Steven Woods, co-founder and CTO of Eloqua, leads the company’s product strategy and technology vision while working with hundreds of today’s leading marketers. Mr. Woods has gained a reputation as a leading thinker on the transition of marketing as a discipline. Most recently, he was named to Inside CRM’s “Top 25 CRM Influencers of 2007.”
In the first decade of major commercial adoption of the Internet, marketers quickly seized upon the new media types it provided, such as email, banner ads, search placements, and now the broad variety of new media options that have appeared in recent years. Marketers, however, adopted these media types in very much the same way that television, radio, and print media had been used in prior decades.
Today, progressive marketers are realizing that these new media types can provide a greater depth of information on prospects’ interest areas and objections — a service that is often more valuable than the marketing communication itself. A desire to better communicate with prospects based on an understanding of their true interests is driving a shift toward coordinating all communications into a common technology platform. Using that common platform to provide deep insight into prospect interests, will drive innovation within marketing for the next decade.
As information required by prospects is increasingly found online, the nuances of what someone looked at, what caught someone’s eye, and what someone reacted negatively to become as important to a marketer as the nuances of body language are to the salesperson communicating face-to-face with a prospect. For marketers to succeed in today’s world, they need to become proficient at reading this “digital body language.”
The value of tracking a prospect’s behavior is directly related to the number of marketing touchpoints that can be aggregated: Web, email, direct mail, search, downloads, webinars and whitepapers all tell a piece of the story. Together, they provide direct, actionable insight into the prospect’s propensity to buy. To repeatably and reliably provide this type of insight, marketers need an infrastructure that relieves them from the technical details of both launching campaigns across multiple media and tracking the results of a individual components through to a web site. Without today’s infrastructure, marketing won’t be able to innovate at the level of today’s expectations.
With this infrastructure in place, new campaigns that coordinate messages, promotions and communication across media types, in real time, based on a prospect’s actual interest area are possible. When a prospective condominium buyer spends time looking at two bedroom units with a lake view, a direct mail offer might be sent highlighting one such unit. When a qualified prospective buyer of network equipment spends significant time digging into technical specifications of a new router, they might be invited to a detailed technical webinar with the lead engineers of that router.
As marketers explore the prospect insights that the new marketing infrastructure provides, while leveraging the time that is freed up by having a platform that takes care of the mundane details of campaign execution, such innovations will accelerate. We will see the media types that the Internet created — and many media types that existed prior to the Internet — used in novel ways for innovative campaigns that could never have been considered before.
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