The value proposition of Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation: The Secret Sauce to Marketing-Driven Sales Growth and Empowerment

A Cross-Industry Analysis

frost.com

contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3

Marketing Today: Coming to Terms with a New World Reality ................................................ 3

Unstructured and Low-Quality Data ......................................................................................... 3

Siloed Marketing and Sales Organizations ............................................................................... 4

Overhead Costs Hemorrhaging the Bottom Line ..................................................................... 4

Prolonged Sales Cycle ................................................................................................................. 4

Marketing 2.0: A Necessary Reboot for an Aging Model .......................................................... 5

Marketing Automation to the Rescue ......................................................................................... 7

Healthcare ................................................................................................................................... 7

Insurance and Financial Services ............................................................................................... 7

Manufacturing ............................................................................................................................. 8

Eloqua: A Solution Brief ............................................................................................................... 8

The Bottom Line ........................................................................................................................... 9

3


IntroductIon

Technology has toppled barriers to the global marketplace and geographic boundaries are no longer an obstacle to identify and reach sales prospects. Increasing global access to the Internet; proliferation of social media networks; and the widespread use of smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles offer customers new ways to collect information and make purchases. In addition, they provide companies large and small with new and exciting channels to market their products and services.

Yet the benefits of technology present a globalizing company with marketing challenges and process pitfalls. Though marketers today have access to a lot of data, for the most part they are challenged to understand what part of that data is actually meaningful. Data on its own is just bits and bytes of zeros and ones. Understanding behaviors that influence the customer decision-making process while leveraging real-time data empowers marketers to find and monetize opportunities. Analytics makes data come to life and unlocks its potential. It enables marketers to overcome the complexity of their data and find valuable insights. It is the “secret sauce” that when done well, makes marketing a hero and wins you a seat at the revenue table.

Additionally, marketers must be prepared to address increased workflow complexity and campaign management across multiple borders, leveraging multiple different channels (out-bound and in-bound, online and off-line) and using social media platforms effectively. With so many tools available to marketers today, deciding what would be the best fit is a daunting task.

The role of the marketer is changing rapidly, and digital marketers today have doubled up as data scientists and technocrats as well. With marketing budgets constantly under pressure, marketers are held more accountable than ever before to show tangible growth. The ability to identify potential sales engagements, embrace behavior-based nurturing of prospects, and measure messaging effectiveness and customer conversion are critical factors for marketing and business success.

This white paper is the first of a series exploring the diverse capabilities that Marketing Automation Solutions (MAS) bring to companies worldwide to meet established growth objectives and improve sales efficacy.

This paper will show how marketing automation helps drive trigger-based marketing across different verticals and enhances the value proposition of complementary solutions such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

MarketIng today: coMIng to terMs wIth a new world realIty

The business world today moves at the speed of the Internet and many companies have deployed myriad point solutions in marketing and sales to address operational and market demands that fuel business growth. Solutions like CRM, ECM, Marketing Process Optimization, and other digital marketing tools have significantly helped companies, but they’ve also opened a Pandora’s box of new challenges that, when left un-tackled, lead to marketing and sales inefficiencies.

Frost & Sullivan has surveyed marketers across several verticals to understand the challenges they face. The next part of this paper summarizes some of the key challenges plaguing marketing organizations today:

Unstructured and Low-Quality Data

In a typical organization, most marketers are forced to work with siloed systems such as the company’s social media outreach programs or event marketing programs. They have unorganized data sets with outdated content in their systems. Social media, especially, generates massive amounts of data, but marketers have no

4

frost.com

way of leveraging the insights that can be gleaned from that rich data. Though social media is part of their marketing campaign strategy, they typically do not have access to tools that would stitch their disparate systems together and automatically integrate the technology platforms for centralized access to real-time information. The prevalence of basic analytics in most organizations today also gives a false sense of security where marketers believe that they have their bases covered.

Although marketers believe they have the right tools to engage the customer community, there is no accountability. Many times there is no tangible measurement of performance or a way to find the really valuable prospects that are worth pursuing. Critical marketing processes such as content marketing, campaign building, drip campaign management, and measuring campaign results are spread across different employees and loosely tied together with sporadic communication. The end result is frequently a busy and unusable data set that defeats the purpose of behavioral marketing. The unstructured and noisy set of data is a classic problem that gives rise to ineffective messaging in marketing campaigns.

Siloed Marketing and Sales Organizations

Frost & Sullivan research further revealed that for most organizations, sales and marketing are rarely in sync with each other. Organizations are most efficient closing an engagement when the sales organization has prospects that have been vetted and there is tangible information about the prospect’s interest. In contrast, marketing campaigns are more focused on getting the maximum possible leads regardless of quality, rather than identifying qualified engagements worth pursuing. This causes the sales team to spend valuable time separating the chaff from potential high-value engagements instead of working together with marketing from the very start. It distracts them from focusing their efforts on high-quality prospects.

Overhead Costs Hemorrhaging the Bottom Line

Another challenging area for marketers is when employees work in isolation on intensive manual tasks. These tasks range from building landing pages to creating, developing, and launching campaigns that could include off-line mailers. Add to this the resources for everyday marketing activities such as maintaining existing marketing programs, customer segmentation, acquisition, reporting, email creation, updating content, qualifying leads, among various other activities, and marketing costs can quickly spiral out of control.

All of these activities are critical; however, marketers have struggled with efficiency and have overextended themselves trying to make these processes manageable. This has made it difficult to measure the return on investment for marketing campaigns as costs are spread across many different touch points. The result is that companies are rethinking their marketing investments and are jeopardizing the efficacy of their sales organization.

Prolonged Sales Cycle

A challenge echoed by marketers is the lack of integration of their digital marketing tools with other solutions critical for business success. In an ideal scenario, prospect engagement information, sourced through print-based PURLs, social media campaigns, contact center interaction, and all other out-bound and in-bound online activity, should be automatically ingested into sales tools like CRM systems that account executives access daily. What actually occurs, however, is that sales executives have little or no visibility into marketing campaign data. This seriously hampers effective conversations with potential clients and prolongs sales cycles.

In the world of digital marketing and eCommerce, milliseconds count. The time that it takes for a visitor to find a site, to form an opinion of whether or not it meets their expectations, and then to commit to or bounce off the site can be quick. As companies invest more in online channels, search engine marketing, social media and mobile marketing, and programs that can validate their efforts, such connections can be lost in the blink of an eye.

5


When the success or failure of customer engagement moves so rapidly, old marketing rules no longer apply. The ability to track visitors on a company’s Web property and create profiles for unknown visitors based on how they interact with the website—and engage them at the peak of their interest—shortens sales cycles and increases the probability of success. Unfortunately, a lack of internal communication and integration with marketing systems can inhibit potential sales.

As companies try to proactively engage with customers, their ability to reinforce brand equity, create a competitive edge with growth potential and, in some cases, their ability to survive is at stake. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel as Marketing Automation provides a solution that overcomes all of the aforementioned challenges.

MarketIng 2.0: a necessary reboot for an agIng Model

The role of marketing is being redefined in the 21st century. Companies expect accountability from marketing organizations and need marketing to be a flagship department that builds brand awareness and leads the way to sales success. Today’s marketer needs to empower the sales organization by running marketing campaigns that develop high-quality engagements that also have a high probability of conversion. All marketing activities should produce quantifiable business opportunities in an efficient manner that stays within budgetary restraints; this is where marketing automation helps.

Marketing Automation Software (MAS) automates marketing and sales activities to drive revenue growth and empower organizations to make data-driven decisions. MAS solutions have emerged to align with the evolving customer engagement lifecycle. A customer engagement lifecycle is viewed as an ecosystem that comprises of generating interactive content to create awareness of a company’s offerings in order to engage, nurture, acquire, and build relationships with customers, eventually enabling them to become advocates and/or influencers of a brand.

MARKETINGAUTOMATION

SOFTWARE

CONTENT MARKETING ENABLEMENTBEHAVIO

R-B

ASE

D

NURTU

RIN

G

SALES

EN

AB

LEM

ENTDATA DRIVEN M

ARKETING

ANALYTICS AND MEASU

REMEN

T

Source: Frost & Sullivan

A Frost & Sullivan survey of marketers provided insight on experiences after deploying Marketing Automation Solutions in their organizations. The survey revealed a dramatic difference in marketing operations by using these solutions.

6

frost.com

Before the introduction of MAS, marketers did not have metrics to measure efficacy of marketing campaigns; today they report the ability to measure not just click-through rates, website visits and brand impressions, but also customer conversion rates and detailed customer behaviors. Importantly, campaigns can be improvised on the go based on the quality of interaction with prospects that drives the overall success of campaigns, with minimal growth in expenses and overhead.

Having suffered marketing process fragmentation and silos, marketers reported they can now organize everything in one place—marketing content, previous campaigns, all of the collected metrics, quality leads, customer profiles, customer conversions—which makes them more productive and efficient.

Marketers have also used MAS to control their cost structure. Everyday activities such as customer segmentation, marketing campaign process flow, campaign statistics, content marketing, and trigger or behavior-based nurturing can be automated. This allows marketers to focus on result-oriented tasks that show tangible ROI on campaigns with metrics that include number of engagements generated and converted, number of new site visitors, interaction with prospects and automating outgoing messages. This has made manual intervention an exception rather than the rule.

With Marketing Automation, companies can leverage data that helps them maintain information of prospects with important historical data. Because of this, marketers can now identify key interests and send relevant content to generate demand for products and services, while also nurturing relationships. This provides an advantage over competitors who do not have granular information about their customer base.

For example, today marketers can use MAS to create profiles of visitors based on triggers such as downloading content, website interaction, PURL activation or an interaction through social media, as these triggers can now be monitored and reported and used to convert unknown visitors to “knowns” at the peak of their interest. Subsequently, marketers are alerted at an opportune time to engage with prospects and help them with their purchase or inquiry.

A sales organization’s typical frustration stemming from a lack of customer information via marketing campaigns evaporates as companies deploying Marketing Automation integrate it with their existing CRM systems. It now gives them the ability to leverage big data and analytics for their sales cycle. This allows marketers to extract intelligence and empowers them to effectively triangulate the imperfect nature of various data streams, such as print-based PURLs, social media, online and offline channel interactivity, among others. Using the power of analytics to mine for the most relevant data, marketers can successfully nurture customer relationships. With MAS integration, sales executives have access to historical information on each engagement through a single dashboard, which enables relevant and timely communication with the customer necessary to accelerate sales cycles.

Metrics such as number of engagements generated, trigger or behavior-based customer qualification, and number of opportunities created help monitor productivity and performance of sales and marketing teams to create accountability that can be measured.

The increasing amount of customer data gathered through multi-channel marketing has compelled marketers to do a better job organizing these disparate pieces. Marketing Automation has become the preferred platform, as it allows data management and viewing of individual customer information in a centralized location.

Marketing Automation allows marketing and sales teams to coordinate effectively and streamlines communications. Now marketing and sales can work together toward common goals and complement each other to achieve business success based on well-defined metrics.

7


MarketIng autoMatIon to the rescue

The benefits of a Marketing Automation solution are relevant for any industry or market vertical. As an example of how Marketing Automation vendors are empowering marketers globally, let us see how Eloqua (now part of the Oracle family) brings to bear its value proposition to marketing organizations within several specific industries.

These are just a few examples of how different verticals, many of whom share similar characteristics in their marketing channels, have benefited from Marketing Automation. As a part of Frost & Sullivan’s coverage of the Marketing Automation market, we have a follow-up series of papers that go into vertical-specific use-cases and will discuss, in detail and using real-life case studies, how Marketing Automation was able to make a tremendous impact on business performance and sales growth for companies within diverse industries.

Healthcare

As competition continues to intensify across the healthcare ecosystem, companies across the value chain have struggled to understand how best to market to their respective constituents. For example, a healthcare provider depends on its insured patient pool to provide the revenues to stay in business and provide services. As the market has become more competitive, other healthcare providers within the same area are trying to attract the same pool of patients, putting a strain on the revenue model for all.

All things even, healthcare providers then have to find a way to differentiate themselves from competition and develop a brand—something few have had the need to even consider doing in the past. Add to this the intangibles that have a severe impact on a provider’s bottom line, such as the cost of ER visits. Factors such as this have not been top-of-mind for the provider community’s marketing department, which is now increasingly being put under microscope and being held more accountable. In today’s world it is the marketing department that can be of the greatest benefit to the organization to not only help create brand awareness and differentiation, but also ease the pressure of the bottom line and become a profit center instead of an organizational burden.

Marketing automation software such as Eloqua can help healthcare and pharmaceutical companies reduce compliance costs, collateral generation and maintenance overhead, while increasing sales conversions.

Insurance and Financial Services

The case of Zurich NA, an insurance company, is an example of how MAS helps within the financial services market. The company’s specific challenge was the many hours being spent on manually tracking spreadsheets related to broker events. The company automated this process using a combination of Eloqua’s Engage, Profiler and Analyzer products. Salesforce and Eloqua were integrated, allowing industry-specific campaign execution.

Further, event management tasks were significantly simplified to an easy three-step process: set up a dashboard report, pull the results, and pass these on to the company’s business partners. In addition to the time and cost-savings Zurich NA realized from a single integrated platform, the company also benefited from up to 10% higher renewal rates.

8

frost.com

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry can also reap tremendous benefits, as is illustrated through the deployment of Eloqua at Balluff GmbH. The company was challenged by sales and marketing teams that were not communicating effectively with each other. The result was that sales had to make do with very little insight into customer and lead activity from the company website. The company also suffered from the inability to effectively tackle these challenges due to a lack of experience with Marketing Automation.

By leveraging Eloqua’s Lead Management along with Eloqua forms, hypersites, landing pages and reporting, Balluff has improved the alignment between its marketing and sales teams. Furthermore, by leveraging Digital Body Language, which provides crucial insight into visitor activity, Balluff can tailor content to customer and visitor interest, thus boosting sales and customer loyalty, while making sales and marketing work together toward a common goal of company growth.

eloqua: a solutIon brIef

Eloqua offers advanced campaign execution, email marketing, social media marketing, and behavioral marketing capabilities for B2B and B2C organizations. All repeatable tasks are automated, while users focus on measuring the impact of their campaigns. With numerous email templates in their repository, Eloqua offers multiple ways to communicate with customers. Trigger-based nurturing capabilities ensure that the customers stay engaged, while customer segmentation features facilitates personalized customer engagement.

While the software captures and tracks relevant data, users can study individual profiles, inbound referrals, and information about their prospects’ behaviors. Lead scoring identifies strong leads that can be assigned to sales people at the right time.

Eloqua also provides a comprehensive set of applications and services to complement their marketing automation platform. These applications save time and eliminate all the heavy lifting that goes into content and data management activities. The Oracle Eloqua AppCloud consists of more than 80 in-house and third-party applications such as channel management systems, content management systems, social landing page tools, and webinar and event marketing tools that help their end user centralize all the data in one place. The AppCloud unlocks the real potential of marketers by helping them be more efficient at their daily tasks and focus on driving revenue for their company.

Eloqua’s Social Suite features a social sign-on feature that prompts customers to login to their Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts. This way, the platform collects email addresses and ties in the customers’ social identities to their existing profile information. The platform builds awareness on social media, engages customers and tracks the impact of the company’s social media on its marketing campaigns through inbound referrals and Web analytics.

Further, as part of the Oracle family, Eloqua has the added capability to tap into larger enterprise IT ecosystems and bring Oracle’s deep vertical expertise to the table.

9


the bottoM lIne

Today, the success or failure of a marketing campaign is measured at the level of individual consumers, experiences, engagement, and engagement conversions. For too long marketers have been bogged down with siloed tasks that prevent the generation of effective, actionable data-sharing with sales executives. Siloed tasks can now be automated and made more intelligent, and connected in a way that springboards companies to improved sales.

Companies like Eloqua have forged ahead to put marketers on a path leading to business growth as their role is redefined in the today’s global business environment. The benefits that Marketing Automation brings to organizations are well-documented and are business-critical for proactive organizations that are serious about breaking down the walls between sales and marketing departments, while focusing on becoming more personalized and targeted with their digital marketing strategy. In doing so, companies are positioned for success in transforming customer dialogues to relationships that can be nurtured.

The follow-up series of papers takes a deeper dive into the unique way Marketing Automation provides very tangible benefits to diverse markets such as healthcare, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications.

For information regarding permission, write:Frost & Sullivan331 E. Evelyn Ave. Suite 100Mountain View, CA 94041

Silicon Valley331 E. Evelyn Ave. Suite 100Mountain View, CA 94041Tel 650.475.4500Fax 650.475.1570

San Antonio7550 West Interstate 10, Suite 400,San Antonio, Texas 78229Tel 210.348.1000 Fax 210.348.1003

London4 Grosvenor GardensLondon SW1W 0DHTel +44 (0)20 7343 8383Fax +44 (0)20 7730 3343

[email protected]

AucklandBahrainBangkokBeijingBengaluru Buenos AiresCape Town Chennai ColomboDelhi/NCR Detroit

DubaiFrankfurt Iskander Malaysia/Johor BahruIstanbul JakartaKolkata Kuala LumpurLondonManhattanMiamiMilan

MumbaiMoscowOxfordParisPuneRockville CentreSan AntonioSão PauloSarasota SeoulShanghai

Shenzhen Silicon ValleySingaporeSophia Antipolis Sydney TaipeiTel Aviv TokyoToronto WarsawWashington, DC

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that

addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today’s market participants. For more than

50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the Global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment

community. Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing

competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies?