As this busy week for marketers comes to an end, we’d like to reflect on our key marketing event takeaways and lessons learned at Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit and Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. These major events touched on several key facets of today’s marketing world, from new, digitized storytelling approaches to the exponentially growing value of data analytics. Here is an overview of what we learned from MarTech leaders this week:
Shocker: Big Data Rules the Day
Data is the new window to the soul, the customer’s soul at least. With so much data driving insights for marketers and sales professionals, getting to know the customer’s preferences and tendencies is easier than ever. We’re also seeing the effects of weaving in AI, IoT and predictive analytics to the process and how these tools are not only helping marketers generate new leads that are more promising, but enabling them to retain existing customers and better nurture those relationships. Some might call it #customerobsession, but it’s all about knowing how to tease out useful customer trends and making these mountains of data actionable.
Marketing is Getting Smarter to Compete with Google and Crowdsourcing
Key account marketing or account-based marketing are becoming increasingly more appealing to marketers in the face of search engines and social networking. By employing intuitive MarTech solutions to help execute approaches like key account marketing, marketers are able to get back in the ring when it comes to lead generation. They are able to be more proactive and involved in the shopping process with their potential customers and really demonstrate their level of knowledge and service.
Storytelling isn’t Dying – It’s Changing
It’s a common sentiment that the arts of storytelling and conversation are on their last legs. With the overwhelming adoption of data-driven insights, many believe that humans are less inclined to be interested in spinning a yarn and more interested in the cold, hard facts of data. But that’s not the case for marketers, a profession with storytelling as its backbone. Marketers today need to understand how to utilize that irrefutable data as a foundation for defining the company’s brand, objectives and goals.
Markets are Adopting a Shiny, New Approach to CX
MarTech comes to the rescue once again, this time for the customer experience. Customers are more knowledgeable than ever, so executing phenomenal CX is not a plus – it’s a must. There’s no excuse for marketers and sales professionals to not understand the customer, their pain points and how their solution is addressing them, at least not with the technologies available to us today. So leverage that technology to create a customer experience with which today’s enlightened customer would be delighted to be involved.
Looking all these marketing event takeaways, it’s safe to say this week was action-packed for marketers. These new tactics and approaches shared at marketing shows like these are what shape the marketers of tomorrow and adopting intuitive strategies and technologies will surely pave the way for success.
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