The world of marketing has become incredibly complex. On top of it, the number and type of marketing tools CMOs have to choose from has exploded. It’s simply not easy to understand where to turn to identify and pick the best tool to solve specific problems.
To better understand the tools that leading CMOs use at work and where they find them, I turned to Josh Steimle, CEO of digital marketing agency MWI. Through in-depth interviews, Steimle was able to get an inside look at the tools that chief marketers at Domo, GE and Spotify use and the rationale behind why they chose them. Below are thoughts from Steimle and quotes from his book, Chief Marketing Officers at Work.
Source: Josh Steimle
Josh Steimle
Whitler: Can you explain how Domo is using marketing tools to drive business results?
Steimle: Domo is big on traditional social networks because social is the name of the marketing tool game. CMO Heather Zynczak said that they’ve seen a big return on their investment via their social channels.
“A large percentage of our revenue comes from leads that are generated off social channels. I think every CMO can tell you social channels are significantly contributing to their revenue. We don’t do anything on social that doesn’t give us results, that doesn’t give us revenue, that doesn’t make us the ROI we need. I think that’s rare and awesome all at the same time,” she said.
Despite image-based social apps such as Snapchat and Instagram being the focus of many marketers to engage their users, Zynczak’s team seems to have found success using more traditional networks.
“LinkedIn has been a great resource for us, mainly because of buyer personas and personalization. You can run very targeted campaigns on LinkedIn. I know if you’re a VP, I know what industry you work in, I know what your title is—whether you have digital marketing, for example, or financial planning in your title. We’ve had times when we were running over a thousand different specific campaigns with unique landing pages off of LinkedIn,” she said.
To add, Zynczak said that Twitter and Facebook have also been extremely useful tools for Domo.
Whitler: How does GE use marketing tools?
Steimle: GE actually connects with startups to find tools that work. “You can’t keep up with everything. What you have to do is pick some and place some bets. But as a team, we can keep up with quite a few of them. I can’t be beyond everything or feel like I know everything, but as a team, we can sort of follow the 80/20 rule,” said Linda Boff, CMO of GE.
She said that her marketing team is trying a number of different activities including bringing in practitioners and creating forums.
“The team did something called GE AppFronts where we brought in a dozen companies that were at the forefront of new applications — Slack was one of them, Wattpad and Poncho,” she said. GE uses these showcases to bring their customers in to see what’s new. By engaging with startup companies, they have access to the latest tools on the market.
“Once a quarter at least, we do an emerging media roundtable, where we bring in companies that are debuting new technologies. We meet with startups all the time and try to keep our finger on what’s going on, pick and choose what it is, where we want to activate and what we want to use. There’s no excuse for not trying to learn what’s out there,” she said.
Whitler: Spotify is a very different business than established and mature GE. How does Spotify use marketing tools?
Steimle: At Spotify, they build their own tools. While GE and Domo are using tools created by startups and tech companies alike, Spotify likes to build things from the ground up.
“I’m building most of those now. For instance, we are building a CRM system pretty much from the ground up. One of the great things about being a tech company is it will be completely integrated into the customer experience, inside the client, inside the app, so we don’t just have a hodgepodge of systems to spam people with. It is personalized,” said CMO Seth Farbman.
The tools that he’s building will evaluate the effectiveness of marketing strategies and also give insight into how consumers feel about the Spotify brand. According to Farbman, the tools will have functions such as social listening and political-style polling.
“We’ve actually purchased a couple of analytical companies that allow us to look at our user data in real time and then extract meaning from it, so I have this wonderful sense of what’s happening inside the client. This allows me to do a couple of things. One is to provide more meaningful, contextual, personalized messaging to people to find the dark corners where we’re not doing so well,” he said.
[“Source-forbes”]