SXSW 2012 Industry Insight: Marketo

Last month, our team had a phenomenal time attending SXSW Interactive in Austin.  Thousands flock to our state capital each year for SXSW to attend the sessions, workshops, and events designed for industry professionals looking to take on (or at least be prepared for) the next "big thing" around the corner.

Before heading back to our offices in Houston, we asked some exhibitors at the SXSW Tradeshow what our users should know is on the horizon for marketing, communication, and interactive initiatives for 2012 and beyond!

Our first nugget of Industry Insight comes from Sandra Freeman with Marketo.   Sandra discusses the importance of marketing automation and how we can expect this aspect of the industry to grow throughout 2012.

(Transcript Provided Below)

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SXSW Interview with Sandra Freeman from Marketo TRANSCRIPT

Sandra Freeman:  I’m Sandra Freeman and I think one of the key things for 2012 is to understand the growing area of marketing automation and how marketers can use that whole technology and automation to improve the lead life cycle.  What I mean by that is really understanding how to drive more leads into the funnel, generating more leads, and then engaging with those leads.  So as an example, we can use marketing automation to e-mail people, to watch what they’re engaging on on your site, what their behaviors are, also tracking social … and then being able to do more with that.

So, letting your sales reps know who’s engaged, so they can call on the hottest leads so that they can close more deals faster.  Keeping up with that is really important and there’s a lot of opportunity out there as more and more businesses are using this technology to drive more leads and ultimately, of course, more revenue.  So as marketers we need to do that to support our sales teams and make them more productive because the sales teams are very expensive resources and you want to cut [wasted time] down so they can spend less time on cold calls and more time talking to the right leads and generating more revenue.

I know that this has been a hard thing is to measure how marketing is doing, but that’s one of the things at Marketo that we’re trying to really strongly focus on is every program has to have a return on investment… and having the tools to be able to do that and saying “this person CAME FROM this booth” (like South By Southwest here today) and how after that they engaged with us and how it moved through the “final.”  Being able to then quantify that and being able to say, “this program resulted in X dollars and that’s why we should invest more in THIS program… or less in this program and more in something else.  So, we strongly believe in that.  We look at all kinds of marketing channels and we analyze that on an ongoing basis and every marketer SHOULD.  But sometimes it’s hard, so you need tools to do that like marketing automation.