Faster than you can say “data driven marketer” the world of B2B marketing is changing. This week at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience (#ModernCX), marketers are exploring the shift in customer relationships and how they can keep up with the changes. Today’s customer is enlightened and empowered to define his or her interactions with your organization. They often want a seamless, personalized interaction and marketers need the right tools in their arsenal to connect with enlightened buyers.

Gone are the days of purely pushing content via your company blog, twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  Its simply too noisy with every other company shouting at their customers, “look at me!” Content is still key, but it needs to understand the customer and speak directly to them. Hence the rise of the data-driven marketer.  Armed with technology, tools, automation, these marketers are striving to develop a strategy to target the right customers. But even as this wave of new marketers rise,  the true leaders that will emerge are the marketers that understand that its not about the data or the technology alone — its about leveraging the data to create a customer’s experience that has a human touch and connection.

A true marketing leader will leverage the data and the technology provided to them and not just create a content push strategy with social sharing elements, but will instead study the customer and develop an intimate interaction.

This level of intimacy and #customerobsession will drive marketing leaders towards creating authentic communities, not groups.  It enables marketers to foster collaboration, not simply sharing. That is the real power of the technology and tools available today. The data empowers the marketer to make real-time decisions on how to draw their customer into a meaningful interaction in a noisy marketplace. That’s where the true return on investment is seen.

Here are a few steps to consider for data-driven marketers that are looking to become marketing leaders:

1. Start with the customer and work backwards. Do you know what your customer’s need? What are their pain points?
2. Leverage technology and tools that can capture data and share data in a simplified manner that is easy to use right now.
3. Don’t just speak to your customers, engage them in conversation after understanding their needs and collaborate to define a solution.
4. Facilitate a community for your customers to engage with each other, educate themselves, and collaborate.
5. Measure effectiveness not only by numbers but by customer trust, engagement, and loyalty.

The key take-away from Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience? A better customer experience leads to revenue growth. In order to keep up with the customer revolution in a very noisy marketplace, every marketing campaign needs to dramatically shift to become customer-led, data-driven, connected, and timely.