Boston Marketing Nation Event | Powering Epic Experiences

I received many invitations to yesterday’s Marketo “Marketing Nation” event, by email and social media, so despite not be in a formal “user” of the software suite, I attended as an observer, to be more informed in my engagements with marketing organizations.  Somewhere along the line I downloaded a whitepaper or connected with a team and will forever and gratefully be part of their ecosystem.   So, I think that’s part of the message that they were getting across yesterday.   “We found you, but now we need to get to know you much better!”

In fact, my main takeaways were from the opening and closing keynote speakers who both hit upon the need to beef up the human side of the equation.  The big idea of the day was to create EPIC experiences for customers – both consumers and BTB users who in the end, are still making buying decisions based on many factors outside of the product features. But EPIC experiences require meaningful marketing, relevant content, trust which paired with affinity has the potential to create a long standing relationship. These words highlighted in her talk, are directly attributable to opening keynote, Ann Handley from Marketing Profs who advocated slowing down to be sure you are having an open and honest conversation WITH your customer, not AT your customer.  She went so far as to say “do less” but do it in a deeper, more thoughtful way.  She advocated for a renaissance of email, but focusing on the “letter” vs. the “news” side to reach out personally, slow down the telling of the story, and be sure you are fully in synch with what is keeping the customer up at night.

The closing speaker, Matt Zilli, VP, Go-To-Market, Adobe hit upon EPIC in a big way.   Naturally, he alluded to the need for analytics to drive informed conversation and decision-making, which dovetails into Marketo’s play for Account Based Marketing (ABM).  However, to put these more sophisticated goals in place and to extend the marketing organization’s overall accountability, one really has to up their game on the people front.   In the case of ABM, (the talk given by Brian Glover, Marketo Head of Product Marketing) the marketing systems will be populated with contacts from across the entire customer organization, many without existing relationships.  Understanding how they fit into the account, reaching out, and engaging the external contacts as well as the internal contacts (i.e. Sales)  in the greater conversation requires an enhanced set of skills.  Matt suggests the type of PEOPLE that are needed to energize this initiative – empathetic, agile, accountable, and creative.  Ann’s suggests we need to create more engaging interactions, write more powerful newsletters and rise above the fray with engaging content.  Agreed.  But I walked away with the question of what the new marketing professional will really look like.  Are these creative and agile types the same people that are being groomed to sit and analyze data in the marketing dashboard?  If not what kind of leadership and teams do we really need to achieve these EPIC experiences?