Recap: Creating a Digital Marketing Revolution
Nick Panayi, Director, Global Brand & Digital Marketing at CSC, was the featured speaker at the most recent Technology Marketing Alliance event. CSC is a $15 billion IT service provider with 80,000 employees. Over the last three years, Nick and his team have overhauled the digital marketing program at CSC, and he was nice enough to share his lessons learned with the TMA group.
Nick outlined nine tips for marketing success:
1. Embrace digital marketing. Especially if you have a limited budget, digital marketing can be a force multiplier for your message.
2. It’s all about the people. Nick uses many tools to support his marketing and lead generation efforts (like Demandbase, GoodData, 6 Sense and Bizo) but it takes great people to run them. Nick’s team is composed of three types of people:
- Infra-jockey: Great technologists that understand the infrastructure but also understand marketing concepts
- Content-jockey: Talented writers to fuel the content machine and capture the significant expertise within CSC
- DemandGen-jockey: Eloqua experts that create multi-touch campaigns
3. Study digital body language: You may not know what your prospects are going to do next, but you do know what they’ve done so far. In fact, according to the Corporate Executive Board, 57% of the buyers’ journey is digital, which means that their mind is already 57% made up before reaching out to a sales person. Make sure you provide your prospects with the tools and content to educate themselves.
4. Determine your prospects’ interests and suggest valued content. Create a value exchange. Prospects will give you their time in exchange for content that they would otherwise pay for. CSC recommends content, solutions and success stories and keeps very little content behind a registration pay wall.
5. Engage in multi-touch, multi-tactic campaigns. Try to create a “soft embrace” of content and don’t let any content go to waste. If someone at CSC writes a whitepaper, Nick’s team will also leverage that content in a series of smaller whitepapers, a short video interview, promote it on social media and perhaps use it on a site like TechTarget.
6. Drip and nurture to stay near-mind. Keep your prospect’s attention by sending them content of interest. CSC recently made a move to highlight some of their experts more prominently in marketing campaigns to make the content more personal.
7. Be there when they are ready. CSC looks for explicit interest from a Contact Me form and implicit interest based on conservative lead scoring. Telesales people and account managers conduct all follow up.
8. Measure everything. Create a strong dashboard to measure quantity and quality of leads and the degree to which leads are sourced or assisted by marketing. A marketing automation system like Eloqua will take much of the guesswork out of this process.
9. Be free to experiment. So much testing technology is available, it’s almost a crime not to try new things and improve upon existing campaigns.
If you’re interested, you can view Nick’s presentation on Prezi.
Hope to see you at the next TMA event.