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Act-On Introduces Integrated Workspace to Extend Marketing Automation Beyond Demand Generation

Act-On Software announced the availability of its integrated workspace to support the growing demands of CMOs beyond acquisition of net-new leads — with added functionality for brand marketing and customer marketing.

It’s Time to Rethink Marketing — New Research Shows Top Performing Companies Make a Balanced Investment Across the Marketing Disciplines: Brand, Demand, & Customer
PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – April 18, 2016) – Act-On Software, the leading provider of marketing automation for fast-growing businesses, today announced the availability of its integrated workspace to support the growing demands of CMOs beyond acquisition of net-new leads — with added functionality for brand marketing and customer marketing.

Act-On’s continued innovation is empowering its customers to apply marketing automation functionality — segmentation, scoring, and nurturing, to other areas beyond acquisition marketing, including influencer relations, human resources, customer retention, and customer advocacy.

Since the inception of digital marketing, the pendulum has swung from Don Draper-style marketing with a mono-focus on branding and creative to a focus on data-driven, demand generation. Act-On recently conducted a survey to see where the pendulum rests today, and if marketing is really all demand generation. The survey interviewed 250 senior level marketers from US based B2B and B2C companies to understand the value placed on brand, demand, and customer marketing as well as how budget and staff are being allocated across the three marketing disciplines.

The role of the CMO is not to be demand gen-centric, but instead to be the steward of the brand and to facilitate the customer experience across the entire lifecycle. A CMO must focus her efforts across all three functions of the marketing department — awareness, acquisition, and retention.

The results produced two key take-aways. Balance does exist. The majority of companies (87 percent) spend more time in other functions of marketing besides demand generation. Secondly, top performing companies (those that met or exceeded revenue expectations in the last fiscal year) spend less time on demand generation than underperforming companies. Despite this balanced approach to marketing, marketers are not taking advantage of marketing automation outside of demand generation.

Demand generation has been marketing’s golden child and the main use case for marketing automation for more than a decade. While demand generation is still a critical component to growth, CMOs must go beyond that and rethink their approach to marketing — looking holistically at marketing automation’s relationship to the customer experience and its role in brand awareness, demand generation, and customer retention & loyalty.

New use cases for Act-On Marketing Automation include:

Brand Marketing —

· Influencer Relations — Track and score press, analysts, and bloggers so you can see who your most engaged and interested influencers are. Be aware of the pages they visit on your site, what they’re interested in, and the emails (pitches, press releases, events) they are engaging with. Use this intelligence to prioritize who you pitch and what your talk track is.

· Press Release Attribution — Sales can come from press releases so create trackable URLs to tie public relations activity back the to lead-to-revenue process. Look at multi-touch attribution and how press releases contribute to the sale.

· Corporate/Internal Communications — Create and execute internal newsletters and emails, and be able to track employee engagement. Also, identify and nurture prospective employees.

· Brand Identity Management — Marketing automation can help your corporate marketing team control the visuals, including brand look and feel, logo usage, and header/footers. Create approved templates, and then distribute them in the media library for other marketing and sales departments to use.

· Event Management — Make the most of events. Know who to invite, and manage all communications before and after, with more precision and less effort. Create an automated workflow (save the date, official invite, seats are limited, registration responder and follow-up reminders) to make it easy, then re-use and refine the workflow for the next event.

Customer Marketing —

· New Customer Onboarding — Refine your onboarding to the most effective process, and automate it with 30-, 60-, and 90-day on-boarding drip programs.

· Expand Product Usage — Use newsletters and new feature announcements to keep your customers in the loop, and let them know their satisfaction matters.

· New Feature Promotion — Help your customers become power users. Automate all the communications around these online events.

· Customer Retention — Measure product consumption and trigger communication based on feature/non-feature use.

· Satisfaction Surveys — Deploy surveys and invite customers to analyze the results.

· Upsell/Cross-Sell — Leverage marketing automation, CRM, and ERP data to understand when a buyer is ready for an upsell. Look at pages visited, datasheets downloaded, and contract renewal information and payment history, and tie it to engagement data to understand when to reach out on an upsell or cross-sell.

· Advocacy/Loyalty — Apply a score to customer behavior and engagement to understand who your advocates and most loyal customers are. As an example, you can apply a score for webinar attendance, event registration, social engagement, emails opened, references given, user groups attended, etc.

“The role of the CMO today is more strategic than ever, and as a result has a bigger presence at the table,” said Kevin Bobowski, CMO of Act-On Software. “Not only must a CMO build a high-performance demand generation machine, they must also act as the chief experience officer and brand steward. Therefore, it is time for CMOs to rethink how marketing automation is used across the marketing organization to build brand awareness and deliver an exceptional customer experience.”

Visit the Rethink Marketing page to access the full report.

About Act-On Software

Act-On Software is a marketing automation company delivering innovation that empowers marketers to do the best work of their careers. Act-On is the only integrated workspace that powers the customer experience from end-to-end. From brand awareness and demand generation, to retention and loyalty, With Act-On, marketers can drive better business outcomes and see higher customer lifetime value. Act-On is squarely focused on the success of its customers and offers consultant level quality with everyday customer support. Act-On Software has been recognized for its superior product and rapid business growth by Deloitte, Forbes, and Inc. Magazine. For more information, visit act-on.com.