Marketing is pivoting. Yes, you’ve heard it before and you will hear it again: traditional marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. It has been happening for the last 20 years.
Remember banner blindness, the rise and fall of cold calling and drip campaigns? None of these things have disappeared, but their effectiveness has declined as the market got saturated. The constant evolution makes our jobs both challenging and exciting!
One of the most ROI-effective strategies right now is Account Based Selling (or account-based marketing) with carefully crafted account plans, hyper-personalized messaging, and beautifully orchestrated sales and marketing collaboration. But the communication channels are clogged with an overwhelming amount of content, which challenges the effectiveness of this approach, especially for those in sales.
Content / Channel Overload
Let’s start with the content. IBM stated 4 years ago that 90% of the world’s data had been created in the past two years. This is a flabbergasting fact, considering content marketing as a concept is almost 300 years old. NOTE: In 1732 Benjamin Franklin published the first annual Poor Richard’s Almanack to promote his printing business. But as content became more digital, it became available in more forms and new channels of communication opened.
Now marketers can deliver digital communication not just as text, but infographics, animation, and of course video. So on top of delivering the same content in multiple forms, we now have account-based communications added to the mix. Now we must multiply this content as it gets personalized to fit the needs and languages of specific accounts and segments of the market. And as we reshare all that content, we further contribute to the multiple variations of it. Suddenly that 90% number begins to look a lot more logical, doesn’t it?
And what about channels? The more forms of content there are, the more commercialized those channels become, the more they are perceived as noisy and suspicious.
I remember very well the effect of the increasing banner blindness on the internet agency I worked for back in Europe in the late 90s. Around ‘98-99 we started rapidly losing users’ attention, and no amount of creative imagery, switching from animated gifs to Flash, or increasing color contrast could stop that trend.
By 2001 we dropped from an average of 1% CTR to below 0.5%. That’s a 50% ROI loss. Then email nurturing and cold calling sequences rolled out almost globally in the mid 00s. That lasted for a short bit. But today an average business person receives around 120 daily emails, and the success of cold-calling appointment setting is barely at 2.5%.
On top of that, companies like Yelp, Amazon and Google reviews taught us a different buying behavior. We no longer trust what brands tell us about themselves. We look at reviews and ratings before we make decisions. We want to see endorsements, references and recommendations. We trust what our peers say about their experience with brands and vendors.
What’s the Answer?
So how do sales and marketing teams adapt to all these changes? One of the responses to the market is “social selling.” Per HBR’s study, “nearly 60% of a typical purchasing decision… happens before even having a conversation with a supplier.” There are many reasons why that is working: it’s a less cluttered channel; it’s a pier-to-pier network, but most importantly, it allows people to build authentic relationships. According to the research by the University of British Columbia, a direct correlation exists between the number of incidental similarities between the buyer and the seller, and the likelihood of a successful commercial transaction.
In this context, social selling means sales people building and nurturing relationships with their networks by sharing personal, relevant, often non-marketing content that is valuable for their existing and future customers. Through this sharing over time, they are able to express their values, build a human connection and show that there is a real person with a unique personality behind their professional profile. And mixing up personal and business content, sales professionals can also build their professional brand and become much more relatable and convincing, making their networks more likely to consider doing business with them.
And as we already established, there is no lack of different content, both, personal, and professional. But this brings about another challenge. With those copious amounts of content floating in the ether, do sales people have the means of curating, let alone personalizing it for their networks? Of course, you can – and should – put the function of curating professional content on the marketing team. But all that content marketing noise is already drowning out real communication. Besides, what about that personal content, which, according to the most successful companies that employ social content strategies, comprises at least ¾ of all sales-published social content? No marketing team can curate that volume, especially for larger organizations with hundreds of sales people.
Enter Artificial Intelligence
It wasn’t until the recent rise of AI that the level of content personalization became scalable. And that changed the game.
I realize it sounds strange, if not contradictory, that AI is becoming a bigger factor in enhancing interpersonal human relationships. But when it comes to sales engagement, it really does! Machine learning can analyze high volumes of daily content and track content engagement, allowing AI to help marketers and sales prioritize their conversations based on a variety of data-rich factors, such as behavior, past engagement, trends, and so on. AI-enabled content management informs humans how to focus on the most relevant content for each conversation in their network. It also factors in where their contact is in the buyer’s journey. Simply put, this advises sales professionals how to share the most relevant content on their social networks and avoid sending irrelevant, irritating information.
“AI is the modern-day equivalent of the industrial revolution. Instead of improving the output of things (by reducing waste in the manufacturing process), AI improves the output of humans (by reducing waste in the sales process and by producing information and insight that helps them perform at their peak),” said Nancy Nardin, CEO of Smart Selling Tools, in the DemandGen Report “The State Of AI-Fueled Sales Enablement.”
Conclusion
In today’s digital marketing world, AI is often used to leverage analytics and close the resource gaps. It’s basically inevitable: three out of four marketers interviewed for a PwC study stated that AI provides a “business advantage” for their marketing strategies. True leaders of digital transformation in their respective industries, companies like SAP and Guardian Life, have been successfully using AI-powered content marketing strategies to nurture relationships and drive revenue across the entire customer journey for years.
Sales is still focusing on building the relationships to acquire new customers and often encourage repeat sales, while marketing becomes the true sales enabler. Marketing continues to lead the charge on creating and curating content strategies that empower sales. And now with AI-fueled content they allow sales to build trust and earn thought leadership. With this level of personalization, every sales rep can build their unique personal and professional brands, while reinforcing the corporate brand that they represent.
About the Author: Paul Odnoletkov is Marketing Director at Grapevine6. With over 20 years of experience in Europe, USA and Canada executing go-to-market strategies and building marketing teams that take high-growth technology companies to their next level, Paul is an advocate for innovative business approaches such as Account-Based Marketing, Hyper-personalization and Social Selling. He has earned his B.Comm degree from the State Institute Of Technology in St. Petersburg, Russia.