In 2022, #TeamBrightGen attended marketing events to develop our own knowledge – and to understand how we can better serve our customers with MarTech. We now live in a world where people don’t want to be sold to unless what you’re selling is relevant to them at that time. Marketing also works hand in hand with customer success. Companies need to provide their customers with a seamless experience, while reducing costs ahead of a great recession. We summarised some tips we gathered from the events we attended in this blog post.
Future of CRM
CRM is not just about personalisation – it is about relevance.
Dave Robinson, Virgin Red
At Technology for Marketing (TfM), Marek Borowik of Formula 1 taught us about the complexities of the audiences they need to reach. The distinct levels of fandom require diverse types of engagement at specific times. For example, some will pay for a grandstand ticket worth £10,000 – while others just keep up with races on TV.
Borowik described a recent campaign, where a Formula 1 driver would call a fan to wake them when a race is on in a different time zone. They achieved this by deeply understanding their fan base and carefully segmenting their audience using Salesforce.
Dave Robinson of Virgin Red talked about his experience at his prior employer, Boots. The same customer might have a completely different need depending on the time or day they were buying. For example, medicine on a Monday, lipstick on a Saturday. CRM is not just about personalisation – it is about relevance.
Marketing beyond age, gender & demographics
Ricardas Montvila gave a great presentation at TfM about how we understand our customers. The most obvious ways we segment our audiences in marketing tend to be around location, age, and gender. However, Montvila went on to explain that this builds a false depiction of who our customers are.
Marketing based on averages creates average results.
Ricardas Montvila, Mapp Digital
So, what else should you segment on? The most obvious next step would be behaviours. This will really enhance your understanding of your customers. In a recent Salesforce Partner Learning Camp training session, we learned that this is how Salesforce primarily segments its customers. Montvila also selected values as an important grouping: find out what you have in common with your customers, and then communicate that.
The nine immutable laws of brand voice
Brand was a topic frequently raised at all the events we attended this year. At BrightonSEO (where you can access recordings for free) Bethany Joy described the concept of “brand voice.” Too often, brands use values to describe their brand voice – but this is wrong!
- Values tell you how you should act
- Personality tells you how you should sound
Joy stressed that when considering your brand voice, you need to think about how your company sounds, not acts. Her bonus tip on on how to describe your personality gave us some food for thought: “If the word you are thinking of is one that no one would want to be the opposite of, do not use it to describe your brand voice.”
She gave examples such as “professional” and “high quality” – no one would say that they are not those things. As an alternative, think of traits that are simply different between brands, but neither good nor bad. “Relentlessly curious; casually elegant!”
Digital Engagement: The data engine of successful sales strategies
Many of us will know ON24 as an advanced online events platform – or a digital engagement platform. They offered an insightful presentation at AntiConLX Global about how to maximise the value of online events. They started out by describing the shifts in the market affecting sales:
- There are 27 touchpoints in every buyer’s journey (up from 17 in 2019)
- There has been a 43% increase in number of stakeholders
- 80% of customers said they were more likely to buy from companies that offered personalised marketing experiences
Webinars are a reliable way to generate leads. But how do they help with the three shifts in the market referenced above?
The webinar itself is the easiest part of the whole process.
ON24
ON24 gave their top tips for the work you need to do surrounding an online event, which will help to improve the customer journey and personalise the experience:
- Sales resources are finite: Sales only needs to see meaningful engagement data, so only collect what you need
- Drive personalisation after the event as you gather more information
- Listen to first-party signals at all stages (before, during & after)
They also reminded us of the fact that there is no need for huge projects! Build small journeys that have value: a “Minimal Valuable Campaign.” That is how Marketing can keep up with changing customer demands while keeping costs low.
Notes from a MarTech expert
Finally, our very own MarTech expert, Saniul Ali, gave his thoughts on AntiConLX Global:
Across my (excellent) day of learning at AntiConLX, I took note of the sessions I saw and broke them down into high-level topic categories:
- 40%: Customer Data Platform (CDP)
- 35%: Personalisation and digital moments/insights/real-time experimentation with AI/ML
- 10%: Privacy and consent of data usage for end users, access/visibility compliance
- 8%: Predictive analytics with AI
- 5%: Playable marketing across customer lifecycle
- 2%: Change management
I thought it was interesting that everyone was more excited about the shiny tools and technology, but less about the people side. Change management needs to be the key for any MarTech to be adopted and, therefore, successful.
Another key takeaway for me was the growth in importance of privacy with AI. Organisations need to capture, store and honour customer data in the right ways.
With great AI comes great responsibility.
Saniul Ali, BrightGen MarTech Consultant
And here’s my hot take! Gen Z has finally made it to adulthood and (especially B2C) companies are scrambling to earn their attention and money. I believe that in 2-3 years’ time, with Gen Z’s infamous short attention span and love of gaming, playable marketing will be the most talked about topic at the event. Personalisation will include gamification and playable marketing will be key to engagement branding.
At the moment people are looking at playable marketing at a very basic level. They’re mostly using iframes but integration hasn’t been as thoroughly explored. A top topic will be how to integrate across the funnel across different teams outside of marketing, such as customer success and sales.
That’s all, folks! We hope you’ve enjoyed our free tips from last year’s learning events. We’ll be back in 2023 with more insights from the learning events we attend. Thanks to Technology for Marketing, BrightonSEO and AntiConLX for making 2022 so much more interesting for us marketing geeks.
If you’re a fellow marketing geek and you know a thing or two about Salesforce Marketing solutions, contact us about a career at BrightGen!