Part 3 of a Series on the Top 10 Trends You Need to Know as a Marketing Professional
Trend #5 – New Forms of Lead Nurturing Pop Up
In 2013, we saw retargeting emerge as a form of lead nurturing. With retargeting, the advertiser drops a cookie on the prospect the first time they visit your site. This cookie enables Google, Adroll, Bizo, and other display advertising networks to present highly relevant and targeted ads to the prospect when they visit a site like the New York Times. This seems like advertising but is really a form of lead nurturing; the objective here is to keep your brand top of mind as the prospect does their own web-based research.
2013 was the year that retargeted really surfaced as a strategy with value for all kinds of marketers, not just those that sold via e-commerce. Expect 2014 to be the year that the major social media platforms – particularly Twitter and LinkedIn pioneer new forms of lead nurturing based on slipping your brands content and valuable calls-to-action into the stream of prospects and potential customers.
This type of lead nurturing doesn’t have a name (yet). You could call it “native advertising” this gets confusing fast. (Not all native advertising is equally benign; some is outright deceptive.) One term with potential: dub sponsored posts, like this one on LinkedIn, “slipstream” marketing because this is marketing designed to slip into the content the prospect is likely to consume.
Regardless of what you call it, this form of marketing works precisely because it is unobtrusive, non-interruptive, and designed to add value in much the same way as seach engine ads ad value.
Prediction
- To ensure the quality of the customer (read: end user) experience, the major networks focus on bringing new capabilities to sponsored posts, including metering / frequency control, improved targeting, and competitive separation between sponsored posts
Trend #6 – Customer Satisfaction Measurement Moves to the Marketing Department
By now, most marketers have heard of Net Promoter Score – the one question you should ask – to measure customer satisfaction. According to Bain & Associates, thousands of innovative companies have adopted Net Promoter Score as a simple and accurate way to assess customer satisfaction. Forward thinking companies know that the best way to calculate Net Promoter Score is to automate the process – from soup (sending out the survey in a targeted manner) to nuts (collecting and displaying the data). Marketing leaders are being asked to take over the process, as part of its leadership role in data-based marketing.
Predictions
- Customer satisfaction measurement moves into the marketing department
- Net Promoter Score continues to dominates the landscape
- Specialized products for Net Promoter Score decline in adoption as more mainstream products – for marketing automation and customer surveys – take their place.
