Bridging the chasm between advertising and engagement

Marketo Australia MD Aden Forrest
By Marketo Australia MD Aden Forrest | 18 June 2015
 

Advertising has historically been the big hitting item for a marketing department. It’s a concept that CEOs and CFOs can easily understand: you place ads, people find out about your company and that makes them buy from you. And technology is making advertising more accountable, reducing placements that don’t effectively contribute to sales or brand building.
What the C-team (and some of the more traditional advertising agencies) probably wonder is, what else does the marketing team do?

The answer is, they look after the rest of the customer journey. It’s a giant leap of faith to assume awareness driven by advertising instantly translates to sales. Information plays a big role in a purchase decision (whether it’s a car, a tablet, a holiday or a brand of coffee), and modern marketers spend a lot of their time ensuring prospects are fed relevant content at each stage in the decision making process. If they’re suitably skilled at this, marketing chiefs will already be demonstrating to the C-team how this work is providing payback, with greater conversion rates, less churn or other hard measures that directly impact the bottom line.

The issue is linking these two stages of marketing. The advertising front-end has always been driven by numbers. The follow-through, which focuses on building marketing engagement, is now more data rich than ever before; but it’s been hard to marry up the two. An ad-campaign might create many leads, but how many of these ultimately convert? There hasn’t been a sure-fire way of knowing if higher cost inventory is generating business from higher spending customers?

Now, at last, the technology used to deliver advertising (ad-tech) is blending with the world of marketing automation - the systems that manage the follow-through engagement process. These systems are usually integrated into a company’s CRM, so the entire journey can be tracked, from advertising through the nurturing process, through to the eventual sale.
Imagine the strength of seeing that somebody bought from you after responding to a campaign several months back, and understanding the engagement process along the way. It's powerful data that will help to determine how future campaigns are targeted, or how those in play are refined.

There’s another bonus of this bridge between advertising and marketing automation systems. Planners for engagement campaigns have often been rather too eager to acquire a prospect’s contact details, because it provided a way to track and communicate with the user. By linking ad-tracking software with engagement solutions, a broader range of communication channels are available. For example: a user clicks through from an ad, visits your website and snoops around a little. Your next step might be to target the individual with paid-ads promoting follow-up content, such as reviews, case-studies or specific offers.

Advertising becomes a tool throughout the sales journey – not just the mechanism to drive early awareness. And ad-placements are treated as part of a mix of channels, driven by insights into customer behaviour.

It’s easy to imagine this in practice. How many times have you seen an ad for a product you have already been researching online? It can be annoying. There’s no need for advertisers to drive awareness, you are already there. Doesn’t it make sense that you see ads highlighting things you don’t know about the product – so the ads become tools that will encourage you to buy?

Another bonus is that deep customer insights will help deliver creative solutions relevant to the prospect, based on who they are and what they’ve done before. Add to that their location, the device and channel they are using – social, websites, mobile or smart-TV, for example – and you can see how sophisticated the marketing approach can become.

For this reason, advertising can’t stay as a silo in the marketing department. It needs to be part of the complex engagement processes marketing teams are developing, which means there’s no place for isolated technologies – or, indeed, agencies that still think their job is simply about creating awareness, full stop.

The CFO will love it because it’s all about numbers. In a way it gets over the most uncomfortable aspect of marketing spend – when we spend big on advertising, do we really know what happens to all that money? In fact, the C-team will have so many numbers to look at, they’ll have less time to suggest their own creative ideas for the next campaign. And that’s got to be a win for everyone.

By Aden Forrest

Managing director

Marketo Australia

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