Growth Marketing through Hyper Personalization

 

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Growth marketing is about increasing pipeline so the sales organization can be more successful, faster. My guest on this episode of the podcast approaches growth marketing through hyper-personalization. What is that? Imagine yourself driving down the highway and two billboards appear along the road. One is a generic, “buy this product from us” presentation while the other speaks directly to you, addressing a very specific personal need you have. Which are you most drawn to?

Ari Capogeannis is Senior Marketing Director in charge of Demand Generation for Cumulus Networks.The company designs and sells a Linux operating system to deliver networking solutions for large datacenter, cloud computing, and enterprise environments.

. Ari has seen how hyper-personalization —directed at every person within the decision-making unit of mid-market and enterprise businesses — can accelerate sales pipeline with truly qualified leads as well as decrease the time to close. Listen to hear a brief but deep-dive explanation of what hyper-personalized growth marketing could do for your modern marketing strategy.

This episode is sponsored by XANT, the enterprise leader in sales engagement. Xant has authored the Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence. Get your copy at www.SalesCadenceGuide.com

Acquisition, Engagement, Retention: Three Pillars Of Growth Marketing

Ari explains that there are three aspects of growth marketing that must be mastered: 

Acquisition Engagement Retention 

He explains how a hyper-personalized approach to growth marketing can improve the effectiveness of each of these pillars by introducing a new concept: He calls it “Demand Gen 3.0.”

Demand Gen 1.0 is marketing that’s focused on marketing qualified leads (MQLs) which is primarily a volume play with limitations.

Demand Gen 2.0 is focused on generating opportunities within target accounts and managing those opportunities in collaboration with the sales team. It uses scoring models to develop accountability and measure the journey of those opportunities. It’s less about leads. It’s all about driving opportunities at accounts. 

Demand Gen 3.0—which is what Ari is advocating— refers to a holistic approach whereby marketers create a digital experience that addresses specific pain points of each person encountered on the website and other digital channels. Different than 1.0 and 2.0, this 3.0 approach is not just lead gen and it’s not just coming up with scoring models that allow sales teams to be more efficient.

Demand Gen 3.0 is about leveraging the marketing technology stack to deliver messaging that speaks directly to the pain points of the varied members of the decision-making team within a prospective customer's decision-making unit. It’s done by segmenting content according to role and persona and also providing it directly to the sales team for their use.

What Size Marketing Staff Is Required to Hyper-Personalize Marketing This Way?

An approach to growth marketing that dives so deeply into hyper-personalization by personas and buying stages sounds very people intensive. It’s understandable to think that it could require many people. But Ari explains how, by making the right choices about tools within the MarTech stack and centralizing the data, these tasks can be handled by a team of one, two or three people, of course depending on their other responsibilities.

He says you must hone in on the tools that can integrate effectively. You may need to replace four or five separate technologies in your MarTech stack to achieve centralization of data that enables your team to manage personalized messaging. This change will impact everything, including targeting, predictive analytics, sales enablement and more in a way that accelerates your ability to be effective in this growth marketing strategy.

Effectively Passing Personalized Assets To The Sales Organization

By using this streamlined set of predictive analytics tools and other MarTech solutions, Ari's team can discover insights about the prospect’s buying journey, both on and off the company’s website.

Off-site: Are people researching key brand terms or other terms related to the products that Cumulus Networks sells? Are they exhibiting behavior that indicates an interest in the company’s offerings? 

On-site: Ari's team can tell exactly when people from matched accounts are hitting the website each day, tie it to a sales territory, and arrange to sort each one by sales engagement stage. Then he can identify leads that indicate buying intent and provide them to the appropriate person in the sales organization. The integrated and centralized way the tech stack works enables sales to understand the content paths they should use—by vertical, purchase intent, stage, who they are competing against, etc.

Ari refers to this as “People-Based Marketing”—it IS ABM but not focused on the account, it’s focused on the people within the account’s decision-making unit. Among the many results, Ari says that this hyper-personalization reduces time to close by as much as 50%. That’s impressive. Listen to this episode to hear first-hand from Ari about growth marketing through hyper-personalization. 

 

Featured on This Episode Connect with Ari Capogeannis on LinkedIn Follow Ari on Twitter: @Capogeannis Cumulus Networks - where Ari serves as Senior Marketing Director Outline of This Episode [1:39] Ari’s role and goals at Cumulus Networks [3:05] Why should growth marketing take place through hyper personalization? [7:48] Unpacking the tools and approach underneath Demand Gen 3.0 [10:03] What impact does this approach have on a marketing staff? ]17:03] Reviewing metrics of prospects and decision-makers [27:50] Metrics that show the effectiveness of these growth marketing approaches 

Resources & People Mentioned

This episode is sponsored by XANT, the enterprise leader in sales engagement. Xant has authored the Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence. Get your copy at www.SalesCadenceGuide.com

The Modern Selling Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr Connect With Bernie and Modern Marketing Engine https://www.Facebook.com/modernmarketingengine/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernieborges/ https://twitter.com/bernieborges https://instagram.com/bernieborges https://Twitter.com/MMEnginePodcast Subscribe to Modern Marketing Engine on your app of choice