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Marketing Innovation in the Marketing Cloud Era

March 17, 2014 By Meagen Eisenberg 1 Comment

DocuSign’s Meagen Eisenberg explains how the company is growing its business by leveraging technology for marketing automation, targeting, social and content.

What an amazing time to be a marketer.  We have more technology and data than ever at our disposal – and the investment is only growing.  The arms race to build out the best platform and solution is hot – we have Oracle, Salesforce, and other major players building out their marketing cloud and VCs investing more than ever in marketing and sales technologies to fill the acquisition pipeline.  Not only are we leveraging our own technology, DocuSign, to streamline our marketing and sales organizations, but we have more than a dozen other marketing technologies we use to optimize our efforts.

Marketing Technology Landscape 2014Source: Chiefmartec.com

If I look back just a year and a half ago at what marketing technology investments were in the budget, it was our marketing automation platform, Eloqua, and our targeting and web optimization software, Demandbase.  While still our number one and number two marketing technology investments respectively, we now have so many other important technologies and a full marketing systems budget so we can invest in technologies that leverage big-data, social, customer advocacy and content.  And these topics are hot in B2B marketing.

Diving into our investments in big-data technologies, we are doing some very cool things with companies like Mintigo.  Mintigo is helping us optimize our campaigns and scoring by understanding our ideal targets in new and existing markets by analyzing our existing customer DNA.  And they are delivering new leads that convert at a faster pace because they leverage our customer DNA top attributes to locate new targets out in the massive internet (the future CRM).  Big-data in this example includes external databases such as financials, social and company websites to access attributes not obtainable on the short forms that we collect leads with today on our website.  The ultimate goal is to improve sales efficiency so sales reps can focus on the top converting leads.  At 90,000 leads a quarter, DocuSign needs to focus on the deals that will most likely close within a quarter.

Our desire to leverage social to fill the B2B funnel has introduced us to companies like Social123, InsightPool, LittleBird, Inadco and Nudge.  The initial challenge with social programs for B2B was the lack of business context and contact information.  Sales needs the business title, phone number and email address.  With companies like Social123, you can now get the business data appended to social leads.  If you want to apply the nurture techniques to social leads that you typically see in email marketing, InsightPool is the way to go.  You can acquire and build a relationship with your connections.  And if you are looking for the right business influencers, LittleBird is a great technology to start with.  I see it as the product marketer’s social influencer research site.  DocuSign has done a lot of campaigns within LinkedIn and Twitter, with the ability to really segment and target.  And Inadco has allowed us to capture more than just social data from the lead cards with the ability to capture fields within the social ads, such as title, business phone and company. With the excitement and value around social selling, Nudge has just entered the scene from our colleagues that used to be core to Eloqua.

As marketers, we are tasked to acquire, keep and grow customers.  We are seeing amazing results with our customer advocacy software – Influitive.  To engage with our customers through gaming best practices and to extend our reach and effectiveness through their networks is priceless.

And content marketing has been a hot topic for a while now.  The growing list of technologies includes Kapost, Compendium, LookBookHQ, Expressions by MarcomCentral, Vidyard, and even Bizo delivering targeted content in the ad space.  DocuSign has seen increased conversions on our emails that leverage the Expressions technology to personalize our images with name and company.

Hard to believe our DocuSign marketing systems budget incorporates more than a dozen technologies and several more in the queue to review.  Gartner wasn’t kidding when they said CMO spend and budget will outpace IT by 2017.  And Consumption Economics is definitely on to something when they talk about the SaaS movement shifting IT budget and ownership to LOB owners. I recommend the read to any SaaS marketer.

While I think the proliferation of marketing technologies definitely supports the new CDO (Chief Digital Officer), I would rather see a rise of the MIO (Marketing Innovation or Information Officer).  I think it is more than just implementing and managing the technology, but figuring out how to innovate and grow the pipeline effectively with the increased access to big-data, social, our customers and content in the marketing clouds of today and the future.

 

Meagen EisenbergAbout Meagen Eisenberg.  Meagen is the VP of Demand Generation at DocuSign. She has spent over 19 years in high-tech. In 2012 she received the SuperNova Award in Matrix Commerce and in 2011 the Marketing Visionary Markie award within the marketing automation field. She has an MBA from Yale, and a Bachelor of Science degree in MIS and minor in CSC from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

 

Filed Under: AI for Marketing, Customer Intelligence

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  1. Stop Building Marketing Platforms For Marketers says:
    May 6, 2015 at 2:54 pm

    […] Modern buyers are reconstructing the purchasing process, and marketing platforms haven’t caught up. The marketing cloud is ripe for innovation. […]

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