Tales from Modern Marketers

This past week, we had our 2016 sales kickoff right here in TechTarget’s Newton headquarters. This time of year is a time of excitement and optimism moving into a new year. Each and every year we look for new ways to help our customers, technology marketers, achieve more success and drive better results with their marketing programs and strategies.

As the marketing world gets more and more sophisticated, it is important to understand the universal needs and challenges we are all facing. In order to get more insight, we held a panel to help us understand what keeps modern marketers up at night. TechTarget VP of Field & Product Marketing Courtney Kay moderated a panel of modern marketers from a number of prominent companies.

Look out for in-depth insight into what each of these marketers face in future posts, but for now, here are 3 universal challenges facing marketers.

3 challenges that face modern marketers

1. Explosion of marketing tools – The best thing to happen to marketers in the last decade has been the advent of technology to help with things like marketing automation, data analysis, and program management. But what distinguishes one from the other? The space has gotten so crowded with tools, that it can be a full time job managing technology within your own environment, much less gain any competitive advantage from it. One panelist commented that she has 22 tools running currently.
   In order to find success, marketers must take a hard look at technology relative to their current environment and process. There are alot of best of breed solutions out there, but they mean very little if they cannot fit into with your workflow. Making sure new technologies have connection points with other tools and systems within your environment as well as help you address current gaps in your approach/delivery is essential.
2. Using data and analytics to their fullest advantage – Data is a very powerful asset for marketers and helps you understand everything you can about your prospects. Not just who they are, but what they have done. This is essential for informing lead scoring models, managing personas, or getting a better handle on attribution. Some of the marketers on our panel are using predictive analytics to get more insight into users who are not yet in their funnel or have yet to become MQLs. However, data is only as good as what you can effectively use. You can track just about anything these days, but marketers must make sure they are analyzing the data that will help them measure relative to their goals.
3. Getting on the same page with sales – This is not new to modern marketers, but it continues to be a challenge. Making sure you are on the same page with sales doesn’t involve throwing leads over the wall and it’s not just about what the data is telling you is a good prospect. Sit down with sales and map out your lead definitions and get real feedback on what their ideal buyer is. Marketing should help sales narrow down accounts and hone in on what is effective rather than push leads on them. If you show that you can understand what they want and deliver it, than they will come to you. As one panelist said, it is more important to get pull from sales than push from marketing.

These are just a few challenges that marketers are faced with. We will be profiling each of our featured panelists and how they are addressing these challenges in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we would love to hear what your current marketing challenges are. Feel free to leave a comment or connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Modern marketer image via Shutterstock.