to engage with them when they are ready to buy or need your assistance. You must determine the channels your customers are most active on, but more importantly understand how they use each channel so you can create appropriate, reliable and consistent service through them.

4. Be Accessible to your Customers

For better or worse, we live in a 24/7 world and your customers expect service or insight whenever they are engaged. If you cannot provide 24/7 service, that is fine, but provide the self-serve resources to directly address their questions in your absence. HubSpot has a great Knowledge Base Guide for more details.

5. Whenever Possible, Make an Emotional Connection

According to the “Harvard Business Review study across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that the most effective way to maximize customer value is to move beyond mere customer satisfaction and connect with customers at an emotional level – tapping into their fundamental motivations and fulfilling their deep, often unspoken emotional needs. Emotionally engaged customers are:

• At least three times more likely to recommend your product or service
• Three times more likely to re-purchase
• Less likely to shop around (44% said they rarely or never shop around)
• Much less price sensitive (33% said they would need a discount of over 20% before they would defect)”

 

6. Leverage & Execute on Employee Feedback

Our teams are on the front lines, engaging with customers regularly. They are our best source of instant feedback and we should be continuously processing that feedback to improve customer experience and employee morale.

7. Participant in the Customer Experience Ecosystem: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange on February 11^th in New York City.

The event’s mission is to assist you in achieving organization-wide customer centricity and it’s like no event you’ve ever attended.  The standard powerpoint presentation has mostly been ditched in favor of driving content and best practices through collaborative hands-on peer-to-peer workshops.  The result, you’ll have more actionable takeaways in the first half day, than at the last 5 events you attended combined.  We hope you’ll join in February. Until next – remember to grow your brand…And drive demand!

Don’t look now, but the fourth quarter is quickly approaching and that means budget season for those of us on a calendar fiscal year.  This is the stretch of the year when you should be allocating time in our calendars to analyze results from the prior three quarters so we can properly prepare for 2020 and this is the focus of today’s Brand and Demand Marketing Impact Vlog.

Today’s Vlog topic is entitled: 5 Simple Steps to Create a Marketing Plan & Budget that Drives Return. As we look toward the New Year, we need strategies and a plan to acquire new customers, drive deeper returns from existing customers, sync with sales on goals, and develop new opportunities to grow our businesses.

Nicole – I love this time of the year. Living in the Boston area, we’ve got the crisp early mornings of fall. The leaves are starting to change and that’s my annual signal to carve out time for analysis, strategy and planning.  It’s an exciting, yet busy time of the year, as we work hard to close out the year strong, while building the appropriate plan and budget to make next year even more successful.

Step 1 is to analyze results and return for your efforts thus far. We all should be optimizing campaigns on a regular basis, but this is your opportunity to take a deeper dive into the analytics to evaluate true return and adjust accordingly. We’re not going to spend any energy on this step, you know what you need to do here. Our focus today is on the remaining the steps.

Many companies plan their marketing budget based on the previous year and how much they’re willing to spend on marketing. This is a great way to hold yourself back from achieving your sales goals and to waste budget on poor performing channels.

Step 2 is to Create a Marketing Strategy

Don’t make the mistake of setting your budget and then building a strategy around the budget. Before you calculate your marketing budget, align your marketing goals with your company’s strategic goals and vision for growth. If you plan to grow by 20% or launch new lines of business, that’s a strong indicator that you’ll require more budget to invest toward growth.

It’s imperative to create a marketing strategy document that your executive team, sales team, and marketing team are committed to. Everyone must set their activities in motion on the same course.

Which brings us to Step 3 – Build a Marketing Budget

Once you’ve aligned your company goals with your marketing goals, it’s time to identify your marketing budget. Solidifying your budget provides the opportunity to develop a detailed marketing plan that supports your strategy. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen three options as it relates to developing a marketing budget.

Option A is the Maintain Plan: Allocating 1 – 3% of your top-line revenue. Your organization is committed to engaging and retaining its current customers with simple tools and strategies. This option is perfect for companies that want to maintain market share and don’t have ambitious growth goals.

Option B is the Expansion Plan: Allocating 4 – 5% of your top-line revenue. Your organization strives to attract new prospects and retain current customers with advanced tools and strategies. This option is perfect for companies with goals to expand their market share and annual growth by 10 – 20%.

Option C is the High Growth Plan: Allocating 6% or more of your top-line revenue. Your organization is dedicated to accelerating results by leveraging additional resources to increase demand generation, conversions and sales. To accomplish this you’ll leverage complex marketing strategies and cutting-edge tools. This option is perfect for companies who have ambitious goals to increase their market share and annual growth by 20% or more.

Once you settle on an option, it’s time to move to step 4.

Step 4 is to Allocate Your Marketing Budget

Now that you’ve got your goals and a budget, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get into the nitty-gritty of developing a tactical plan of execution to convert your strategy into reality! The specifics of the plan are contingent on the budget you’ve identified, but consider including the following tactics in no specific order:

• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Social Media (Organic and Paid)
• Display and Retargeting
• SEO and Paid Search
• ABM
• Lead Conversion and Nurturing
• Earned Media/PR
• Referral Marketing
• Customer Experience
• Events
• Branding
• Affiliate & Influencer Marketing
• Traditional Advertising

Determine how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to each aspect of your plan. To find out how fellow marketers are allocating their budgets, I highly suggest you take our Brand & Demand B2B Marketing Executive Priority Benchmark Survey. Upon completion, you’re not only going to receive the results, but you may be contacted to see where you rank among your peers in the industry.

We’ve arrived at our fifth and final step! Step 5 is to Create & Implement a Marketing Plan.

I recently saw a stat that approximately 85% of SMB’s operate from only a budget. They have no written plan to accompany it. This explains why so many marketers are tactically focused – they’re trying to figure out how to spend budget, instead of thinking about goals and strategies.

I really like The Balance SMB definition: “A marketing plan outlines the specific actions you intend to carry out to interest potential customers and clients in your product and/or service and persuade them to buy the product and/or services you offer.”

“The marketing plan implements your marketing strategy. Or, the marketing strategy provides the goals for your marketing plans. It tells you where you want to go from here. The plan is the specific roadmap that’s going to get you there.”

This is a time-consuming process, but writing a strong plan forces you to think through your strategies and relevant tactics. A strong marketing plan typically includes:

• Executive summary
• Financial goals
• Target customers
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
• Brand strategy
• Product pricing and positioning overview
• Distribution plan
• Sales plan
• Marketing materials and campaigns
• Detailed budget and financial projections
• Retention strategy
• Conversion strategy
• Dates to review progress

 

Once you’ve developed the plan. Success can only be achieved by implementing the plan with a qualified team of marketers, designers, and technical experts.

I couldn’t agree more Adam and that’s where Brand and Demand Solutions come in. We help you increase brand awareness and fuel your pipeline with a variety of personalized content marketing and demand generation solutions stamped with the credibility of Frost & Sullivan.

If you have any remaining budget that you need to allocate. I’ve got one piece of advice; DON’T adopt a use-it-or-lose-it mentality or what I’ve heard referred to as the “Irrational Budget Dump.”  Instead – make an investment and partner with us. Simply fill out our contact us form and one of our marketing consultants will be in touch to schedule a free consultation with you.

Until next – remember to grow your brand…and drive demand!