Position² was again a Platinum sponsor at the SiriusDecisions Summit 2017 in Las Vegas this May. Wow!! What a show it was! SiriusDecisions unveiled a new Demand Waterfall, and that was just the beginning.

We met with many amazing marketers and discussed real world advanced challenges about marketing technologies, demand acceleration, AI and anonymous visitors. Our team did two presentations on diverse and very relevant topics for today’s marketers. Niraj Swarup, Sr. VP of Products and Services, talked about the demand waterfall and I spoke about AdTech and MarTech integration.

Over the last month, I’ve had the opportunity to digest the learnings from the summit. I aligned these learnings with the challenges our clients and prospects face in their day-to-day digital marketing efforts. Optimizing the demand waterfall and tech stack continue to throw up major challenges not just for SMBs, but also for billion dollar enterprises.

In this article, I have compiled the key points from our presentations and SiriusDecisions’ sessions. My aim is to offer you direction to solve some of your digital marketing challenges. In doing so I have laid out high-level pointers to help you build a robust and scalable digital marketing model. If you require additional information or would like to just chat with us about your challenges, please write to us.

My session was titled ‘Crossing the Chasm from AdTech to MarTech’. Primary objective was to explain – (1) how to build the right technology and marketing infrastructure to track digital campaigns, (2) the need to track digital marketing efforts granularly – and benefit from – cross-channel media mix optimization, and (3) the right team for success.

Here are a few strategic and tactical tips to get you going:

1) Marketers have too many technologies or platforms on their hands that make the job of integrating AdTech and MarTech difficult. I recommend you re-evaluate your entire tech stack. Identify and keep the most critical technologies or platforms. Get rid of stuff that you do not need.

Yes, this is a slow and painful process, but it is something you will need to go through to succeed. In fact, a common theme at all the conferences we attended over the year was that successful large enterprises and smaller firms went through this exercise. Once done, these organizations had an ideal stack that best suited their needs.

2) For greater digital media efficiencies, marketers need to look for ways to capture source to close data using “Deep Funnel Metrics”. Many marketers fail to do this because they either have limited or excess technologies. Another impeding factor is an unfriendly team structure.

3) Marketers should strive to use cross-channel insights to optimize the media budget effectively. This is the best way to make sure that you and your teams will be able to migrate one channel’s successes to another. Often this effort falls flat for marketers because their teams work in silos.

4) Lean teams can be a challenge. Therefore, marketers should not shy away from hiring the right resources with diverse skills to manage AdTech and MarTech stacks. Once you have the resources on board you need to make sure that all members of your team are working together.

Niraj’s topic was ‘Add Yellowstone’s Upper and Lower Falls to Your Demand Waterfall’. Niraj drew inspiration from Yellowstone’s famous waterfalls and spoke about an augmented marketing framework that Position² uses for clients.

Below are a few high-level pointers from his presentation:

1) It is important to identify and optimize the combination of touches that actually convert suspects into a known lead.

2) We recommend that SiriusDecisions model be implemented so that you can track and optimize prospects as they convert to customers and as they flow through the waterfall, now the demand unit waterfall.

3) Typically revenue from existing customers accounts for a very significant portion of overall revenue. Therefore, loyalty, renewal, customer advocacy, and retention programs are the critical challenges to solve.

Along similar lines, another interesting topic that emerged this year was about tackling anonymous visitors hitting your website. Here are some insights:

1) Web personalization is one-way marketers are trying to solve this problem.

2) Marketers are playing around with AI and ABM to target these audiences.

3) One can connect platforms like analytics and automation tools to build your ideal profile and target anonymous visitors’ through look-alike visitors.

Of course, this is a new and emerging trend, so watch out for interesting directions to surface frequently.

I hope this article has given you a few tips to solve the challenges of scaling digital marketing Demand Acceleration. We are happy to talk with you about your current MarTech, AdTech or Demand Acceleration challenges. Just contact us and we will reach out to you soon.