[Note: This is Part 3 of a 5-part post. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. We will have a new post up each week! Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]
The Exploration So Far – A Quick Recap
As we work with marketers at mid-to-large enterprises, Kwanzoo sees five key themes for 2012. First, marketers are looking for ways to maximize the value of their Revenue Performance Management (RPM) investment. Second, marketing teams are seeking new approaches to boosting productivity of their staff and resources by re-thinking traditional campaign design, and re-using campaign components across channels. We noted new opportunities to enable rapid multichannel campaign execution and accelerate the sales funnel. We see significant interest in delivering interactive user experiences that are more targeted by tapping into intelligence inside RPM systems – applying Account-based Targeting (or Relationship Targeting) techniques.
It’s Time to Go Social, Go Cloud
The third key theme we see for 2012 centers around:
- leveraging the power of social platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+) to drive more demand for a company’s products and services
- tapping into SaaS and Cloud-based technology solutions to “just do it”, and execute marketing programs with no I.T. support needed
We have all seen the recent proliferation of “social share” icons everywhere, from your email newsletters, to blog posts, e-books, webinar registration pages and more. But are they effective? As marketers and users understand the benefits of sharing, there is opportunity to make the social sharing process easier, more natural, more seamless. Marketers can enable sharing in much more flexible ways so that it is weaved into the interactive experiences they provide to their prospects and customers.
Social sharing options are best presented to users in the natural flow of their consuming a content offer, or interacting in an online conversation with the brand. Whether it’s answering a poll or survey, watching a video, flipping through slides, reviewing customer testimonials, browsing an e-book, social sharing must be available when the prospect or customer is momentarily immersed, and “bought into” the brand’s value and is most willing to recommend the brand to her circle of friends and business colleagues.
With this in mind, we are thinking about ways to continuously expand our portfolio of rich media marketing units, that provide flexible social sharing flows integrated seamlessly into engaging, interactive, content experiences delivered everywhere.
The Power of Incentives
As we executed several social marketing campaigns this past year, a key learning for us has been the power of incentives to drive social sharing. In specific instances, we have seen social sharing jump from less than 1 percent to over 33 percent, resulting in 1 in 3 users who get to a social sharing screen, actually completing the sharing action, simply due to their desire to receive their sharing incentive.
B2B marketers have many different incentives they can work with. For prospects, an exclusive research report from a leading analyst firm, can drive social sharing, followed by a webinar registration, at which point the user receives the report. Of course the sharing message must be as simple as “I am planning to attend this webinar….” and not an explicit endorsement of the brand, which would be an overreach. Other incentives to try are raffles to exclusive executive retreats, a round of golf with the GM of the division or CEO, invitations to a wine-and-cheese reception at the annual conference, etc.
The Power of Real Identity
B2B businesses today are yet to tap into the power of real identity that’s now available via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. All of these platforms provide API access to a business user’s key data components, to external applications and websites. It is now possible to directly link information about a user on to a third party website (e.g. a thumbnail photo, Job Title or Role and Company affiliation). Public conversations between prospects, customers and a business or brand will now benefit from increased trust and authenticity. Customer testimonials are much easier to parse and calibrate, as prospects evaluate a new provider’s offerings.
Web Pages and Landing Pages Redone
We see interest in re-thinking traditional web pages and landing pages to introduce interactive, targeted, component content blocks on the page. Smart marketers are thinking about how each content block serves a clearly defined purpose to lead the prospect down a conversion path, to either share their engagement experience with peers, or opt-in for ongoing communication. Marketers now have ways to optimize each content block, so they are targeted to the incoming prospect, based on intelligence across more than one system, platform or tool.
Smart Testimonials
We will soon see Customer Testimonials on B2B websites that are more dynamic and remain current, as the testimonial provider changes roles at her company, or changes jobs and moves to a new company. Businesses can also present highly targeted and relevant customer testimonials to incoming web visitors, no matter where they interact with the brand or business. The specific testimonial presented to the prospect can now dynamically change based on the prospect’s Company or Industry affiliation, or stated or implicit preferences for specific products or services via prior interactions with the business, anywhere across the web. Combine that with the real identity of the testimonial provider, with links to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and we can deliver a much more enriching experience for users.
Granular Sharing – Still Hard To Do
It remains extremely difficult for end users to organize their circle of friends and business colleagues into lists and groups, on any of the social platforms. As that capability matures, marketers can start to think about enabling more granular social sharing by users, allowing prospects to share with specific colleagues in their social network, as opposed to the way it’s typically available today – a single post to one’s Twitter feed, Facebook feed or LinkedIn status.
From SaaS to the Cloud – Does It Matter?
The past few years have seen rapid adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms by enterprise marketers. With a SaaS approach, the entire marketing platform is developed and managed by the platform provider. With the arrival of Cloud-based infrastructure services such as Amazon AWS, it is now possible for platform providers to innovate faster, and deliver the end applications and capabilities that marketers want. There is more “off the shelf” technology capabilities available to leverage, and re-use.
The role of marketing platform providers has changed – they now need to think hard about their core competency and the value they best provide to their customers. Outsource or leverage everything else they need from Cloud-based infrastructure providers to provide a complete solution to customers. Have open APIs to integrate easily with other related platforms and tools.
We have taken this exact approach at Kwanzoo with our marketing platform development. Our commitment to customers is to constantly innovate, and deliver more (rich media) engagement marketing units, across more marketing channels, with more connectors to different enterprise systems and platforms.
Cloud – Pay for Use, Pay for Value
Cloud-based services also allow the new breed of marketing platform and service providers to disrupt more traditional enterprise software and custom solution providers, as they are easily tapped on a pay-for-use and pay-for-value model. As a consumer of Amazon AWS and related cloud-services ourselves, Kwanzoo is able to pass along the infrastructure savings we see directly to our customers. Our customers are assured of a robust, scalable, reliable, enterprise-class platform on a simple “pay-as-you-go” model. They can run trials until they have experimented with a range of engagement marketing campaign approaches, found the ones that deliver value on a consistent basis, and then sign onto a long-term arrangement for more savings.
A World Full of Mash-ups
Enterprise marketers are constantly looking for new ways to drive for higher ROI, while leveraging their existing marketing content, systems and tools. Another recent trend is cloud-enabled SaaS platforms, where each specific platform looks to be “best-in-class” in it’s core areas of competency. Marketers understand the best places as well as the value from hosting their marketing content outside their own enterprise walls. We have different sites emerging as category leaders depending on content format (videos, presentations, e-books, documents). These sites offer widespread distribution and visibility to the content, which is immensely valuable to the business or brand.
This opens up a key new opportunity for marketers today, viz: creating marketing “mash ups”. Think incorporating marketing content and formats (videos, presentations, documents, emails, social posts and feeds) inside branded, interactive experiences that marketers can create and place everywhere. Each experience serves up content from wherever it’s been natively hosted, while enabling easy social sharing, and lead capture. Think a video hosted on your company’s Slideshare channel, but presented to a prospect on a web placement, or triggered inside a partner newsletter. Users who watch the video can then easily opt-in or share with their colleagues to drive new viral visits to your branded video experience. It is now possible to completely re-think the older “banner ad click -> redirect to landing page -> capture a lead or prospect interaction” approach.
With quick, easy to use multichannel campaign creation and execution tools that are directly available to marketers, it’s now possible to rapidly make changes, and test the changes in near real-time. Simple, easy-to-understand and yet comprehensive drill-down dashboards make it possible to drive optimal ROI from each marketing campaign, with more iterations as the campaign is underway, and prospects reactto the campaign concept and creative presented to them.
As marketing platforms bring together their insights and intelligence, this will be an area of increasing opportunity, as prospect behavior and history is captured and integrated across multiple systems.
So What Are We In For in 2012?
These are just some of the areas of innovation now possible, as platform providers introduce, and marketers leverage more social capabilities and the benefits of cloud-based SaaS technologies and apply them to their marketing initiatives in 2012. We look forward to your feedback, comments and key learnings. Please drop us a note or write a comment below.
p.s. You can register and catch our Insights webinar on January 12, 10 AM PST with Eloqua CTO Steve Woods which will explore many of the topics and themes in these posts. You can also catch it recorded here after the event.
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