Katherine Kostereva, CEO and Managing Partner at bpm’online shares her thoughts on the latest trends each forward-thinking CMO should be aware of
More than 2 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, and customer data has never been more valuable than it is today. Every new connected device creates a new customer touchpoint, and technology has become fashion – with apps coming and going like clothing trends at a breathtaking pace. CMOs are forced to rethink the customer journey and sales funnel, and build their strategies with focus on speed and agility to stay relevant in this extreme business environment.
In this article, CEO and Managing Partner at bpm’online, Katherine Kostereva explains why marketers need to be smart about trends and accelerate their efforts to keep pace with the speed of change. Katherine also shares the 5 key areas marketers can maximize their data set and create a platform for future success.
Align marketing, sales and service departments to accelerate core operations
“For marketing, sales and service departments to drive results and deliver meaningful value to customers in the digital age, they have to be perfectly aligned and operate as a single mechanism and accelerate business growth,” remarks Katherine Kostereva at bpm’online.
According to Katherine Kostereva, only few organizations can claim they have perfect alignment between marketing, sales and service. Data sets are different, there is typically limited visibility across organizational silos, and no one has more technology than marketing. Today’s CMOs have a better opportunity than their predecessors to solve this and drive better organizational alignment. It can create better understanding about which marketing initiatives have long-term benefits and measure marketing return against metrics like customer lifetime value, rather than just clicks and conversions. Better alignment between marketing and sales also helps to drastically accelerate core business processes and adapt faster.
“No one has a data creation problem, but most have an insight problem,” commented Katherine Kostereva. Aligning customer data across teams prevents clogs and blind spots in the customer’s journey, allowing for a better experience from lead-to-loyalty. Katherine Kostereva maintains that “each department holds only one piece of the puzzle, and if any of the teams has insufficient understanding of the whole picture, there is no chance to achieve seamless operation and top efficiency.” Industry statistics confirms this statement: according to an Aberdeen Group study, highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth, while their less-aligned competitors saw a 7% decrease.
Integrate AI and Predictive Analytics into your strategy
Katherine Kostereva noted that conversational interfaces wouldn’t be possible without improvements in AI, which is being adopted rapidly. Despite being new technology, the reality is that nearly half of executives are on board with this movement, with 44% believing AI’s most important benefit is automated communications that provide data that can be used to make decisions. According to Katherine Kostereva, advancements with AI and predictive analytics are already starting to significantly impact marketers and they will continue to improve in the coming years to allow for better decisions within your ABM, SEO and lead nurturing campaigns.
Embrace the conversation
Chatbots are finally allowing marketing teams to get more involved in managing live chat with customers, but the chatbot trend doesn’t stop there. By creating conversational interfaces, AI-powered personal assistants will be coming to all kinds of applications – especially CRM. “As more devices become connected and with most business-critical applications shifting to the cloud, voice becomes the standard UI that everyone understands,” commented Katherine Kostereva. It is still early to know which of these is a trend, but what is clear is that marketing teams should start developing the skills necessary to maximize this style of engagement.
Run exceptionally targeted campaigns with extended data enrichment
The primary big data achievement for marketing teams is enabling the capture/analysis of customer behavioral data, and incorporating third-party data enrichment tools that provide more robust customer profiles, infinitely better segmentation and the ability to focus on intent rather than pure demographics. Katherine Kostereva remarked that “by leveraging data enrichment, marketers get more complex and predictive lead scoring, better targeted lead nurturing campaigns and far more accurate personalization of not just content, but context.”
While B2C marketers are familiar with intent data, B2B marketers are likely less familiar. “For them, this means the difference between targeting all new leads the same (the current way,) versus being able to immediately escalate those that exhibit more buying behavior during their web sessions and getting them into sales reps’ hands while they are still engaged,” explained Katherine Kostereva.
Leverage B2C CRM solutions
True B2C CRM is an interesting trend made possible by big data technologies and made necessary by the poorly aging architecture of email service providers. With the rise of mobile communications, email is no longer the only channel in town. More importantly, the rise of retargeting and cross-device engagement means B2C marketers have an opportunity to manage customer re-engagement and potentially personalize it. According to Katherine Kostereva, CRM marketing for B2C teams means completely rethinking the journey and blurring what were previously very distinct marketing silos. Now, B2C CRM marketers have to think about using data for better retargeting, ad segmentation, and personalization across the journey and developing more complex personas for anonymous customers driven by the data, rather than assumptions.
Today, marketers can be significantly more data-driven than their sales counterparts and more experienced in experimenting with new technology trends that deliver business results. It’s very likely, if you are a marketing leader, than these trends are already on your mind. If not, dig in because within the next few years, the ability to adapt and accelerate will be the critical success enabler and fast-moving organizations will dominate the slower ones.
Katherine Kostereva
Katherine Kostereva is the CEO and managing partner of bpm’online, a global business software company leading in the space of business process automation and CRM. With more than 15 years of experience in helping businesses transform and better engage with customers, Katherine has always had a clear and solid vision of the CRM market and business development. She strongly believes that moving fast matters. That is why the mission of bpm’online is to help companies accelerate!