Sales techniques and marketing strategies have been evolving and prospering at a rapid pace since the last decade. Automation technology, data availability, and online advertising have spearheaded businesses into an era of smarter, faster, and better operations and results. But while these tools make your life so much easier, they possess great potential to make the lives of your B2B buyers harder. Rigorous calls, incessant emails, and recurring marketing campaigns can intrude on customers to the point of intense frustration and downright disgust.
For instance, Americans received 26.3 billion robocalls in 2018, with 80% of them reporting online ads as evasive and annoying. This led to a big backlash against major corporations. The situation is only made worse by the intense pressure on departments to expand the business, which leads to inefficient and chaotic sales and marketing processes. A constant sword of daily sales targets hanging on the neck of marketers and salespeople leads to “spray and pray” emails, cold calls, SMSs, ads, and disingenuous claims. This is where Marketing Orchestration comes in to save the day.
Marketing Orchestration – The Solution
Moving away from the focus on singular campaigns that are aggressive and forceful, Marketing Orchestration prioritizes harmonious interactions that are curated and thoughtful. While one stresses on quantity, the other does on quality. Harnessing the power of data, an orchestrated approach synchronizes both AI and human outreach to craft individualized interactions at every step of the customer journey.
Like a conductor coordinating an orchestra across instruments and melodies, Marketing Orchestration harmonizes the music of marketing and sales efforts to bring unified business growth across people and platforms. When done well, it gets all team members to work in tandem towards a common goal, realizing the best outcomes in key accounts.
CMOs today don’t have the luxury to be stuck in the mire of “more is better” attempts of engaging with customers. They need to evolve past the mentality of maximizing leads and transition to the habit of nurturing leads. They have to rise beyond anything and everything-under-the-sun (e-mails, calls, ads, events, etc.) marketing approach to grab customers’ attention and adopt a more selective one.
That’s not to say that you should altogether abandon the tools that have been more or less working for you so far. The need of the hour is a more thoughtful and orchestrated approach for making use of these tools. This, of course, doesn’t happen overnight. Every business’ marketing and sales practices are unique, and they need to be perfected through trial and error. Consulting orchestration experts is also a great way to align your marketing and sales and find which strategies work best for your product or service.
Marketing Orchestration – The Benefits
- More Revenue – Orchestrated marketing means a more personalized and more pleasant buying experience. The better your customer experience, the more your business revenue.
- More Pipelines – Marketing Orchestration prioritizes expansive and accurate data collection. This allows teams to harness instant and real-time changes – how, when, and where they reach out to every customer, and have concrete data available at all times to have a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t.
- More Sales & Marketing Alignment – An orchestrated approach has a ripple effect across all business fractions and not just marketing. Improved data visibility and increased accountability streamline communication across all departments, helping them function as one big unit. For instance, this results in sales having all-time visibility in what marketing comms a prospect has accessed, and marketing to have any time visibility in how to more effectively target the best audiences.
Marketing Orchestration – The Practice
To understand how Marketing Orchestration looks like in practice, we must turn to how it has been classically defined:
“A powerful approach in marketing automation and ABM. It focuses not on delivering standalone campaigns but on optimizing a set of related cross-channel interactions that together make up an individualized customer experience.”
An approach that emphasizes cross-channel marketing and an improved focus on personalized experiences needs businesses to boost how they collect and deal with data. Through cookies and other advanced tracking tech, Marketing Orchestration establishes a unified and singular identity for every prospect across touchpoints. This is brought about through the capturing and merging of data with the help of third-party sources.
When put to effective practice, Marketing Orchestration:
- Collects and organizes data efficiently
- Curates data and removes redundancies
- Creates a reliable list of leads and update account info
- Builds personas and profiles that match the best accounts to the best leads
- Synchronizes data across systems and channels
Also Read: What Is Engagement Design & Why You Need It
What Constitutes Marketing Orchestration
Marketing Orchestration, like all successful marketing strategies, is made up of two parts. First comes effective planning, then comes effective execution. Here’s what constitutes marketing orchestration on paper and in reality:
Part 1 – Strategic Consultation
It’s all about planning and research. During this phase, you envision what style of orchestration will fit your business better and explore the best ways to make it work well.
This includes activities such as:
- Redefining product & services
- Building ideal customer profiles and user personas
- Finding the right product market fit
- Creating customer segmentations
- Mapping customer journeys
- Determining KPIs and tools required
…among others.
Part 2 – System Beyond Automation
Once your orchestration plan is set and ready, it’s time for implementation and deployment. Remember that this phase involves more than just automation; the core aim is to set up all the systems in place that make all your channels work in proper harmony. It’s called Marketing ‘Orchestration’ for a reason.
This includes activities such as:
- Setting up engagement core
- Account and contact profiling
- CRM and sales integration
- Setting up marketing automation and workflows
- Nurturing emails and designing landing pages
- Chatflow/form/source configuration
- KPIs and Analytics setup
…among others.
CONCLUSION
So in a nutshell – like the skilled instrumentalists of an orchestra, Marketing Orchestration enables your team members to pick up data and make sales plays like pros.