Wayne Lockwood: 5 Marketing Trends and How Technology is Helping Marketers Address Them

Marketers today are not shy about facing the challenges of the changing market, regardless of whether they are selling to consumers or to other businesses. And the market is changing rapidly—mobile use only continues to rise, personalization is an expectation, and the channels where people engage are constantly shifting—and marketers and marketing organizations are expected to respond at speed and with scale.

The challenge could feel insurmountable, but it’s not. Marketers are innovative, creative, and data-driven and with the right technology at their side, they can work faster and smarter, and face the challenges of changing markets and high customer expectations.

In this blog, I’ll highlight 5 marketing trends that marketers are using technology to address and succeed—many of which are covered in our latest product release.

Your Audience Is Online and They Expect More Than Generic

Each year more people gain access to the internet, and even more have multiple devices and ways they access it. For marketers, this data point only increases the pressure to ensure their web presence is optimized. As buyers do more self-education than ever before, you may not even be aware when they get their first impression of your company or product. But marketers know that not every audience member is the same, and have looked to technology to help them engage their visitors in the right way, with the right message.

That’s where web personalization and predictive content recommendations come in. Web personalization helps marketers drive conversions more effectively on their website by delivering personalized messages, images and offers to segments of your Web visitors. In our latest product release, Marketo Web Personalization took this to the next level with increased campaign triggering and display options that respond to the visitor based on new intent signals, like scrolling, or exit, and appear in new ways like animating in and out, all at the marketer’s fingertips.

Predictive content recommendations take personalization to the next level by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend the right content to each individual. Marketo Predictive Content uses behavioral information and customer profiles in the Marketo Engagement Hub, combined with AI, to assess an individual’s likelihood to consume certain content and then recommends the right piece of content. This is incredibly powerful when you think that content is now one of the primary ways organizations can deliver value to a customer or prospective customer. Marketo Predictive Content can recommend content across your web, mobile and email channels, and in multiple languages.

Mobile Continues to Gain Momentum

You’ve probably heard stats thrown around about how often someone checks their mobile device, or how many mobile devices (phone, tablet, smart watch, etc.) a person uses in a day. And all of these stats point to one fact—mobile rules the customer experience. If you are not adapting your marketing to perform on a mobile device, then you are wasting time and money.

Marketers have started to adapt their websites, blogs, and emails to cater specifically to a mobile device experience, but not everyone has adapted their digital ads. And that’s a missed opportunity—with the right technology, marketers can not only ensure their ads are precisely targeted but they can also optimize the ad conversion experience on a mobile device to drive better results. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, for example, improves the member experience and conversion rates on the Linkedin mobile app with a form that pre-populates with contact and professional details. Marketo recently released a product integration with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms that automatically syncs captured lead data to Marketo and allows marketers to instantly deliver an email follow-up, sales alert or add someone to a nurture list. As part of Marketo Ad Bridge, this complements our product integration with LinkedIn Matched Audiences for targeting and personalization.

Data is King

The amount of data available in an organization today is massive. The challenge that many marketers face is how to take that data and make it valuable, useable and glean key insights from it. While you may have a platform, like Marketo, that you use as your system of record or data foundation, there is not a single vendor that offers a complete marketing stack. With this in mind, it’s critical that marketers and organizations have the freedom and flexibility to move and manipulate their data.

We recently introduced more ways to get data in and out of Marketo more efficiently. For Marketo customers, their trove of data that’s stored in Marketo is accessible to them through Bulk API’s, which gives marketers freedom to quickly bring data in that you want to associate with the people in your database or export it—to a business intelligence tool, for example.

Account-Level Engagement Is Critical

Account-based marketing (ABM), or account-based engagement is not a new concept but with new digital technology, it has become more scalable and accessible for marketers. Marketers today are using ABM to target and engage accounts and measure the revenue impact of their activities. As a native part of the Marketo Engagement Platform, Marketo ABM marries ABM capabilities with Marketo’s powerful lead management capabilities and its complete ecosystem of services partners and integrated technology partners. A well-orchestrated ABM strategy often leverages multiple vendors and capabilities, which makes the latest update to Marketo ABM—adding Custom Fields and Account List APIs for eased data flow across your ABM tech stack—even more important.

Sales & Marketing Play as a Team

Marketing and Sales alignment is an age-old challenge that organizations face, but as organizations shift to become customer centric, marketing and sales must develop the skills to act as a well-coordinated and supportive team. A team that can offer a seamless customer experience because let’s face it, the customer does not differentiate between teams when they interact with your organization.

With that said, how can marketing and sales get in sync with the right content, messaging and playbooks to engage prospects and turn leads into pipeline and revenue? It comes down to bringing your playbooks to life instead of producing them, training and implementing your teams on them and then having them sit and gather dust. Sales engagement technology allows marketing and sales to collaborate on a living playbook—that considers the latest messaging and techniques but also can offer the analytics to know what’s working and what isn’t. With Marketo’s Sales Insight and ToutApp together, marketers and sales can operationalize their playbooks, collaborate on best practices content and drive more pipeline and revenue.

As marketers are faced with new challenges from emerging trends, innovative technology will surely be at their side to help. What trends are you addressing with technology? I’d love to hear more in the comments below. Looking for more information on Marketo’s latest product release, check out the details here.

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