Eloqua
Understanding how to deliver an end-to-end engaging experience requires a concerted effort to enhance the flow of information between dispersed sales and marketing organizations. Because the majority of B2B buying decisions are made before a sales person even gets involved, the role of marketing has changed. This evolution in buying behavior demands a radical shift in how companies are aligning marketing and sales to maxi¬mize conversion rates.
More than ever, marketers are being held accountable for demonstrating how marketing investments directly translate into sales. That’s why Modern Marketing is fueled by intelligent data analytics and reporting. Implementing the proper analytics systems can help you make critical decisions regarding which parts of your marketing efforts are working or not, and provide the reporting tools necessary to justify those decisions by connecting them directly with pipeline and revenue.
By implementing systems for reporting and intelligence, you can better understand the impact that sales and marketing efforts are having on overall business. You then can refine strategies and develop repeatable processes for success.
Modern Marketers mine conversion data to gain insights into marketing efforts; providing insight on trends, stage conversion history, and other key metrics. However, only 21% of marketers say their current tools are even capable of measuring the right things, according to the report “Defining the Modern Marketer: From Real to Ideal” by BtoB Magazine and Eloqua. Furthermore, only 26% believe the data they collect is even accurate.
Moreover, the increased pressure for marketing accountability requires a modernized approach to managing campaign effectiveness. To understand prospects in a more holistic way, marketers typically leverage firmographic analysis and the market segmentation insights it yields to identify likely buyers. Marketing automation enables marketers to summarize and enhance this wealth of behavioral data — your prospects’ Digital Body Language™ — in different ways. For example, marketers can glean an understanding of:
• Contact’s campaign history
• Program membership
• Activity and behavioral information
• Business Intelligence (BI) to streamline strategy and sales tactics
Intelligently automating marketing campaign delivery and lead scoring, as well as adding a social layer to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, helps enhance the flow of information between dispersed sales and marketing orga¬nizations. By automating your campaigns, you can improve the buyer’s experience, develop loyal relationships, and track conversion data more effectively. In addition, automated campaigns have higher conversation rates, are much more resilient for maintenance, and can feed critical information directly into existing CRM systems in real-time.
Enabling Sales To Deliver on the Promise of Relevance and Value
While many marketing initiatives are driven by buyer-centric strategies, it’s important to remember that smart Modern Marketing strategies are focused on sales enablement in addition to providing value to prospects and customers. Sales enablement — or sales readiness — is about helping your sales reps deliver the right content to the right person at the right time to cultivate a more active role in the mostly independent buying process.
To empower sales to engage with prospects and customers in a relevant, meaningful way, you must determine which campaign metrics are most important in terms of visibility, such as:
• Closed loop campaign reporting
• Campaign engagement reporting
• Web site analytics reporting
• Database health reporting (media; blog, etc.)
Integrated web analytics lets marketers track social media sites and relevant blogs that drive significant traffic to their website. Marketers can align their content sharing efforts with the social channels most likely to drive higher traffic and engagement, maximizing the impact of each campaign and boosting marketing ROI. The core data that once took hours to fuse together from various systems and spreadsheets is streamlined via mar¬keting automation dashboards to provide visibility into campaign ROI relevant to your specific business needs.
Looking for more ways to put these practices into action? Check out the modern marketing event of the year, Eloqua Experience, October 23-25 in San Francisco. The event features track sessions specific to Analysis and Conversion! Visit the event page for more details and follow the discussion on Twitter with the hashtag #EE13.
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