The Marketing Mind

Making the digital transformation means evaluating all parts of your business to see where digital tools and strategy can have an impact. One increasingly important piece to this puzzle is marketing.

Historically, most brokerages have used marketing primarily as a communications and public relations channel. The marketing folks were tasked with overseeing the website, creating press releases and presentation decks, and managing the promotions around community and charitable events. But that tide has shifted. In recent years, firms have invested in marketing efforts as they have begun to discover the impact it has on prospecting, member retention and renewals.

A 2015 study by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit predicted that in three to five years marketing will increasingly be viewed less as a cost center and more as a valuable revenue source. To drive revenue, marketing will draw insights from data by using marketing automation tools. 

Marketing automation has two distinct components. First, it’s about better managing the process, employing a technology-based platform to plan, streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows. This creates workflow efficiencies and integrates marketing efforts across different distribution channels, such as email, Web, social and mobile.

But marketing automation goes beyond just the process. Its second component gives businesses the ability to track clients’ and prospects’ interests and behaviors—what they are reading, what communications they are opening and how often they are engaged. Businesses can leverage these insights in a number of ways using the system. For example, the platform can be set up to recognize when clients haven’t opened an email and send a follow-up to those clients in a certain number of days. The platform could even be programmed to optimize the send time so the email arrives when those particular clients are most likely to open it.

The data collected also help marketers create more targeted, personalized messages and deliver more specific content to a narrower audience, enhancing their value with prospects and clients. 

A key benefit of marketing automation is the ability to better gauge the impact of marketing campaigns. While most agencies have websites, many are not effectively tracking who visits, where they spend their time, where they go when they leave (a competitor’s site?) and, especially important, how they got there in the first place. (For example, did they enter your site via a marketing outreach campaign?) For brokerages, this is the true value proposition.

Marketing is a precursor to selling. When your marketing efforts amount to “fire and forget” or “spray and pray,” you can’t expect great results. Simply put, marketing automation enables you to improve your process, provide intelligence that feeds more targeted communications and track insightful metrics that allow you to refine your approach.

In this way, marketing automation becomes an integral part not only of the marketing process but of decisions about what to market and to whom. By making more targeted decisions, organizations can become more efficient and grow revenue faster.

“Gleaning the real effectiveness of marketing automation requires a solid balance between strategic thinking and tactical initiatives,” says Susan Rushford, senior vice president of marketing and communications at The Council. “It connects multiple touchpoints across all marketing channels incorporating both push and pull tactics.

Prospects can be attracted through lead-generation tactics and continually nurtured with customized communications, and then ranked to assess where they are in the buyer life cycle. Personalized outreach and custom content feed your existing clients with the essential intelligence and information while simultaneously elevating your firm’s brand and enhancing your value.”

The Process

Sure, it sounds great. But how do you get there? It starts with the marketing team and, in particular, a leader who has not just a strong strategic and creative background but who can also layer in the science of analytics and understand how technology can accelerate revenue opportunities. The marketing leader might not be building the IT architecture and integrating software, but this person does need to be a translator of sorts, combining data and analytic literacy with the language of business strategy. This person must also know the audience and what questions to ask of the data.

With a leader in place, the marketing team can begin researching its options. There are many out there—Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, Marketo, Silverpop and Infusionsoft are just a few. Outlining your strategy is key to wading through them. You need to know how you plan to use the tool to determine what is cost-effective and what features will have the greatest impact. You might want to automate your digital communications to create workflow efficiencies. You might want to generate more leads. These platforms can be robust, so Rushford cautions to start slow. “You don’t need to use the full suite of tool features right out of the gate,” she says. “Like any new resource, it’s good to test one or two strategies—measure and refine them—versus deploying a multitude of programs at once.”

Once you think you know what you want, it’s time to test its integration with existing IT systems, such as your CRM system. Bring in the CIO and IT department to test the capabilities in this area. You will also need organizational buy-in, and this is a good place to start. Alignment with IT will help you build your case.

Successful digital transformation relies on collaboration. The marketing team will need to work closely with IT, sales operations and digital strategists, among others, to make this work. It’s about sharing and tracking information across a multitude of platforms efficiently and understanding the needs and goals of each team to best apply that information across the organization. Ultimately, it will be necessary to obtain buy-in from leadership and these key stakeholders.

Assuming you’ve gained buy-in and purchased your tool, the next step is training and cross-training. “Make sure you really learn the ins and outs of your platform before you dive right in,” Rushford says. “And cross-training fosters broader engagement with the tool. Not to mention the fact you don’t want to be dependent on just one individual.”

As implementation rolls along, it’s important to keep your clients and your content top of mind. Are you sending out insightful information that will capture their attention? Is it something they aren’t getting elsewhere? Will it help them improve their business? All of this is part of an integrated strategic effort that engages the client.

And finally, don’t forget to refine. “Refining your strategy is essential to using these tools effectively,” Rushford says. “Glean benchmarks to help guide your decisions as you refine. The digital world is always changing, and you need to continually evolve to meet your customers’ needs.”

The Data Angle

Marketing automation is both a source and a consumer of large sets of data. “Properly executed digital marketing can give an agency an incredible edge in new business development and create stronger customer engagement for retention,” says Christopher Gagnon, The Council’s CIO. “But the biggest gains only happen when your marketing automation is fully integrated with an overall data analytics strategy.”

Look under the hood of a marketing automation platform and you’ll see the magic that fuels the machine is data. Tracking who opened an email and where it went from there requires the creation and analysis of data. While most agencies generally rely on software systems to prompt them for data collection, Gagnon believes this approach is shortsighted.

“We can no longer assume software developers know all the right questions we should be asking.” Gagnon says. “The best approach for an agency is to spend some time thinking about everything we want to know about our customers; it’s far more than just an address, a vehicle list and an expiration date. To date, our industry hasn’t thought much about master data management and data governance, but these concepts will enter our common lexicon like a lion. Without them, we’ll become irrelevant before we know it.”

Interpreting data and then translating it to thoughtful marketing initiatives is what ultimately separates good programs from stellar ones. But it’s more than just a numbers game. Numbers can take you down a path that might not be the most effective.

“You need to use your marketer mind to look beyond the obvious,” Rushford says. “Sometimes a deeper look into the metrics can shed light on your future game plan.” Automation and intelligence complement but certainly don’t replace the intuitive insights and nuances that come from understanding your clients.

Today’s marketing is about the client experience. How are your clients deriving value? How easy is it for them to access the information they need? Is it timely, relevant and digestible? Are you helping them be smarter, be more efficient and be forward thinkers?

Digitization has changed consumerism. The standards for speed and ease of transaction have soared. You have to bring people something useful and do it efficiently. Marketing automation helps you do that, and it’s helping shape a new role for the marketing team.