MarketingSherpa: Describe any digital marketing challenges and/or opportunities that you’ve personally experienced in the past year.
Jordan Schneider, TechnologyAdvice: Our biggest challenge this past year was a misaligned sales and marketing structure. We took huge steps to improve this in 2015 through use of marketing automation and the development of a service level agreement between the two departments. We look forward to continuing our progress in 2016.
MarketingSherpa: What has been your most valuable asset in digital marketing?
Jordan Schneider, TechnologyAdvice: At TA, we view content as "the fuel of the modern marketer." Content plays a role in most of our strategies, from generating awareness around our brand to creating loyalty and goodwill amongst existing partners. Our content team helps us cultivate a captive audience from our blog, and plays a key role in marching prospects down our sales funnel. They are truly a well-oiled machine and we are very proud of the fuel they continuously add to the flame.
MarketingSherpa: How can marketers use digital to be customer-centric?
Jordan Schneider, TechnologyAdvice: Through integration between marketing automation and CRM platforms, the modern marketer has access to all data points collected on a given contact. Leveraging those data points allows for the creation of more personalized and targeted campaigns, which enables a much more customer-centric approach to advertising, email, etc.
MarketingSherpa: What was your big picture takeaway from digital marketing this year?
Jordan Schneider, TechnologyAdvice: My biggest takeaway is that there is more and more competition emerging every single day, and digital is becoming a very crowded space. A study from CBS in 2006 said the average person is exposed to over 5,000 ads per day. That’s staggering. In order to rise above the noise, marketers are going to be challenged to be more personalized.
MarketingSherpa: What are some tactics you are or will be implementing in your digital marketing in the future?
Jordan Schneider, TechnologyAdvice: Future tactics for us include ways to mobilize advocacy among current customers. For instance, a platform like Influitive could be very interesting to test. Additionally, we will be exploring new possibilities to include within our Martech stack specifically related to ABM.
MarketingSherpa: What are some trends that you see coming up in digital marketing?
Jordan Schneider, TechnologyAdvice: I believe automation will continue to take control over the modern marketing narrative. I’m not just talking about marketing automation either. Think about the ABM tech stack that’s emerging right now. ABM as a strategy has been around forever, but there is now a tech stack emerging to support that product (think Terminus and Demandbase). Many of these tools integrate with your CRM in the same way a marketing automation solution does to power different functions of marketing.
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