One of the major challenges in the martech industry is getting the attention of prospects in a world where they are bombarded by content and emails on all sides.
The sheer volume of noise out there means that generating cost effective, qualified leads in a scalable way is a challenge.
Martech businesses are fighting to reach the same audiences, but how do you stand out from the crowd?
Knowing your customers
Peter Bell, EMEA Senior Director, Product Marketing at Marketo, acknowledges the challenge:
“As the Lumascape charts continue to show, it is crowded and fragmented market with many competing claims, knowing who your ideal customers and the value you create for them is critical to rising above the noise.”
Increasingly, these organisations are having to understand the immediate issues and priorities of clients in a much more systematic way and tailor their messages accordingly.
And they need to put these messages in the right places where a prospect not only will pay attention, but also value the communication.
Here’s Peter Bell on how Marketo achieves this:
“There is a tendency within the vendor community to jump on the latest bandwagon even if there is little to justify the claim. ABM is the latest example. Everyone is the leader in ABM, so who leads ABM.
Knowing our customer and communicating with them in their language, in the places they go in an appropriate way, everything else is tactics.”
A number of new style B2B media companies have emerged to help with these challenges, focusing on identifying the key issues that prospects most engage with, and then working with martech companies to craft their messages in a way to address these topics.
Analytics
They’re also supported by sophisticated analytics tools that track user engagement with specific topics in a much more granular way.
One of the providers of these tools is Fospha. According to CEO Jonathan Attwood:
“Page views and clicks are not enough. You need to know who is scrolling or pinching and zooming on which bits of content, and be able to understand the particular bit of content they are interested in.
In a fast moving world of digital marketing, the issues on the minds of clients change month to month… we need to stay relevant by helping clients with those particular issues. Sometimes we are too focused on the things we want to communicate. Instead we need to really get inside their priorities and target our message in a much more customised way.”
The time of top-level metrics is long gone and the need for real usable data has never been stronger. It’s the only way you will truly understand clients and customers, and offer them the personalised service they demand.