UCLA Health  faced challenges with the integration of two Eloqua instances. While quick integration was implemented to send global unsubscribes, it caused several problems such as an increase in contact volume, compliance risk, and cumbersome manual solutions. UCLA Health approached Sojourn Solutions to find a new solution that could integrate subscription data between the two systems, ensure data alignment and consistency, limit the creation of net new contacts, and eliminate manual list scrubbing.  In this post, we'll take a closer look at the challenge and the solution designed by Sojourn that helped UCLA Health stay within their contract threshold limit and eliminate the risk of emailing unsubscribed contacts. The Challenge UCLA Health implemented a second instance of Eloqua in 2021 to allow their Strategic Marketing team to do larger list purchases and outreach to net new prospective patients without harming the domain of their main patient instance of Eloqua. When this second Eloqua instance was implemented, some quick integration leveraging form reposts was implemented to send global unsubscribes between instances by simply creating mirror contacts in each instance. However, in this case, quick didn’t mean better. The initial integration created several problems: First, when recording the unsubscribe in the secondary instance, the process created unnecessary net new contacts and increased UCLA Health’s Eloqua contact volume, causing them to go over their contract threshold. A more important problem was that the quick integration didn’t take into consideration when a contact changed his or her subscription preferences, which added a huge compliance risk.   Finally, the manual solution designed to manage and vet the subscription data against the two systems was too cumbersome to continue. The Solution UCLA Health challenged their marketing operations consulting partner, Sojourn Solutions, to find a new solution to not only integrate the global subscription data between the two systems, but to also: Ensure data alignment and consistency of Global Subscription preference status (Unsubscribed AND Subscribed) between UCLA Health’s two Eloqua instances; Keep the overall contact volume in mind and limit the creation of net new contacts that are not needed in the opposite instance; Ensure if a record is deleted, and later re-created, their previous subscription status remains; Eliminate the need to manually scrub list purchases against the older “Main” instance of Eloqua before uploading into the new “Strategic Marketing” instance of Eloqua. So how did Sojourn achieve all this? A Program Canvas was created using the Form Submit App. The Program sends the most up-to-date subscription status data to the opposite instance of Eloqua. That data is received using a new form, created specifically for subscription status updates, which in turn creates a full set of new contacts. Once the new contacts are received, the program triggers necessary processing rules to find and match any contact records and update the subscription field. Once the fields are updated, then a secondary program automatically deletes the net new contacts from the contact table. The Results The new integration eliminated hours of monotonous, time-consuming manual work to compare lists against each instance of Eloqua to ensure an accurate reflection of global subscription data. Instead, UCLA Health was able to quality control all of the contacts in the Strategic Marketing instance of Eloqua and delete all unnecessary contacts that were previously created just to log the unsubscribe. By implementing the solution, UCLA Health was able to stay within their contract threshold limit and remove the risk of emailing unsubscribed contacts they should not be reaching out to, saving UCLA Health both time and resources while enhancing their contact data reliability and engagement quality. To learn more about how Sojourn can help you improve data quality plus engagement quality - while staying within contracted thresholds - for your organization,  contact us  today.

Steve McConnell is a Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions with 10 years marketing experience specializing in marketing operations, sales enablement, CRM integration, and system and data management. He's a certified Eloqua B2B Implementation Specialist with over 8 years experience in the platform. Steve loves training and empowering Eloqua users to do new and existing things - and as for himself, loves making Eloqua do backflips!    Why you have no choice when it comes to data removals and email deliverability There is no more fundamental law in nature than entropy; the tendency for things to fall apart over time. The law’s infallibility was captured in the famous quote from British scientist Arthur Eddington: “The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” As it is in the Universe, so it is in your marketing database. “Yes, yes,” I hear you say, “everyone knows you need to look after your database - data cleansing, field completeness – I’m already doing that!” And that’s probably true – most companies have at least some form of contact washing machine program in place. But do you fully understand the implications of data being left in your database over a long enough period? Introducing Spam Traps Do you have any email addresses that you no longer use – including email addresses from a previous job? If you do, there is a good chance that one of those email addresses is now a spam trap. In order to detect spam senders, ISPs (including Gmail and Outlook) convert old email addresses that have been inactive for a long time into Spam Traps. Any emails sent to these inactive email addresses are immediately considered to be spam, since the only way you’d have that old email address is from failure to remove bad data from your email database, or purchasing an old address from a poor-quality data supplier. You read that right – over time, every email address in your database has the potential to turn into a spam trap, even those of previous customers. If you do not take measures to detect and remove these addresses from your database, you will eventually hit a spam trap, and see your deliverability start to reduce. What’s worse, you may not even detect this has happened unless you are using an enterprise deliverability solution to monitor inbox placement. The Best Disinfectant Did you know that we don’t actually get net energy from the Sun? It’s true – if we did, the Earth would cook pretty quickly with all that heat building up! What we get from the Sun is less entropy . Natural systems which appear stable and permanent (like the Gulf Stream for example) require energy to maintain and not destabilize over time. Life on Earth takes energy from the Sun and expends it to build new structures, organize cells, rearrange their environment – and clean up their email database! Removing contacts from your email database can seem scary at first, but as we pointed out in the first part of this article, you simply do not have a choice. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and by removing old, inactive email addresses from your system, you are not only preventing the appearance of spam traps, but you should see your most important performance metrics increase. Inactive recipients can only ever push your open, click and conversion rates down, and it is these metrics which are most important for email marketing strategies. Getting Started If you are already following best practice when it comes to removing inactive contacts, you are ahead of the game. As long as you are not purchasing data from poor-quality sources then you shouldn’t have too much of a problem. However, if you have not practiced removing data from your audience historically, your database may already have fallen victim to entropy and be full of undetected spam traps. In this situation, you may need to use third party tools to identify these addresses, and to get an accurate view of whether your emails are falling into promotions, social, or the person’s main inbox. Whatever your current practices though – make sure you are removing inactive emails from your database, and make sure you are avoiding (in the words of Arthur Eddington) “deepest humiliation” when it comes to your email deliverability. Questions? Contact us to learn more about how to improve your email deliverability and overall email marketing performance.

Since its widespread adoption in the 1990s, email has typically been the most effective and most widely-used communication channel for B2B marketers. That’s especially true when it comes to promoting B2B events, whether they’re virtual, in-person, or hybrid.  That said, the biggest challenge B2B event marketers face with email is the same challenge all marketers face: how to reach the right customers with relevant messaging that will convince them to act (in this case, by registering for the big event).  If you had an email list of over a million contacts, and you were asking them to register for the same event, you wouldn’t want them all to receive the exact same message. That simply wouldn’t lead to optimized engagement . . .and could even feel spammy. After all, people might participate in the event for different reasons and may want to attend different event sessions/speakers that address their different functional needs (such as to learn new skills or to network with other professionals in similar roles). Ideally, an engaging email message should address those different audiences and their diverse needs.  The challenge: Leveraging email to drive more event registrations  A well-known global communication and collaboration firm organizes an annual event that brings together tens of thousands of professionals from an array of industries and functions, including marketing, sales, and beyond. The communications and collaboration company (hereinafter, “the client company”) uses its annual big event to build a customer community, launch new offerings, and generally promote its global brand. The company reached out to Sojourn Solutions for help. The client company’s primary objective was to optimize its email program supporting the event, which was virtual in 2022, and build upon the past success of its email channel, which had driven 54% of total event registrants the previous year (2021). The client company leveraged four instances of Marketo. It also worked with multiple outside agencies and stakeholders to support promotion of the big event. While the client company had 1.3 million records/contacts, some of those records had missing or unreliable data fields such as “industry.” This missing/unreliable data meant the client company couldn't personalize its email messaging by industry. To further complicate matters, some of the client company’s managers were taking vacations at critical times around the email campaign’s launch, which had the potential to create delays or quality control concerns. And due to the just-launched Russian military invasion of Ukraine, messaging had to be altered at the last minute to ensure that the email’s tone was sensitive and considerate, especially for European recipients.  Finally, the organization of the big event also posed challenges, as sessions were typically more focused on the solutions offered by the client company rather than the specific Industries or roles the email recipients worked in. What’s true for shoes and hats is also true for events: one size does not necessarily fit everyone. The solution: More personalization leads to more event registrations  Sojourn worked closely with the client company to define a strategy for its email campaign, one that would enable more personalization/relevance in order to drive more registrations. Sojourn began by pulling all relevant contact/email recipient data into one place, PowerBI. It then made two big recommendations to the client company to facilitate increased email personalization: 1. On tactics and strategy.  Sojourn looked broadly at what messages were being sent to which recipients. “We believed that if the client company leveraged its available data to improve personalization and address the specific needs of multiple customer segments and personas, it would lead to increases in email open rates and more registrations,” said June Dean , Marketing Automation Consultant, Sojourn Solutions. The client company’s 1.3 million email recipients were grouped into five different and distinct “journey types” for the big event. Using the client company’s available data, Sojourn considered the function and role of each recipient, as well as the contact’s job level (junior, senior, or mid-level) and decision-making authority (were they on the execution/practitioner side and/or decision-makers?). Sojourn created two different “persona types” among email recipients; (1) Decision Maker and (2) Practitioner. From a campaign standpoint, outgoing email messages would recommend what sessions the recipients should attend, based on their distinct journey type and persona, and then help recipients pull out a specific value proposition for their particular needs.  The main idea was to tailor the email message to make it easier for email recipients to decide whether or not to attend the event. Not only were the emails tailored to address recipients’ personalized needs, but so was the event experience itself, which was tailored to different journey types and personas. 2. Campaign Execution.  Sojourn also recommended how the emails would be sent, working with the client company to create a more efficient and automated process to get all these different, more personalized emails built, QA tested, and delivered on time and on budget. Sojourn and the client company built out emails with 57 variations, in three different languages, using Velocity Script for efficiency as it meant content could dynamically be laid out, depending on the personalization required from the data. Additionally, A/B Testing was used on the subject line across the multiple language versions to help optimize performance. Sojourn did all the coding for the emails. Since there were four instances of Marketo, it also gave the emails, code, and instructions to another agency to manage, offering support as needed. Tracking links were added to all emails to determine what registrants were coming from what emails, as a way to prove and improve campaign performance. The results: 10% more registrations, cost savings  The bottom line result of the “personalization” email solution was a 10% increase in overall email channel performance, with 64% of event registrants coming from email in 2022 compared to 54% in 2021. In terms of raw numbers, about 2,400 more email recipients registered for the big event in 2022 versus 2021. The cost of each additional event registrant was only $8 per registrant. The campaign also effectively accommodated shorter timeframes around the launch and also addressed the “tone issues” created by the just-launched Russian invasion of Ukraine. “In the end,” says Dean, “the personalized emails simply performed better, garnering higher open rates, better engagement, and more registrations because they were more relevant in addressing the specific needs of different recipients.” In all, 57 dynamic versions of emails were sent to 1.3 million email recipients. While this “send volume” was indeed impressive, the quality of recipient engagement was even more so. For help in improving your “ data readiness ” to drive email personalization efforts, reach out to us here  for help.

UCLA Health  prides itself on providing the best patient experience every time - a commitment that the Digital Marketing team takes seriously. The team knew that leveraging their vast patient database to produce highly personalized communications was a no-brainer. But first? They needed an easy way to manage contacts with complex many-to-one relationships to ensure the right message was addressed to the right individual. They reached out to Sojourn Solutions for help solving the issue.  In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at how UCLA Health utilized Eloqua  and the 4Thought Many-to-One Email Cloud App  to improve their transactional patient marketing.  The Challenge UCLA Health wanted to send highly personalized messages to its patients. On the surface, they had everything they needed to do this. Each day, their Office of Health Informatics and Analytics (OHIA) team would send a daily feed of patient data to Eloqua (suppressing certain records with restricted flags as needed). Each patient has a unique encrypted patient identification code in OHIA and a valid, though not necessarily unique, email address. Eloqua – by design – uses email address as the unique identifier. UCLA Health faced a specific and difficult challenge: find a way to manage duplicate email addresses to accommodate multiple family members who share a single email address while still sending the right message to the right person. Patients occasionally share email addresses. For instance, a parent might use their own email address for information not just about his or herself but also for his or her child. For example, Jane Doe and her son John are both active patients. Jane and her son each have their unique patient identification code, but they both use Jane’s email address. UCLA Health wanted to remind both of them to get their COVID-19 booster, which ideally would generate two separate emails: one addressed to Jane/herself, and one for John. UCLA Health simply couldn’t personalize the message with the old system. So when OHIA sent data to Eloqua, Eloqua was simply updating the single contact record with the most recent patient data available for that email address. As a result, individual patient data was mixed together, which made it impossible to identify who was who in Eloqua and prevented UCLA Health from personalizing any message specific to a unique individual.  Bottom line? This problem prevented them from sending an email to all applicable patients at that email address regarding a clinical update (e.g., COVID vaccine eligibility) using even simple personalization such as patient First Name. The Solution First, Sojourn addressed the data, recommending integrating UCLA Health’s Eloqua instance with the 4Thought Many-to-One Email Cloud App. This allowed for management of the complex, many-to-one relationships and enabled seamless updates to the unique patient’s contact by leveraging Eloqua’s Custom Object data. That capability hadn’t previously existed for UCLA Health.  Once the data was addressed, the next steps were as follows -  Once the app was installed, it was then time to set up all the necessary assets and components such as new contact and custom object fields. This allowed the app to work appropriately with the necessary data. Next, the related template campaign canvas flows were updated to ensure that the new campaigns would act properly. Once the necessary configuration and campaign pieces in place, Sojourn worked with OHIA to update the daily data feed into Eloqua to migrate the storage of patient data from Eloqua’s Contact table to the new Custom Object. After testing and troubleshooting, Sojourn fully documented the new data integration process. With the new integration in place, it was also time to document the changes in the patient communications process. This included new steps for appropriate segmentation, campaign canvas and app configuration. The final step was to document how the team could finally use personalization in their patient messaging. The Results The results to date have been impressive. The Digital Marketing team saved hours of time in monotonous, manual work. But more importantly, the personalized messaging significantly improved response rates, which helped reinforce their goal of a superior patient experience every time. UCLA Health is now able to deploy their transactional patient communications in a much simpler and efficient manner, while ensuring each patient receives the appropriate email(s) (even if the same email address is included more than once in the list). The straightforward configuration allows their email specialist to build and execute the campaigns herself. Emails deploy to more than 50k patients within minutes and the UCLA/OHIA team is able to easily reference standard campaign-level reporting. Since patient communication is now more personalized, overall patient engagement has been enhanced.  To learn more about how Sojourn can help you improve personalized email messaging for your organization, contact us  today.

Data is the fuel that powers modern marketing, enabling better understanding of customer needs that leads to better engagement, better content, and better marketing tools/approaches. Data by itself is useless, however, without a mature data management infrastructure of people, processes, and technology in place to turn raw data into actionable insight that drives better engagement and improved ROI. Our “Data and Insight Series” focuses on building that mature data infrastructure. In this post, we examine a customer success story involving data and insight.   Getac, a multinational B2B technology company that specializes in rugged computers, mobile video systems, mechanical components, automotive parts, and aerospace fasteners, has adopted a 1st-party cookie strategy in order to improve its ad targeting. This move has resulted in a 55% increase in data targeting efficiency which has led to a greatly improved marketing ROI. Getac's 1st-party cookie strategy allows it to target ads more effectively by leveraging customer data collected from its own Getac website.  The 1st-party data is then used to target ads to users who are more likely to purchase the products or services that Getac offers. The result is a more efficient and effective advertising campaign that generates more leads and sales for the company, allowing Getac to get more bang for its marketing/advertising buck. A brief refresher: 3 types of customer data First-party data/cookies  originate directly from customers, and are collected within a brand’s domain/company website (usually through enabling tracking) in order to support a website transaction, or as a support or service requirement.  Second-party data/cookies  are typically someone else's 1st-party data: it’s data your organization has purchased from another organization or that’s been shared with you through a data partnership arrangement. Third-party data/cookies  are collected outside your brand’s domain/company website from a variety of sources, such as a customer’s (cross-domain) browsing history. This data is typically collected from 3rd-party cookie tracking, a functionality that is now quickly disappearing (more on that later). Why Getac adopted a 1st-party cookie strategy Getac had been using 3rd-party cookies, but found that they were not as accurate or effective for their ad targeting needs. Third-party cookies are placed on users' browsers and enable the tracking of users' online activity beyond the visit to a first-domain website (in this case, the Getac website). Emerging security and privacy regulations, along with changes from big operating systems (like Apple and Google), have ensured more data privacy, but have also resulted in 3rd-party cookies increasingly being blocked, making a user’s digital activity anonymous. Adding to these big challenges, Getac couldn't segment against its website visitors because Eloqua tracking scripts weren't set up correctly or applied to all pages. As a result, there was not enough information on known contacts to understand what website pages they had visited for future Lead Model proposals and Sales conversations. Getac simply couldn't launch multiple, planned nurture campaigns in order to support their buyer journey because they couldn't set up a decision step and use targeted data to push people down the nurturing/learning path. Those challenges resulted in limited visibility into customer intent signals and more wasted ad spend due to poor targeting. How Getac’s 1st-party cookie strategy works Getac set up their strategy in the following way: 1. 1st party cookies are placed on a website by the website itself and allow the website to track a user’s online activity. As mentioned before, 1st-party cookies are not impacted by cookie blockers, so they provide more accurate and identifiable data than 3rd party cookies do. 2. Getac set up Eloqua's 1st party cookie integration , which was easy to set up and offers a seamless experience for collecting and leveraging 1st-party cookies. To implement tracking for 1st-party cookies, Eloqua users would simply open an SR (service request) with Oracle cloud support. As part of your SR, you would provide all of the relevant information: your instance name, the tracking domain you want to use, and whether it’s secure or not.  3. Getac thus added new capabilities around 1st-party cookies: it could now segment its website visitors and understand their online behavior. 4. Based on its enhanced understanding of, and visibility into, users' online behavior, it could now launch more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. The results of Getac’s 1st-party cookie strategy As the old saying goes about data, “garbage in means garbage out.” With increased data accuracy brought about by its 1st-party cookie strategy, Getac achieved more accuracy and quality in its data. The 1st-party strategy also enabled Getac to improve its website visitors segmentation with more granular and accurate data collection. As a result of its enhanced ability to collect and leverage higher quality user data for targeting purposes, Getac was able to plan and execute better targeted marketing campaigns. The ultimate result of all these enhancements to data quality brought about by Getac’s 1st-party cookies strategy was more leads, higher quality leads, and more sales. Getac's 1st-party cookie strategy has resulted in a 55% increase in data targeting efficiency. This increase in efficiency has allowed Getac to more effectively target prospects who are more likely to be interested in the products or services that Getac offers. The company is no longer wasting ad spend because they know which target customers are showing more propensity to buy. How you can benefit from a 1st-party cookie strategy First-party cookies are more accurate than 3rd-party cookies and they are not impacted by cookie blockers and emerging privacy regulations. Eloqua's 1st-party cookie integration is easy to set up, and Getac’s experience shows, so you can quickly start segmenting your website visitors and better track/understand their online behavior. You, like Getac, can then launch targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to generate leads and sales. You don’t have to waste money by targeting ads to buyers unlikely to engage and purchase. John Wanamaker  (1838-1922), who pioneered both the modern department store and modern advertising, once bemoaned that, “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted, but I just don’t know which half.” Getac’s 1st-party cookie strategy has helped them resolve the age-old ad targeting dilemma that Wannamaker and millions of marketers have faced for over a century.   For help in improving your data quality and ad targeting with 1st-Party cookies/data, reach out  to us today.

Today’s B2B marketers are awash in automated solutions, which are being deployed for so many use cases that it’s hard to keep track. But having more automation isn’t always the best answer for driving B2B marketing ROI, not least because automation can be expensive and challenging to use. You need the right mix of automation for the particular strategic goals of your organization. What do marketers think are the most important benefits of automation? A survey of nearly 400 marketers, conducted for the report The State of Marketing Automation 2022  (free download), uncovered the top 7 benefits, described in detail below.   1. Automation improves the overall customer experience  Driving a great customer experience requires marketers (and their entire organizations) to deliver consistent and relevant messaging across whatever channels their customers use (from brand websites to call centers, social channels, email, SMS messaging, and more). Automation can improve the customer experience in so many ways, including: More personalized email messages and automated, orchestrated follow-up depending on customer responses. More relevant, timely product and/or content recommendations depending on customer behavioral/intent signals. Subject-line and send-time optimizations for emails, improving open and response rates. Better and more dynamic customer segmentation and lead scoring. More targeted, personalized paid advertising (and therefore more efficient advertising spend for marketers). 2. Automation enables better use of a marketer’s time Perhaps the most obvious and important benefit of marketing automation is how it frees up marketers from the burdens of monotonous, manual work.  What could be more boring than manually reformatting or updating customer data? An automated tool such as a data washing machine can do it better. How about manually pulling data from multiple spreadsheets in order to prepare a marketing report? That sounds like a nightmare from the mid-1990s, when marketers spent days writing a single report. Today, automation can instantly gather the relevant data and create a report in just seconds. “I became a marketer because I always dreamed of manually formatting data and spending days sifting through spreadsheets to create reports,” said no marketer, ever. Automation enables marketers to do the tasks they’re best at, creating ideas and campaigns that engage customers.  3. Automation provides better data to support better decision-making Automation not only provides more and better data about your customers than you’ve ever had before, but it can also help you manage and deploy all that data , leading to better, more personalized customer engagement and improved marketing ROI For instance, automation enables marketers to leverage search queries and “digital behavior signals” from customers to inform engagement approaches. Actionable data such as customer intent signals help marketers put relevant messaging and offers in front of highly qualified leads when they’re in-market, driving better revenue outcomes.  4. Automation improves lead generation and nurturing Way back in the 1990s, lead generation efforts often meant picking up a “cold call” list and calling prospects. The cold call recipients were generally less than thrilled to hear from a sales rep trying to set up a meeting or “hard selling” a product they didn’t need. And if receiving those cold calls was a cringe-worthy experience, how about spending hours making those calls, with your job depending on it. The automation of lead generation, via an “always-on” revenue engine, saves marketers time (and sanity) while streamlining a formerly labor-intensive process. Gartner  offers the clearest explanation of how marketing automation helps marketers with lead gen: “B2B marketing automation . . .supports the practice of demand generation. This includes building awareness, generating and nurturing high-quality leads, orchestrating multichannel engagement to guide customer journey progression, and using analytics to measure and optimize performance. The main goal of these [automation tools] is to capture, qualify and nurture leads and accounts, align them to the appropriate sales team member(s), then continue sales- and/or marketing-driven engagement to drive toward a closed deal.”  5. Automation makes marketing budget/spend more efficient Beyond enabling marketers to do more in less time (see benefit #2), automation also allows them to scale capabilities and drive cost efficiency. An automated tool such as a data washing machine, the example we used above to show time savings, also saves budget because engaging customers with inaccurate or outdated data simply throws your marketing spend out the window. Conversely, engaging customers with accurate, updated data results in a higher marketing ROI. Email engagement and Ad targeting are other areas where bad data and a lack of automation wastes your limited resources: automation can drive better, more personalized engagement that delivers cost efficiency/ROI. Almost every automation benefit related to customer engagement (see #1, #3, #4, and #6) also results in enhanced cost efficiency, a massive win-win for both customers and marketers. 6. Automation enables more personalization Most B2B marketing organizations today orchestrate customer journeys that combine human and automated interactions to create a more personalized, relevant customer experience across channels. Email and SMS, for example, are two channels where the use of “automation-fueled orchestration” are growing, resulting in better personalization.  The level of automation marketing organizations deploy to orchestrate customer journeys is on a continuum, with 78% of marketers using some level of automation . The survey of 400 marketers from The State of Marketing Automation 2022  report notes that “69% of marketers consider their overall customer journey to be partially or mostly automated .” What percentage of today’s marketing teams are fully automating  their customer journeys? Only 9%. On the flip side, 22% of marketers say their “customer journeys include no automation at all.” 7. Automation improves measurement Automation, as we’ve seen, is fueled by data. Having the volume and visibility of data that automation provides can also help B2B marketers prove and improve everything they do, which is the foundation of marketing operations and performance marketing. In terms of measuring outcomes and performance, automation can’t be beat.   Want to improve your B2B marketing efforts with marketing automation? We’re experienced experts who can help you – learn more here

B2B brands have a reputation for being absent, boring, or utterly irrelevant on social media. Olivia Messina and Oktopost , a B2B social media management platform, want to change all that, seeking to turn social media into a great customer engagement and conversion channel for B2B brands. Messina is Oktopost’s social media and community manager, a role in which she creates all of Oktopost’s social posts.  In a recent Oktopost webinar, The Art of B2B Social Media (free on-demand, with registration), Messina shared the following ten tips for effective B2B social media management. Tip #1: Don’t look for a playbook Messina: “There’s no playbook or rule book for B2B social media. Social media is truly an art and there's no right way to do it that will work for everyone. It's up to the B2B brand’s social media manager to craft their messages by using the right tools and learning through trial and error. There are so many challenges with social media, and also so much to love. It will look different for every B2B company. Sharing value is going to be at the heart of your content no matter what: you always have to be providing some type of value.” Tip #2: Know yourself and your why Messina: “You need to begin by thinking about what you want people to know about your B2B brand, and what you want them to feel about it. Why should they care about you? Why do you exist? The answers to these questions will help you showcase your brand on social media. Every company has different goals, different things they're trying to achieve through social media. But once you know why you're trying to reach people, that's when you can get creative.” Tip #3: Know your target audience Messina: “Know your target customer and audience. At Oktopost, we're targeting millennials on social media, mostly because they're the ones in buying positions today. They represent 75% of the workforce. We know they go to social media to help them make purchasing decisions, to do research. We also know that millennials like information to be quick and easy to digest, they're not messing around. They like to get in, get their information, and go.  So by knowing the target, millennials for us, and knowing how they want to be engaged, you can craft your social media to make it easy for them to digest content. Videos, for example, are so easy to digest.” Tip #4: Understand the “why” of your audience Messina: “It's important to first identify who you’re trying to target, and really understand what they're coming to social media for, what are the problems they’re trying to solve or the questions they want answered? How can you be helpful to them? Being clear on that will help you create content that addresses their “why”: you can't effectively engage someone if you don't know anything about them.” Tip #5: Be human  Messina: “It's not really business-to-business. It's really human-to-human, which plays into there being no one, right way to do SM. Showing the human aspects of your brand and knowing what resonates with your audience is going to help you engage them on social media. It’s a human-to-human conversation.” Tip #6: Use employee advocacy Messina: “As a community manager, I think social media is really great when it showcases the people behind the brand and really humanizes the brand, because brands are nothing without the amazing people behind it. So for example, we have an employee advocacy platform and it encourages our employees to share content, based on the concept that people are more likely to interact with a human than with a brand.  Oktopost also showcases an employee every single week. So for example, one employee shared that she likes to quilt and you would never know that from her LinkedIn. It’s about diving deeper into who we are as people, why we're doing it, and letting people in on the beautiful faces behind our brand.” Tip #7: Highlight your employer brand Messina: “We also like to show on social what an amazing place Oktopost is to work and why our people love to work here. So I recently tweeted out, ‘Hey Oktopost employees, let me know in one word what it feels like to work here?’ It's a way for our audience to see in real time what our people are saying. I also repurposed that content and shared it on LinkedIn and Instagram.” Tip #8: Use the right tools  Messina: “Some of the tools I like to use for our social media include Canva , a graphic design platform, and AI Video Generator which is a really simple way to create and edit video content. I know video content is really big now and AI Video Generator offers a simple, easy way to add subtitles and images and stuff. I have to add Oktopost , which you can use to post your posts.” Tip #9: Be ready to adapt and learn Messina: “You really have to embrace change and be adaptable, because what's working right now is probably not going to work in the future. You have to be taking action and trying to do little things every day to improve because social media is constantly changing. Playing around with new channels is important, but also focus energy on your best channel. You don't need to be on every single platform, but you need to know where your audience is. Just keeping, sharing relevant news and don't be afraid to go out and see what people are talking about on SM.  It's okay to try something and fail because social media's quick and we just keep moving along.”  Tip #10: Have two-way conversations Messina: “I think that talking to your audience, engaging with your audience, is one of the most important things you can do on social. It should never be a brand shouting at an audience, telling them why your product is so amazing. It should be conversational, offering solutions, really talking to your audience and getting to know them, because that's what social media at its best is about.” To learn more about managing and improving your B2B social media, reach out to our partner Oktopost today.

Essie Reynolds, MBA, is a Data Analyst and Business Intelligence Consultant at Sojourn Solutions.   Modern marketing is fueled by quality data. Understanding and coordinating all of the parts of your data ecosystem is therefore critical to marketing success. Below is a ten-step process you can follow to drive data quality within your organization. As mentioned above, these steps represent an update to a post we did way back in 2017 – a lot has changed since then, especially around data privacy and an increased emphasis on quality data to drive marketing outcomes, and this updated post certainly reflects those changes. The 10 steps below are divided into three distinct categories: (1) surveying the data and ecosystem you already have; (2) the tactics of ensuring data quality; and (3) ongoing maintenance of your data and data ecosystem. Let’s begin. A. Survey:  1. Know your “why” for data  When you collect data just for the sake of collecting data, it can add lots of “noise,” increase the cost of storing your data, and lead to a poor user experience. In order to be more strategic about how you’re collecting and using data, you need to know what your organizational goals are for data, what questions you want answers to, and what you want to accomplish with data.    2. Be accountable and aligned on data Each functional area within your organization should have a point person who's accountable for maintaining the data in their realm of responsibility. Anyone touching that data should be trained so they have some accountability to data quality as well.  There are always going to be differences in what different functions or departments might need regarding data, so the appropriate identity management needs to be defined and set up. For example, if the marketing team is buying a new martech tool, they need to be strategically aligned with their organization on who owns the tool, where the data will be stored, and who gets access to the data. 3. Complete an audit Take a comprehensive look at all the data your organization is currently collecting. You’ll need to know where data is coming from, the tech tools that are involved, who's using what data, and why they’re using it. How is data being stored and analyzed? Knowing all this gives you a clear understanding of your entire data ecosystem. An audit helps prevent data redundancies and highlights gaps that need closing. Part of the audit would be creating a visualization of data flows. You might have data going from Salesforce into Tableau and from Eloqua into Tableau. It helps to visualize these connections. B. Tactical: 4. Outline rigorous data processes You need defined data processes to ensure that your data is consistent and standardized. Your values should also be standardized with tools such as pick lists or country names (US v. USA v. U.S.A.). Standard processes make your data cleaner and make your reporting more accurate. Make sure everyone involved with your data understands how these processes help drive data quality.  Have standardized routines for how data is added and deleted, how lists are uploaded, and how data is managed across the organization. 5. Automate with a contact washing machine (aka automated data cleansing)  Using a contact washing machine can make a huge difference in your data quality and save you time and manual effort in cleaning your data. It'll automate and streamline your data standardization. With a contact washing machine, you set up rules that are automatically applied when data flows in. Any data that comes in and deviates from your defined rules gets standardized by the contact washing machine. 6. Take advantage of third party applications You can use third party applications to normalize, validate, and add missing contact data. So an app can validate email addresses or tell you if a phone number is still valid or help you fill in missing pieces of mailing addresses. You don’t want to send email or direct mail to addresses that are wrong or invalid – that wastes your resources and hurts your numbers/KPIs.  7. Create and use templates  Templates are key to the standardization of data: they save you time and improve your data quality while helping your user experience. For example, if you're using templates on your websites and landing pages, and you use pick lists, they’ll standardize your data because users can't free-form type anything incorrectly. Your marketing team can leverage templates and won’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.  C. Ongoing: 8. Stay updated and compliant with privacy regulations  The number of data privacy laws are not just limited to Europe or Canada or California. You have to consider all the different data privacy laws in all the different places you're doing business in. You must comply with those data privacy laws so you can continue to do business in those places. In addition, customers want to see that you’re taking data privacy seriously. You should have a point person to ensure that you’re following relevant data privacy requirements.  9. Ongoing maintenance planning  Have a plan for regular maintenance of your data and data ecosystem. Routinely check on mapping fields between tools to ensure that the data flows are still accurate. In marketing automation, for example, you’d want to make sure that the fields you're mapping from Salesforce into your MAP are the relevant ones for what you need. And when you make changes in Salesforce, you must also consider how that affects your MAP.  10. Monitor the age of your database  If you have contacts that have been dormant for a year, you’d want to treat them differently than contacts who are brand new or very engaged. Those differences would determine how you're doing your nurturing and how you're tracking engagement. If you're not getting any new contacts or new leads, that would be a problem you’d want to analyze.  If there's no activity from a contact for a year, you're wasting a lot of resources trying to engage with someone who won’t engage. You might be able to save money if you say, “well, a percentage of this database hasn't responded to anything in a long time. Let’s make them inactive and target our efforts on contacts who engage.” Need more help with your data and/or data management processes? Reach out to us here . Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.   Related Data Management posts: Driving ABM success: How to leverage quality data to define and engage your target accounts How to create a culture of data to drive your B2B marketing: 4 steps to success How Marketing Operations enables data quality and the infrastructure needed to drive ROI

B2B customer journeys are complex and time-consuming, with lots of non-linear touchpoints. Prospects typically do most of their research online, gathering relevant data about purchase options, carefully evaluating offerings from competing vendors, and then reaching a purchasing decision (often by committee). The sooner B2B marketers and an aligned sales function can (1) “read” customer signals of buying intent and (2) respond to those signals with relevant, timely content that addresses customer needs for research/information, the more likely those B2B marketers (working in tandem with sales) can turn insight into action, prospects into buyers. Adobe wants to help facilitate and orchestrate these B2B customer journeys with tools like Marketo Engage , Marketo Measure  ( formerly Bizible ), and Adobe Real-Time CDP, as the recent Adobe Summit  made clear. During a presentation called Orchestrate Customer Journeys Across Marketing and Sales with Adobe  (registration required), Brian Glover , Adobe’s Senior Director of Product Marketing and Strategy, shared Adobe’s vision. It’s a vision for driving seamless personalization at scale across marketing and sales touchpoints, unlocking the power of unified customer profiles and AI, while enabling businesses to measure and maximize marketing ROI. Let’s explore that Adobe vision below in more detail. Enabling orchestration: 3 capabilities required “Over the past two years,” says Glover, “the hard shift to digital has completely changed how businesses compete to build [trusted] customer relationships in a noisy world where customers are more self-directed and can access endless amounts of information.” Glover notes that achieving personalization at scale across B2B customer journeys requires three distinct marketing ops capabilities: data excellence, orchestration agility, and a high degree of marketing and sales coordination. 1. Data excellence is the foundation for every personalized experience, informing how your organization understands and interacts with each prospect.  Insight is the prerequisite for action, but Glover highlights a common obstacle: ”75% of efforts to create automated, personalized engagement will not meet ROI goals because of inadequate buyer insight.” The ability to collect and share high quality data makes positive customer experiences (CXs) possible. 2. Orchestration agility means working as an aligned business across multiple channels to engage customers in data-enabled ways.  It means understanding customer context across every channel and adapting to each customer's unique journey with relevant, timely content. It’s not easy, explains Glover: “82% of marketing and sales professionals have recently observed new and changing customer journeys. It's now about meeting customers when or where they want with the right content or conversation and doing it with speed and scale.” Internally, the right hand and the left hand work together to build a great CX.  3. Marketing and sales coordination is recognized by everyone as essential for success – Glover mentions that “98% of mature companies believe that marketing and sales need to increase coordination” – but it’s not always enabled by the “right” investments in data, processes, and technologies.  Silos of mindsets, systems, terminology, and KPIs still need to be exploded so marketing and sales can work in tandem: “marketing and sales coordination has to be more automated and data driven in order to meet [evolving] customer expectations,” says Glover.  How Adobe enables seamless orchestrations Adobe is working hard to help B2B marketers across each of the three pillars detailed above by Adobe’s Glover.  Data excellence.  Last year Adobe introduced its Real-Time CDP  powered by Adobe Experience Platform. This data management tool “gives you incredibly precise targeting for more consistent, personalized experiences,” says Glover, “by bringing together real-time person profiles with account and opportunity data from across [multiple] systems.” You can connect multiple Marketo Engage instances to Real-Time CDP “so you have one place for all that engagement activity and can activate complete audiences in Marketo Engage, even creating missing leads or contacts to understand the impact of every customer interaction on pipeline or revenue.” Insight flows into action. Orchestration.  “ Adobe Marketo  is purpose-built for orchestrating inbound and outbound journeys across sales and marketing,” says Glover. Adobe also helps measure the impact of activities on revenues via Marketo Measure  and B2B attribution. “You can plan your marketing investments with speed and confidence because you know what’s working and what isn't. Adobe gives you deep visibility into the drivers of pipeline and revenue across channels and campaigns and down to the individual content or creative [asset],” explains Glover. That granularity allows the entire marketing and sales team, orchestrating their activities together, to make faster, data-driven decisions. Glover also announced a new “dynamic chat” feature for Marketo Engage that helps with orchestration, enabling “personalized customer conversations at scale, as part of an omnichannel strategy.” Website visitors can use the chat function to book a meeting or demo with sales, taking them to the next step of their journey.  Marketing and Sales coordination.  Both marketing and sales functions seek to engage with prospects who are most ready to purchase, following the Pareto Principle (or 80/20 Rule) that says most of your revenues (about 80%) come from a small slice (about 20%) of your customers/leads. To help marketing and sales focus on and coordinate activities around their best prospects, Glover announced “predictive lead and account scoring powered by Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe's AI and machine learning framework.” With the ability to predict the likelihood of a person or account becoming a sales opportunity or a new customer, marketing can drive higher quality pipeline (MQLs) more efficiently to sales. Marketo Engage gives each sales rep a prioritized list of their hot leads and gives them multi-step engagement tools and content right inside the CRM for a complete workflow.  Both sales and marketing can see and share the same customer insights and coordinate their actions to move the customer journey forward. When customer intent signals and predictive analytics indicate a sales opportunity is imminent, both marketing and sales receive alerts and next steps they can take. “With product browsing and purchase events, natively connected to Real-Time. CDP, marketing teams can use these activities for personalization [of outreach] with their Adobe Experience Cloud applications,” says Glover.  At the end of the day, Adobe seeks to enable omnichannel engagement across the customer journey and across the business organization (involving sales, marketing, and beyond). As Glover notes: “These innovations reflect Adobe's commitment to B2B marketing leadership.”  Want to learn more about how Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure (formerly Bizible) can help you prove/improve the value of marketing aligned to business outcomes?  Reach out  to us when you're ready to get the conversation started!

Marketo Engage  has a full roadmap for 2022, with new features and innovations coming down the line fast. Venu Tavisala, senior director of product management for Adobe Marketo Engage, described this 2022 roadmap in a presentation at the Adobe Summit 2022 (here’s the full, on-demand presentation  – registration required).  Tavisala began by detailing research from Forrester around the impressive impact Marketo Engage has had on its customers and their marketing efforts. Those impacts include:  an average ROI of 267% across Marketo Engage customers; 29% improvement in customer engagement; 59% improvement in lead conversion rates on top of the funnel and 25% conversion improvement from marketing qualified leads to sales. As Tavisala says, “we know that getting results isn’t easy these days, and that the challenges are many, including the pandemic, the pace of change, business disruption, and rapidly-evolving customer expectations.”   Marketo’s vision and strategy for 2022 Before he began getting into the specifics of Marketo’s 2022 roadmap, Tavisala briefly explained Marketo’s vision and strategy. “Our vision is to empower marketing teams, to orchestrate personalized experiences at scale in concert with sales to drive highly efficient demand with agility and measurable business impact,” he says. The Marketo strategy Tavisala detailed is multi-pronged, and includes: 1. Delivering industry-leading marketing automation for B2B that is optimized for both scale and time-to-value. 2. Providing the orchestration that powers marketing and sales engagement and effectiveness across all channels and stages of the customer journey.  3. Delivering best-in-class marketing automation in the context of Adobe’s full customer experience management suite, connecting with content workflows, customer data and profiles, artificial intelligence, analytics, commerce, and marketing workflows. 4. Supporting a wide range of marketing strategies, including lead based and account based, inbound and outbound, online and offline, so as to help customers adapt to changing conditions and advance their digital maturity. 5. Continuing to improve our ecosystem with strong partners and have an open architecture with pre-built integrations, allowing companies to create marketing stacks that will deliver value now and in the future. Marketo Engage 2022 roadmap highlights “Strengthening the core of the Marketo Engage platform is important to help our customers grow and adapt their winning strategies,” says Tavisala. As such, Marketo is launching a number of features and innovations on its 2022 roadmap, including these:  Predictive Lead and Account Scoring “We're really excited about predictive lead and account scoring because data is exploding, and it’s becoming imperative for our customers to identify and engage with the right contacts and right customers at the right time,” says Tavisala. The tool offers an intelligent and configurable propensity-to-buy scoring solution for both Lead and Account profiles, and includes: AI-powered scores that offer higher accuracy to increase Marketing ROI; Ability to configure scoring without data science expertise, enabling faster time-to-value; and Actual vs. predicted analytics to drive user confidence and boost adoption. “Customers will also get scoring insights that will clearly identify the reasons for the score,” says Tavisala, “which will drive transparency as well as better adoption.”  Predictive lead and accounts scoring will be available for Real-time CDP customers in the second half of 2022, and then will be rolled out to the rest of Marketo Engage customers after. Dynamic Chat “This tool maximizes every opportunity on websites with integrated, 1:1 personalized conversations without additional investment, moving buyers through the marketing and sales funnel faster through real-time conversations,” says Tavisala. B2B businesses can thus engage with prospects on the web in a personalized and contextual way, generating more qualified leads and booking meetings with sellers. Marketo went live with dynamic chat in March, and will be doing a phased rollout to all customers over the next six months. Sales Insight – Actions (Salesforce CRM) This feature improves the accessibility of campaign-context data for sales, so they can make informed decisions about their prospects based on a unified view of the customer/prospect. Marketo and Salesforce are platforms “our customers depend on to keep their marketing and sales teams in lockstep to close deals,” says Tavisala, so getting those platforms connected and sharing with each other is a big focus. “We have plans to expand Marketo’s sales insight capabilities to now include integrated sales actions, empowering sales reps to initiate personalized, one to-one conversations with their prospects, right from their CRM system,” he says.  Reps do not have to leave the sales insight panel within their CRM to access marketing, curated sales emails, and send one-to-one personalized emails to their customers. Insight and action can happen in one place and sales reps won’t need to toggle back and forth between different screens or systems anymore to go from insight to action. The feature has been available to Marketo customers as a limited rollout since February, with a broader rollout slated for later in the year. Adobe User Credentials   Constantly inputting your user credentials to access systems can be time-consuming and frustrating. This feature streamlines user administration and enables single sign-on across Adobe Experience Cloud. Product admins can manage users and user entitlements through a common Admin Console. In addition, IT/Security admins can manage Marketo Engage product instances along with other AEC products through a common console. The feature “also simplifies admin tasks, such as license management, user management, and entitlement,” says Tavisala. Marketo will start onboarding the new capability to new enterprise customers in the first half of 2022 and start migrating existing customers in the second half of 2022.  Conclusion Marketo has a lot of innovations and integrations coming down the road to help improve what its customers do, especially around connecting Salesforce and Marketo. Other improvements include enhancements to usability/UI and improved data sharing capabilities. As Tavisala says, “Marketo continually responds to our customer feedback” through our roadmap.  To learn even more about Adobe Marketo Engage and how it can improve your marketing efforts, reach out  to us. We  partner with Marketo  to implement marketing automation solutions that drive marketing ROI for our customers.

This post was updated May 12, 2023, and originally posted December 17, 2021. Marketing operations (MOPS) is an evolving, multidisciplinary, and multifaceted function with a single goal: to improve and prove the value of marketing. MOPS is about blending martech, people, and processes to drive that single goal. In this four-part blog series, called “MOPS and Optimizing Martech,” we’ll explore the role of MOPS in: (1) developing a martech strategy, (2) integrating new martech into an existing stack, (3) driving martech adoption by enabling people/users, and (4) maintaining and adapting a martech stack, with a focus on scaling and future-proofing said stack. The stakes are always high when it comes to martech integration. As Sojourn’s 2021 Marketing Operations Report  explains it: “The long and often arduous process of integration must be completed before any value can be extracted [from martech] and even then, few organizations take full advantage of a given technology’s capabilities . . .Companies with a named operations function are more than twice as likely to say that martech integration is a significant strength.” To better understand why effectively integrating new martech is so important for marketing success, we spoke with Sojourn’s Phil Boyden  (Partner and Alliance Manager). “You need to connect and leverage your martech and your data in order to build a clear, actionable picture of your customers that you can act upon,” says Boyden. The more you know about customers, the better you can serve them the right messaging at the right time. “As you’re mapping the customer journey and all its touch points,” says Boyden, “your technology stack needs to connect to and follow that same journey in a seamless, integrated way.”  Martech integration should be viewed as a holistic process involving more than just connecting tech. Also critical? Marketing and sales alignment, data strategy and analysis, measurement, and the people and teams required to run everything. Getting martech integration right isn’t always easy, but it’s essential for marketing and MOPS effectiveness , as we’ll explain. The growing complexities of martech integration There are over 11,000  martech tools/apps now available to help you market effectively, adding to the complexities of martech integration. If you always selected the best-in-class martech tools for your particular needs, they may not necessarily integrate with the tech stack you've got now. “Middleware can start to come in to help. You need APIs and middleware that are capable of speaking smoothly to any of these pieces of martech as they get integrated into your existing martech stack,” says Boyden.  New martech tools are not always going to integrate at the push of a button, no matter what martech sales people might say about “plug and play.” Middleware can help with orchestrations or data flows, helping tools and systems speak to each other. There are also tools that can help transform your data to ensure it can flow in and out of martech and middleware to support integrations.   What could go wrong? (A lot) Much can go wrong with integrations, resulting in a stack that looks like a Frankenstein monster of random parts that don’t bolt together seamlessly. Boyden offers the example of “a company we spoke with where some of their preference forms sent data to one place and other forms sent preference data to another place -- they also had their CRM and MAP collecting and sending data.” The company had a custom integration sitting in the middle to make the data flows work, “but it was misfiring,” says Boyden. By the time they realized they had a problem, he says, they had no clue about what was “the actual source of truth regarding their customer data. So they couldn’t tell which systems were working or not.” There were ripple effects as a result. “They didn't know whether they were complying with GDPR. They didn't know whether they could contact any of the people in their database. They therefore had to stop communicating with their customers and get this mess fixed,” says Boyden, “and then try to track stuff back.” To make a long story short: the integration mess ruined all the company’s marketing efforts and put them in jeopardy of breach regarding GDPR, triggering potential legal liability and penalties. That’s an integration nightmare. Common integration challenges A great new martech tool comes along to save the day. You get told by an enthusiastic salesperson that integration is simple. They have this out-of-the-box integration included and it's a single click which sets up right away. It’s exactly what you wanted to hear. What could possibly go wrong? “When you get into the details of integrations, a lot can go wrong,” says Boyden. It might turn out that your customer data in custom fields is not included in the “out-of-the-box” integration. So you buy or build new options to solve your problems and next thing you know, you've got more issues than before “such as siloed data and then you have to find workarounds or make other adjustments that can disrupt your marketing efforts,” Boyden says. Marketing efforts can get disrupted and martech tools can get quickly abandoned or banished to “the island of unintegrated martech.” Planning and executing effective integrations Planning your integrations well in advance is key. “You need to get everybody involved in the same room at the start and build a roadmap,” says Boyden. “You should have discussions around what needs to happen, hash out disagreements, and then define a consensus around who does what and when, what data should flow in and out, the timing of everything and how to handle potential disruptions, along with what steps are required to make the whole integration process work.” It’s highly likely that existing data flows would be impacted during the integration of the new martech tool. Reporting would also likely be disrupted. How will you work around these issues every step of the way? “You can have the world's best martech tool and the best middleware for the integration,” says Boyden, “but it's no good if you’re not actually supporting your people and the business during the integration process.” That requires effective planning, execution, and coordination.  Consultants can help, bringing a clear focus on the big picture. They’ll understand all the systems that are in play and what the role of each system is within the integration process. They know which team members to speak to, and how to guide them. “Too often with companies integrating tech, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing: good consultants will pull everything together and guide the project so the work gets done efficiently and with minimal disruption,” Boyden says. Sojourn, for instance, has expert professionals from different backgrounds who can draw upon their expertise to drive effective martech integrations for a client company.  “We know marketing operations, what data needs to flow where and when, we know the relevant platforms and how the entire integration processes should work,” says Boyden. “Marketing has often been viewed as a cost center, but we help marketing clients improve and prove marketing  as a revenue-driver.” That shift changes everything, helping marketing not only integrate martech effectively but also get more budget and more credibility with the C-suite.  For more information about MOPS and martech, and how you can build your MOPS maturity in order to improve marketing outcomes, reach out to us . Next post in this series:  MOPS and optimizing martech: Driving the adoption, utilization, and optimization of martech (post 3 of 4)

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. “In the future, MOPS is only going to grow in scope,” says Carmen Gardiner. “MOPS didn’t even exist as a dedicated function two decades ago. Back then, marketing operations meant sending emails and preparing reports. Now MOPS encompasses life cycle management, attribution, privacy, governance, data plans, content management, reporting, you name it. The function has just exploded in scope.” What does the future hold for MOPS and MOPS professionals? We asked Gardiner and Robinson to gaze into their crystal balls and offer advice for adapting to the future of MOPS.  MOPS will increasingly blur into SalesOps and RevOps. Gardiner sees MOPS increasingly merging towards sales, customer success, IT, and other functions.  “If you think of a Venn diagram,” says Gardiner, “marketing ops is blurring in from the left side and sales ops is blurring in from the right side, and then there's revenue blurring in from the top. Eventually they're all going to overlap. I just don't know if MOPS and the other functions are going to maintain their autonomy.” Robinson agrees that MOPS will blur with revenues (and potentially into RevOps): “MOPS is going to have to help people see how revenue is being generated, and that's where data and analytics play a big part, attributing revenues to marketing and to other teams,” she says. “That's quite a big shift in mindset and skill set for some people, particularly within marketing. I think we're moving away from the creativity-first side and towards this data and analytical side.” Balancing tracking with data privacy will become an ongoing MOPS challenge. “I’m so interested in observing how we're going to track or predict customer behavior in the future with all this available data, but also while keeping people's privacy in mind and complying with emerging data privacy regulations,” says Gardiner. “Data privacy is evolving, and will continue to evolve as a major issue impacting MOPS.” Bringing meaning to data will get harder and will matter more. “Within MOPS, we have all this data we can use to predict what people are going to do next,” says Gardiner. “But the hardest problem remains knowing what to do with all this data and being able to understand what it's telling you and what it's not telling you. Separating the signals from the noise is difficult. And then believing your analysis enough to actually change your approach is even harder.” Talent will increasingly make the difference in MOPS. “Today, every organization including startups can afford marketing automation.  I think the easy availability of technology makes MOPS people even more important,” says Gardiner. “Creativity will be a key differentiator. And being able to make intelligent decisions based on available data will offer competitive advantage to organizations. People drive all that.”  Empathy will remain essential. “MOPS has always been, and will always be, a highly-collaborative function. Being able to understand the challenges that other people are having within different functions is going to help you understand how you can help them with those challenges,” says Robinson. “What MOPS is there to do is enable others to meet goals, so applying empathy is key to helping people change and succeed.” Never-ending curiosity about technology and human behavior needed. “MOPS professionals will need to understand and keep pace with what's new and what's available technologically,” says Gardiner. “Curiosity about technology and curiosity about human behavior will always be needed, because marketing operations is really a study of human behavior and how we can better affect human behavior with our actions.” Carve out dedicated time for reflection. How do you keep updated on the latest developments while you're so busy doing your MOPS job? “You have to set aside structured time to be curious, to reflect, and to talk with other people who are experiencing what's happening out there,” says Gardiner. “And once a new trend or idea is on your radar, start to think about what it might mean for you and your team and the way you do business down the road.”  Adaptability and resilience required. “You’ll have to be okay with being told you need to stop doing what you’re doing right now and accept that you need to learn some new technology. You're probably going to have to be okay with learning more about data and analytics, but also about business processes,” says Robinson. Choose depth over breadth. “I've always been a proponent of depth of experience above breadth of experience,” says Gardiner. “If you're a Jack of all trades and master of none, then you're not going to be extremely valuable when tough projects come along, when critical thinking and critical problem-solving are needed, because you won’t know enough. Go deep into something first and then you can broaden out and go wider.” Be ready to embrace change (because it’s coming). “The future of MOPS will require us to learn complicated technologies and processes, because we have to prove and show business value in everything MOPS does,” says Robinson. “Just being open to that will put MOPS professionals in a good place. People need to keep up because technologies have always changed and buying behaviors have always changed, and those changes won’t be stopping.”  If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and your marketing, reach out to us here . Full series here:  Building a successful MOPS team: When and how to hire MOPS talent (post 1 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: 10 steps to onboarding MOPS talent (post 2 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: How to effectively manage MOPS talent (post 3 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: Developing your MOPS talent (post 4 of 5)