MARKETING OUTLOOK 2016: PART 2

WHAT SKILLS SHOULD

MARKETERS MASTER

IN 2016?The proficiencies

marketers need to succeed today are

rapidly changing and expanding; some are

more urgent to master than others.

The skills that marketers

need to succeed are

rapidly changing and

expanding. Today it’s

no longer enough to

have a creative flair or a

knack for data analysis

or even deep expertise

within a specific channel.

Marketers need to

broaden and deepen their

proficiencies in everything

from segmentation

and measurement, to

analytics and tech skills,

to customer engagement

and change management.

Here, 14 marketing

insiders, each with a

unique perspective on the

marketing industry, share

their predictions for the

skill it’s most important

for marketers to master in

2016 and why.

–Ginger Conlon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 Sean Zinsmeister, Director of Product Marketing, Infer

8 Eric Stahl, SVP of Product Marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

6 Mike Finnegan, VP of Programmatic, Live Nation

5 Matt Goddard, CEO, R2integratedRebecca Kaykas-Wolff, Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Marketing Cloud

9 Lyle Stevens, Cofounder and CEO, MAVRCK, Chris Wong, VP of Marketing Solutions, IBM Commerce

10 Tom Wilde, SVP Strategic Development, Universal Wilde, 11 Neil O’Keefe, SVP of CRM and Member Engage-ment, Direct Market-ing Association, Chris Byers, CEO, Formstack, 12 Bill Lonergan, CEO, RadiumOne, Katrin Ribant, Chief Solutions Officer, Datorama

7 Adam Padilla, Cofounder and President, BrandFire, Robert Tas, CMO, Pegasystems

SEAN ZINSMEISTERDirector of Product Marketing, Infer @szinsmeister @inferinc

The year ahead is going to be all about mastering ac-count-based marketing (ABM). It’s time for marketers to apply the same rigor to outbound marketing that they have to inbound and lead-nurturing programs. ABM has the potential to open up new revenue channels now that all companies can easily identify best-fit accounts and de-liver personalization at scale—via advertising, direct mar-keting, and more.

Predictive ABM tactics drive bigger, faster deals. But to capitalize on this opportunity, marketers need to advance their skills around market planning, prospect management, and measuring campaign efficacy:

• In a predictive-driven world, marketers should leverage account scoring to pinpoint the most likely to buy existing accounts, as well as to fill in gaps with new lookalike accounts. This helps ensure that they’re aligning effort to impact.

• Once marketers have built the best possible target ac-counts list for their business, the next key skill they’ll need is the ability to interpret a wide variety of customer signals for a deeper understanding of how to carve up their market-able universe. Smart marketers use a blend of firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data to conduct advanced segmentation around prospect groups with the highest rev-enue potential.

• Marketers will then need to leverage innovative ABM campaign tactics and new personalization technologies to activate these accounts and move them forward in their customer journey.

• Finally, marketers should master sophisticated tech-niques for measuring engagement and campaign success. This will help them use more agile test-and-invest strate-gies, such as adjusting messages, content, and channels on the fly.

REBECCA KAYKAS-WOLFFDirector, Product Marketing, Oracle Marketing Cloud

@rebeccakw @OracleMktgCloudWhere 2015 was the year of becoming more data-driven in practice, 2016 will be all about maturity and focus in not only campaign execution, but also enable-ment through partnerships and the ecosystem. Most marketers have embraced the concept of harnessing data to drive better, more relevant business results; many, however, are still struggling with how to sustain success through effective operational design, partnership alignments, and laser-focused commitment to concepts like centers of excellence and internal thought leadership—as well as bringing on the right agencies and partnerships. Data will continue to be at the center of these conversations, but having the right process, partnerships, infra-structure, and technologies will be critical.

MATT GODDARD CEO, R2integrated@R2imatt @R2integrated Marketers have to master breaking down silos so they can apply customer experience management across all channels and beyond just their brand’s website. The CMO has to bring together the technology, brand, media, and content disciplines to function as one cohesive team capable of creating a customer experience ecosystem.

More mature marketing organizations already have the technology in place to manage customer data and personalize content, but now marketers need to master connecting the experience across channels. From the banner ads their customers see, to the search results and the native Google sponsored promotions that appear in email, to the social, mobile, and Web messaging—marketers have to connect the dots. They have to master bridging the experience through content, images, and calls-to-action that matter in the right moment for their customers and that will drive a measurable result for their own business objectives.

MIKE FINNEGANVP of Programmatic, Live Nation @LiveNation

If branded content was the new skill that marketers had to master in 2015, then content targeting and analytics should be the focus for 2016. eMarketer reported that only 36% of U.S. social media users find banner ads to be effective, com-pared to sponsored messages on Periscope (61%), Snapchat (58%), or Instagram (56%). This shift reflects the move from conventional ad placements to an “in-the-trenches” battle for consumers’ attention.

This eMarketer study is helpful for brands to understand what channels should be on their “2016 To-Do List,” but mar-keters must still make sure their content dollars are spent effectively. Measurement and validation are often an after-thought so long as scale and innovation are driving the effort. With many social platforms still in their infancy, distributing content is primarily contextually driven. And even if marketers must live with the reality of spray-and-pray content distribu-tion, measurement remains an Achilles heel.

Don’t be confused: Proper measurement and analysis are necessary skills that all content marketing teams must pos-sess—and use from the onset of a program. The tools are certainly available to all brands and platforms alike. Building in-house expertise should be the focus of content marketers in 2016.

ROBERT TASCMO, Pegasystems

@TasRobert @pegaIn 2016 most marketers will be mastering the new definition around customer engage-ment. In today’s always-on digital economy the bar is constantly being redefined for all of us. This is not just about advertising, but about end-to-end customer engagement. This means arming marketers with tools like predictive analytics that provide insights to drive not just more targeted offers, but also conceptual and personalized interac-tions across all stages of the customer journey. Any marketer who’s not increasing their analytics skills this year runs the risk of alienating their customers with bad experiences.

New analytics tools are now making it much easier for marketers to use analytics to their utmost advantage. These tools move beyond simple reporting and visualiza-tion that often leave it to the marketers to make sense of it all. Instead, new solutions can automate the process of turning raw data and insights into specific actions. This allows them to take the guesswork out of their marketing efforts and more definitive-ly know the next best action to take with each customer every time. It’s the difference between engagement that falls flat and engagement that differentiates the brand, keeping customers loyal and coming back for more.

It’s more important than ever for marketers—particularly CMOs—to take a leading role in keeping their customers happy in the age of digital transformation. And there’s no better way to start off 2016 strong than by using and mastering the tools at their disposal to build personalized interactions, one at a time.

ADAM PADILLA Cofounder and President, BrandFire@BrandFire

The skill that marketers need to master in 2016 is the art of the strategic partnership. Find val-ue for your consumer in the offerings of like-minded products and services, then partner the two brands together to create a synergy that you both can benefit from. The era of rebuild-ing and reinventing the wheel to take everything in-house is over. It’s all about letting special-ists stay in their lane, and be experts rather than jacks-of-all-trades. A consumer product that wants to offer delivery is best served partnering with Uber or Postmates than trying to create a delivery system themself. A media company that tags and catalogs a media library could partner with a social media company that wants to provide targeted content to members. With so many innovative products and services available today, the possibilities are limited only by the creativity of the marketer—it’s a very exciting time.

ERIC STAHLSVP of Product Marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud @ericstahl @marketingcloud

This year will be the year of predictive marketing, so mar-keters need to master this approach. Although predictive marketing strategy and technology have been around for a few years, businesses will adopt it in new ways in 2016.

In the past, deploying predictive marketing involved hir-ing a team of data scientists to build a modeling system, analyze the data, and report on insights. Now, advances in technology have enabled businesses to implement predic-tive marketing without the need for that team of data sci-entists. As we like to say at Salesforce, data science is now directly in the hands of marketers.

In light of these shifts, the focus in 2016 will be on mar-keters further amplifying their predictive efforts by combin-ing predictive analytics tools and strategies to drive deeper, more actionable customer insights.

Part of this involves understanding that customer expe-rience is about more than just marketing. Every division of a company should be aligned around customer experience and success to enable personalized one-to-one customer journeys with the business—and marketers must learn to integrate their marketing systems and processes with oth-er parts of the business to achieve a truly holistic view of the customer.

LYLE STEVENS Cofounder and CEO, MAVRCK@thelylestevens @MavrckCo

2016 presents a digital marketing landscape where consumers’ attention is not only frag-mented, but also self-selected, from the ads they see (or don’t see) to the stories that appear in their news feeds. Consumer trust in traditional advertising has eroded to the point of ad backlash: ad blocking is growing exponentially, with 48% U.S. adoption in the past year alone, according to PageFair.

However, consumer trust in each other remains high: research from Nielsen finds that 83% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of adver-tising. This shifting tide of influence has brought forth the rise of micro-influencers—everyday social media users who have a highly engaged following (500 to 5,000) around relevant topics. As consumers continue to eschew traditional ads, paid celebrity endorsements, and marketing blasts in favor of more personal, authentic, human-to-human communications, marketers must adapt.

In 2016, it’s not sufficient for marketers to rely on the prebaked assumptions of past success; those channels are either not effec-tive or no longer exist. The modern-day marketer needs to be a skilled marketer—equal parts data engineer and creative. Adoption of a human-to-human marketing strategy requires marketers to understand the data analytics around which segments of custom-ers are influential and how the friends they’re engaging can deliver the most value for the brand.

Marketers must be able to creatively apply these insights to the messaging that activates influencers on behalf of their brand, successfully driving conversion at scale that achieves their business objectives.

CHRIS BYERSCEO, Formstack

@FormstackTechnical skills, such as basic coding and video production, will soon be requirements for half of all marketing hires. Data analysis will also be in high demand, as research predicts a shortfall of up to 1.5 million managers with data expertise by 2018.

Furthermore, marketers must pay attention to the ever-increasing mobile-user popula-tion. It’s crucial to think creatively about improvements to user experience on mobile.

And finally, marketers should hone their social media expertise; pay close attention to what actually converts, more than just what’s popular. Marketers who take social media skills further can transform likes into leads.

TOM WILDESVP Strategic Development, Universal Wilde @UniversalWilde

In our always-connected world, social media and other da-ta-collecting tools make it easy to catalog customer details, including location, recent purchases, and product reviews. As technology touches more and more facets of consumers’ lives, marketers will continue to gain more access to data than ever before. With this in mind, the most valuable skill for marketers won’t be to know how to gather data at every touchpoint—as many marketers might expect. Rather, it will be to know how to organize and interpret that data in a way that informs stra-tegic marketing campaigns.

This heightened analysis of data will give brands the op-portunity to easily personalize communication and therefore better interact with customers. Over the next year marketers who are able to offer brands efficient solutions to help with this data culling, and counsel on how to seamlessly incorpo-rate this data into plans that move the needle, will see their successes increase.

NEIL O’KEEFE SVP of CRM and Member Engagement, Direct Marketing Association@NeilOKeefe @DMA_USA

In 2016 we’ll see a full mind-set shift, where marketers will stop thinking about digital market-ing and instead focus on marketing in a digital world.

Imagine if marketers stopped sorting their channels into “digital” or “not digital,” but in-stead analyzed channels by what would be most effective for their goals. To bridge the cre-ative and the analytical, marketers may need to invest in talent recruitment and training—but those investments will pay huge dividends for their team. Only by acknowledging that mar-keting can be both an art and a science will we begin to unlock our industry’s true potential and move marketing from a nuisance to a consumer resource.

Marketers should strive to make personalization predictive, not simply a result of engagements that trigger personalization. Through strategic use of data analytics and cognitive business AI, marketers have the ability to make their data work for them by anticipating customer needs, optimizing their websites for SEO, and even determining content production and release.

Together we can step up and deliver for the customer. Data exchanged between marketers and consumers is a metaphorical handshake, where the customer says, “I will provide you this information if you promise to deliver me offers that are relevant to my needs and wants.” Keeping that promise is essential—not simply for a company’s bottom line, but also to maintain a connection to customers and drive the work of our industry forward.

CHRIS WONG VP of Marketing Solutions, IBM Commerce

@FightOn_CWong @IBMcommerceMarketers have long relied on behavioral and demographic data and analytics to inform their de-cisions, but often struggle to achieve the next level of personalization. In 2016 successful market-ers will master the skill of cognitive computing, which will allow them to better crunch consumer data, understand complex questions, and continually learn.

Startups like Uber, Airbnb, and Nest are disrupting the way consumers buy and expect service, and today’s marketers are challenged to change the way they engage the always-on consumer. But to do this, they have to make sense of unimaginable amounts of consumer data, generate insights in context, and, more important, gain a better understanding of consumer buying hab-its. Enter cognitive computing: It makes the right connections and puts them into the context of consumer behavior, giving marketers a higher level of confidence to make decisions and, there-by, make better decisions to deliver timely, relevant messages and offers to individual shoppers.

Applying cognitive computing to marketing will allow brands to focus on what they do best—developing engaging, personalized experiences—while ensuring that they reach their customers the right way.

BILL LONERGAN CEO, RadiumOne @LonerganBill @RadiumOneThe most crucial skill a marketer can master in 2016 is to “see beyond their own four walls”—the use of big data to get to the heart of customer behavior and understand what makes interac-tions happen. The majority of consumer interactions take place outside a brand. This data, if captured and used by marketers in a timely fashion, is extraordinarily powerful.

If marketers rely solely on their data, their understanding of their audiences will be severely limited in two respects:

1. It will only reflect the interactions with the brand, keeping extremely valuable information on consumer interests, media, and app consumption outside their grasp. Additionally, the brand will have no insight into consumers’ sentiment and interaction with other brands, previous pur-chase history, influences, what they share with or receive from others, and more.

2. It doesn’t include any information on people who have not previously or recently interact-ed with their brands. Most of the digital world has not visited their sites, downloaded their apps, or purchased their products. It’s critical to know not just the people who have already raised their hand with the brand, but also those who might do so in the near future.

When marketers learn to look beyond how consumers interact with their own brand and instead at the consumer experi-ence as a whole, they’ll be in a much better place to influence purchasing decisions.

KATRIN RIBANT Chief Solutions Officer, Datorama @Ribant @DatoramaMarketing is undergoing a dramatic change as CMOs push for closer integration with other groups within the enterprise to more easily access and better understand the broad array of data driving business impacts. Customer journey and purchasing decisions are influenced by many areas outside of traditional marketing, including customer service, sales, CRM, and IT. Mar-keting is increasingly becoming the central point through which many disparate data streams can be accessed and understood—revealing important signals supporting a consistent and ef-fective customer experience. According to a Gartner for Marketing Leaders survey on the role of marketing in customer experience, by 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, versus 36% four years ago.

As such, we’re seeing a new set of hybrid titles emerging among our customer set such as CMO/CIO, chief transformation officer, or chief marketing technologist (CMT). These titles point to the blending of marketing and IT skills, which will be the hallmark of a successful marketing professional in 2016.

Marketers are becoming hybrid professionals whose skill sets includes proficiency with a wide variety of new analytics technologies and approaches to data access, modeling, and integration—a skill formerly associated with data scientists and IT professionals. Add to this that the average enterprise marketing department uses more than 50 different applications and it’s clear that CMTs need to reengineer internal marketing roles and responsibilities with a greater focus on becoming ana-lytically driven.