I have attended Integrated Marketing Summit in Atlanta this week where I moderated Social Media Best Practices Panel.
Below is the summary of the 2 keynotes at the event.
Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and the author of Digital Body Language
In the past marketers were in control. 4Ps is a very familiar framework, but based on an assumption that we as marketers can control how the product is promoted. The reality is that this assumption is no longer valid. Buyers are now in control, they can now get information in a variety of ways. And because they are not using us as source of that info, it means we are no longer in the room with them when decision is being made and that makes these buyers anonymous to us – we can’t see their reaction and whether they shrug or smile, we can’t read their body language. So we have to learn to gather data and “read” their digital body language.
So what led to this revolution? Newspaper sales are declining, this is nothing new and comes as no surprise as we now have the ability to publish a piece of content that can be read by anyone on the entire planet for $0. Facebook is looked at as a country, number of grandparents on Facebook is higher than high-schoolers (source), search engines are now a social filter on quality of info because they are adopting all social platforms.
“Our relationship with sales has fundamentally changed”, says Steve. Every sales methodology has a concept of a discovery call. We ask potential buyers a number of questions about their pain points and then offer them basic product info. Good trade, eh? ABM’s Digital Transformation Study says that 78% of decision makers are reporting a decrease in time with sales reps. How do we actually find out what our buyers’ pains are? Putting up surveys? Well, according to one of the MarketingSherpa studies, most of buyers are not being honest with their answers to our surveys. The answer is behavioral understanding and collecting data of buyers’ digital body language. What people actually do online will tell us a different story than what folks will tell you personally or on the webforms. Knowing digital body language arms you to close the deal.
Also, buyers can use a little help. There is a need for wealth of content, we need to begin acting as publishers and maintain buyer’s attention at all stages of the marketing funnel.
“The goal of lead nurturing is to get permission to stay in contact with the buyer, not to sell,” stresses Steve. If you just sell to them they will ignore it and will emotionally unsubscribe, meaning they won’t unsubscribe from your communications but they will tune them out or delete them.
The data we need is becoming freely available. And we need data as marketers. But you need to remember that “data itself is not a competitive advantage, the relationship we build on top of that data is”. Marketing is regaining a seat at a strategic table. Now that we can understand our buyers behavior objectively by watching their digital body language, we can put together two views of the world – what does our marketing funnel look like today and what does our P&L funnel look like. You can analyze everything with regards to online behavior. You can even predict revenue based on buyer’s online behaviors way in advance.
Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer of the 60 Second Marketer (BKV)
I love how Jamie opened his keynote – the 1st thing he did is tell the audience that the first person to tweet @60secondmarketer gets 2 free books. Too bad I wasn’t fast enough!
“There have been more changes in marketing in the past 10 years than there have been in the previous 100 combined,” says Jamie.
How can you leverage the new marketing landscape to your benefit? “Marketing is about getting large groups of people (with different tastes and interests) to behave in the same fashion,” says Jamie. He walks us through 4 eras in the history of business: the production era, the sales era, the marketing era, the information era and through evolution of marketing: creative, strategy, value, and now reputation. Then he shares…
8 marketing secrets you can use to grow your sales and revenue:
- People buy for emotional reasons, then rationalize their purchase with logic. You never buy Rolex because it shows accurate time!
- People lie to researchers (interesting, same thing Steve was saying), people under-report their alcohol consumption and over-report how often they have sex.
- As much as 95% of consumers thinking occurs in the subconscious mind.
- Consumers don’t think in words. In fact, “thought” neurons light up before “verbal” neurons.
- The secret to increased sales is to understand your customer’s “hidden motivators”.
- Most consumers would pay 20-25% premium for their favorite brand.
- You no longer control your brand’s positioning, the consumer does.
- If you want to sell product tomorrow, you have to build relationship today.
One thing that Jamie mentioned stuck with me – research shows that laughter creates a right-left brain connections that were not there before creating emotional response and making experiences way more memorable for people. Oh, so that’s why funny commercials resonate the most and create the best buzz! 