An IDC eBook, Sponsored by Microsoft | July 2018 · 2018-07-31 · Social media presence is table stakes in marketing. While there are seemingly endless options, Microsoft partners

An IDC eBook, Sponsored by Microsoft | July 2018

IDC Microsoft Next-Gen Partner MarketingHow to Meet Higher Customer Expectations and Win Their Trust

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IDC eBook | IDC Microsoft Next-Gen Partner Marketing

Page 2Sponsored by Microsoft Contents

Introduction Customer-Centric Marketing Practices » Consent: Give me a reason to tell you about myself » Personalization: Communicate on my terms » Prescriptive Action: Anticipate my needs » Continuity of Service: Know my whole relationship with you » Mentor Marketing: Improve my professional life Organizing for Success » Marketing Teams: Roles and Resources » Leadership: Hire and Nurture Talent » Skills: Build a Culture of Competency » Metrics: Measure in Moderation » Technology: Simplify Marketing Infrastructures Epic Fails: Essential Steps on the Path to Mastery Action Plan: What to Do Now

Table of Contents37

23

3132

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This eBook presents findings from interviews IDC conducted with seasoned marketers at a number of Microsoft partners around the world. Our discussions covered a wide variety of marketing practices, management issues, metrics, technology, and most of all, the challenge of customer centricity. There are many examples quoted directly from partners doing innovative work to attract, serve, and retain customers. Participants include companies with no marketing staff to others with dozens of marketers -with many in between. Regardless of size, region, market niche, or business model, they are all using marketing to drive growth and have graciously agreed to share their successes, and in some cases failures, with you.

Partners• Axon IT (UK)• BE-Cloud (France)• Big Red Cloud (UK)• Bluesource (UK)• Chef (USA)

• Content and Code (UK)

• EMBEE (India)• Insight and Ignia

(Australia)• LS Retail (Iceland)

• MediaValet (Canada)• PTG (USA)• Pickit (Sweden

& USA)• PowerObjects (USA)• Qorus (USA)

• RedPixie (UK)• SiEBEN (Greece)• TechQuarters (UK)• Total Synergy

(Australia)

Introduction



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The era of competing on expectations is upon us. The new law of the land: the best experience a customer has anywhere sets the bar for what they expect everywhere. That means you are either raising the bar beyond what your competitors can offer at every interaction, or you are falling short of what customers expect from you.

This is especially true in digital. Winning in this new environment requires marketers to think differently about their role in the customer relationship. If you are just focused on messaging, then you will be surpassed by those who have discovered the power of accelerating customers’ ability to master their challenges, systems, teams, and careers.

Raising Expectations for Competitive Advantage

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IDC’s Hierarchy of Customer Expectations illustrates key aspects of the relationship from the customer’s point of view. These expectations place specific demands on the marketing organization and infrastructure. Most of all, they demand a customer-centric approach to all facets of running a business.

It’s easy to say customer expectations are rising, but what does that mean for the practice and systems of marketing?

Marketing in a World of Constantly Rising Customer Expectations

Mentor Marketing

“Improve my professional life.”

Continuity of Service

“Know my whole relationship with you.”

Prescriptive Action “Anticipate my needs.”

Personalization“Communicate on my terms.”

Consent “Give me a reason to tell you about myself.”

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Marketers must build upon approaches and techniques that worked for the last decade, and be more nuanced about their marketing operations for the next decade. They need to shift from thinking of marketing as a volume-based numbers game, to considering the value they can offer in exchange for consent.

You’ll see examples of how Microsoft partners are starting to change the way they communicate and treat their prospects and customers in the marketing process. They are rethinking traditional approaches to blogs, video, social, events, training and more.

Today’s Marketing: Think Different

Specifically, marketers should:» Figure out how every interaction enhances every other interaction, how each person that serves the customer can enable

the next staff member to do their job better on behalf of the customer. » Move beyond targeting and messaging to teaching, guiding, and even mentoring your audience throughout their careers.» Extend this thinking across your entire business.» Keep in mind that how you treat your customer data is how you treat your customers.

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Delivering Value

Customer-Centric Marketing Practices

“Improve my professional life.”

Mentor Marketing

“Know my whole relationship with you.”

Continuity of service

“Anticipate my needs.”

Prescriptive Action

“Communicate on my terms.”

Personalization“Give me a reason to tell you about myself.”

Consent



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Converting prospects from unknown to known used to be about opt-in. Opt-in was a critical-path moment for marketers to add a name to their database and include it in campaigns until the recipient opted-out. Instead of thinking about opt-in as a singular declaration of permission, today’s best marketers are thinking of consent as a process in which increasingly valuable content is used to get increasingly valuable information. You may think you already do that—and you may to some degree. The difference is: your marketing should be based on information customers know they provided to you for that purpose.

“Give me a reason to tell you about myself.”Consent

Converting prospects from unknown to known used to be about opt-in.

Mentor Marketing


Prescriptive Action

Personalization

Consent

http://www.idc.com

Consent: The five core activities

Live Events

Video

Webinars and Podcasts

Social

Blogging



For prospects, there’s a big difference between deliberately providing marketers with information to be used for their benefit, and marketers using surreptitiously acquired information for the same purpose. Each person that engages may have very different reasons for doing so, and marketers need to discover and act on those needs as respectfully and effectively as possible.

To do that, marketers need increasingly personal information about the people they’re trying to serve (aka customers they’re trying to acquire). In B2B that may be their industry, company, location, name, title, email and social handles, professional network connections, and decision insights like budget, authority, need, and timing, etc. It’s a list that gets progressively more personal and valuable. Getting this information depends on how much customers trust you to protect their data, use it for their benefit, and the value they get in exchange for each disclosure.

It requires a new mindset, new ways of attracting and serving audiences, and new cultural perspectives across all customer-facing functions. Challenging? You bet. But it’s also a tremendous opportunity to differentiate your brand and drive customer expectations beyond what your competitors can deliver. Click on the activities at the right to learn about practical ways to add value.

“Give me a reason to tell you about myself.”Consent

http://www.idc.com


Live Events

Video


Social

Blogging



“Give me a reason to tell you about myself.”Consent: Live Events

No other issue sparked as much discussion among Microsoft partners as events—both live and online.Events are resource-intensive, expensive, and time-consuming. And they are not worth the effort unless the right number of the right kinds of people show up.

It’s clear from our discussions with partners that events are moving online to improve cost and control. In-person events are under greater scrutiny. But in-person events can be effective if one or more of the following are executed well:

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Live Events

Video


Social

Blogging

“Give me a reason to tell you about myself.”



Consent: Webinars and Podcasts

Online events are increasingly attractive due to the far lower cost and greater control partners have over them. However, they also lack the drawing power of a major industry or vendor event. Therefore, some partners are stepping up the quality and the frequency of their webinars, as well as exploring the potential of podcasts.

Marketing an online event is essential to success, both for the actual session and in terms of repurposing the recording, transcripts, and clips in as many ways as possible:

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Online video is exploding as a B2B communications platform. Many partners we spoke to are rapidly increasing their investment in video. Video is easy to produce and publish. It’s also trackable and measurable. Partners are finding that it’s a great way to demonstrate expertise and express personality to liven up relationships. It’s also great for sustaining engagement across a series of short episodes.


Live Events

Video


Social

Blogging




Consent: Videos

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Social media presence is table stakes in marketing. While there are seemingly endless options, Microsoft partners have been most successful by focusing on Linkedin and YouTube. Facebook, and in some cases Instagram are also being used but are not deemed to be as effective in terms of generating business. Social strategies vary a great deal. Partners have to balance resources and results to find the right level of commitment.


Live Events

Video


Social

Blogging




Consent: Social

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Blogging is one of the most popular and effective marketing tactics employed by Microsoft partners. It’s a proven step in the customer’s decision to engage and identify themselves. Typically, a good blog will direct a reader to a more valuable resource like a free trial, or an event that justifies asking for registration.

However, blogging is no longer about frequency and presence. Now it’s about quality. Partners are investing more time in delivering expertise to audiences through their blogs.


Live Events

Video


Social

Blogging




Consent: Blogging

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As a marketer, you have to curate your content and communications based on the customer’s preferences. To do this, you need to capture incrementally more information about your contacts at every touch. Therefore, everything marketing creates should be designed to bring data back. This could be capturing the type and size of their business, their title and role, their personal preferences for content formats and communication channels; tracking activities by time, matching email, phone, IP, and social handles, finding connections on social networks, and assessing their familiarity with your solution.

“Communicate on my terms.”Personalization

Now that you know who your potential customer is, the expectations rise.

Mentor Marketing


Prescriptive Action

Personalization

Consent

http://www.idc.com



In practice, personalization happens in stages as you gain insight into your contacts. At first you may only have a company name and email. Then you might have a title, then solution interests, social handles, a phone number, and browsing patterns. Until you have detailed insights into an individual, marketing has to work the fringes of personalization by producing content based verticalization, localization, and personas.

“Communicate on my terms.”Personalization

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To strengthen your relationships with your customers, you need to keep track of what they already know and help guide them to the next part of your story. Once they’ve seen your videos and read a white paper, where do they go next? This is hard to do and, as a result, can be a big differentiator for marketers.

“Anticipate my needs.”Prescriptive Action

Mentor Marketing


Prescriptive Action

Personalization

Consent

http://www.idc.com



Think of your content as a curriculum and guide customers based on what they already learned from you. One of the simplest ways to do this is to produce content in series like some of the examples we reviewed in videos. In-app marketing is another great single-channel approach, where user behavior (or lack thereof) can be used to deliver information on the next level of mastery or to highlight an under-used feature.

To really differentiate your brand, connect the data you collect in one channel and use it to enhance the customer’s experience where ever they go. Use “learning trees” to design content as a progressive set of steps through your value proposition. You might even publish these for customers to follow (e.g. from a web page to a video to a white paper to an event.) Customer journey mapping is fundamental to success at this stage, as is greater coordination among your marketing channel managers.

“Anticipate my needs.”Prescriptive Action

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As customers move through their relationship with you, they will interact with different departments such as marketing, sales, services, billing, etc., each one of which may have its own systems.

“Know my whole relationship with you.”Continuity of Service

Mentor Marketing


Prescriptive Action

Personalization

Consent

http://www.idc.com



The customer’s data should move with them so they do not have retell their story every time they interact with a different person. Creating a seamless journey is what separates the customer experience masters from the pretenders. But it requires coordination across departments, especially with respect to customer data. Common data models and standard definitions for fields and attributes are key to making it all work. Data is, in fact, the thread that weaves customer-centric culture.

“Know my whole relationship with you.”Continuity of Service

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Microsoft partners have a lot to offer their customers beyond a single transaction. There is tremendous opportunity to accelerate their path to mastery with your solutions, prepare for their next challenges, and acquire skills to further their careers.

“Improve my professional life.”Mentor Marketing

Mentor Marketing


Prescriptive Action

Personalization

Consent

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Not every product or solution, or provider, or even customer, has the potential to support this kind of relationship. But when it works, it creates customers for life. Customers that take you with them as they move up and on with their careers.

“Improve my professional life.”Mentor Marketing

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Organizing for Success



TechnologyMetricsSkillsLeadershipMarketing Teams

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One of the toughest questions for small to mid-sized businesses is, How to build a modern marketing organization with limited staff? The good news is it’s been done. Some Microsoft partners have been able to produce strong teams with novice marketers, provided they have strong leadership and skills development programs to nurture success.

Before you hire your first (or next) marketer, consider leveraging and learning from freelancers, consultants, and agencies. If the frustration levels on cost, control and deadlines becomes bothersome, start hiring. As you build your team, keep in mind that the number and type of people you’ll need depends somewhat on your business. Do you sell to a niche audience that requires specialized technical or vertical market knowledge? Do you grow from new customer acquisition or account penetration, or both? How important is brand building versus lead generation?

These questions, along with the advice and experiences of your peers, will help guide you in creating a marketing team that is best suited to your business. The following examples illustrate how to get started and grow your marketing function to drive the business.

Marketing Teams: Roles and Resources

Key questions in considering your marketing team» Do you sell to a niche audience that requires specialized technical or vertical

market knowledge? » Do you grow from new customer acquisition or account penetration, or both? » How important is brand building versus lead generation?

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Marketing Teams: Partner Examples

Content Manager

n Internal n External

2 Consultants

Image Designer

2 Freelancers

Agency

Partner AEmployees 37Marketers 3+

CEO

CMO

Brand (P/T)


Designer

Mktg Support

Agency

Partner BEmployees 100Marketers 4+

CEO

Corp Comms

Digital Marketer


Content Manager

Campaign Manager

Alliances

Inside Sales

Partner CEmployees 100Marketers 6

CEO

Managing Director

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Marketing Teams: Partner Examples

Digital Marketer


Content Manager

Campaign Manager

Social Marketing

SEO Manager

Partner DEmployees 200Marketers 8+

CEO

Mktg Strategy

Inside Sales (2)

Agencies (4)

Consulants (2)


Partner EEmployees 275Marketers 31

Product Team

Field Team

Partner Team

Events Team

CEO

VP Marketing

Training Team (7)

Website

Social

SDRs

Revenue Team Mktg Operations

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Marketing thrives under strong executive leadership from both the CEO and CMO. The CEO must understand the value of modern marketing but must also fully delegate control to the top marketing executive. For larger businesses, career paths and proactive training are important to retain high performing talent after the first year or two. Establishing and maintaining tight alignment with Sales and corporate strategy are also critical to success.

Leadership: Hire and Nurture Talent

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The CMO needs strong vision for the brand and modern marketing expertise so they can hire and train younger staff effectively. In today’s world of interdependent channels and complex buyers’ journeys, its critical that CMOs establish a culture of competency and even cross-train marketers in different channels and the tools used to run them. This enables different marketers to understand how their output can enhance each other’s performance. It also creates a team that functions well even when a member or two are out of the office.

Skills: Build a Culture of Competency

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There are three levels of measurement for marketers: 1. Execution: These are KPIs specific to campaigns, channels and resources. Examples include landing page performance, social engagement, event attendance. They address questions like: what are the best SEO terms? How is our Linkedin page doing? Are conversions trending up or down? These metrics are used to optimize marketing activities, but they are not very useful for reporting to executives

2. Operational: These are indicators of the efficiency of marketing staff and processes. Examples include: staff to program spend ratio, cost per lead by campaign, channel and resource. They address questions like: Is video more effective than blogging? How did a campaign do by region or audience? Should we hire a new person or an agency or buy some software? These are effective for allocating marketing spend and assessing staffing needs.

3. Corporate: These are measures of marketing’s contribution to the business. Examples include: marketing budget to revenue (turnover) ratio, contribution to pipeline, key account acquisition and penetration, marketing impact on deal size. They address questions like: Is marketing providing sales lift? Is marketing building brand awareness, market share, share of wallet? Is lead quality improving? Smaller companies will be more lead oriented while larger companies will also have branding priorities to report on.

Metrics: Measure in Moderation

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Page 30Sponsored by Microsoft Contents*Other includes software for: web design, tracking, and testing; shopping cart; data integration; and video tools.

There are as many approaches to building marketing technology stacks as there are companies doing so. There are thousands of products to choose from. But for the most part, Microsoft partners—especially the small to midsized ones—are able to support very effective marketing activities with a fairly simple infrastructure.

As shown in the table, two or three systems, including a CRM, a marketing automation platform, and/or an email platform will suffice. The need for additional systems should be driven by your business model, your audience and your marketing strategies.

Are your prospects on social media? Do they prefer video? Does web search drive high conversion traffic? These questions will help simplify the confusion and propensity for distraction when planning technology investments. And, of course, always experiment with free/freemium alternatives especially with analytics, social and blogging.

Marketing Technology Stacks

# of Mktg Mktg Staff Systems CRM Email Mktg Auto Analytics Social Blogging CMS SEO Other 31 5 l l l l l

18 3 l l l 11 2 l l 8 7 l l l l l l l

7 7 l l l l l l l

4 3 l l l 4 10 l l l l l l l l l l

4 2 l l 2 3 l l l 2 6 l l l l l l

1 3 l l l Total 9 7 5 4 4 3 3 3 13

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Epic Fails and Things That Go Bump in the Night

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Raise Customer Expectations: Manage your organization, culture, processes, systems and compensation models so that every customer interaction can enhance every other interaction.

Customer centric culture: Data is the thread that weaves customer centric culture. Establish common customer data models and governance practices across systems and departments.

Consent is the new currency: There are many ways to collect customer data but getting it from customers directly in exchange for valuable content is the best way to build trust and transparency.

Staffing for Success: Before you hire your first (or next) marketer, consider leveraging and learning from freelancers, consultants, and agencies. When the frustration levels on cost, control and deadlines becomes bothersome, start hiring.

Simplify the Stack: Before you commit to your first or next marketing automation solution, try free or “freemium” alternatives.

The Marketing Mission: To be most effective, the executive team should give marketing very clear goals and establish the metrics by which its contribution to the business will be measured.

What to do next depends on your business, your marketing team, your audiences, what’s worked in the past or not. There are many examples in this report on how to run an effective marketing team. The most important ideas to put into practice are summarized below:

Action Plan

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For more Microsoft Resources please visit the following:

All marketing resources for Microsoft partners: aka.ms/smartmarketing

Advice and training resources: aka.ms/gotomarket

Marketing content: aka.ms/pmc


Message from the Sponsor

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An IDC eBook, Sponsored by Microsoft | July 2018 · 2018-07-31 · Social media presence is table stakes in marketing. While there are seemingly endless options, Microsoft partners