3 Useful Tips We Learned at Oracle MME
Last week, MarketBridge partner Eloqua hosted a little event you may have heard of – Oracle Modern Marketing Experience. We joined throngs of marketers and Oracle Marketing Cloud users in Las Vegas who were eager to return home with tips to impact or even transform their departments. As passionate modern marketers, we were of course compelled to share what we learned.
Reflecting on the show, we just had to highlight our favorite presentation of the week. Jay Baer spoke about Smart Marketing in the context of what he calls Youtility. He defines Youtility as, “marketing so useful that people would pay for it.”
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, even marketers with the best intentions – marketers who recognize that the customer must come first, marketers that were born into the age of inbound – fail to recognize the difference between help and hype. As Jay pointed out, there is only one letter of difference between the two words, but this one letter is the difference between being useful and being irrelevant. Put another way, Jay suggested that marketers “stop trying to be amazing and start being useful.”
So, how exactly do we make utility a reality?
Here are the three key types of utility to start creating customers for life.
1. Self-serve information
It’s nothing new – your customers are researching you well before interacting with sales. With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, consumers are demanding much more information. In fact, Jay shared that in just one year, the amount of information required before purchasing a product doubled from the previous year! How is your organization getting ahead of this?
The example given was about Holiday World, a family-owned amusement park. For every single ride at this park, consumers can find a detailed FAQ page on the website. Holiday World wants to ensure customers are prepared before they show up at the park so they can just focus on having a great time once they arrive. Undoubtedly, this treasure trove of information provided to customers is the reason Holiday World is the #1 park on TripAdvisor.
If nothing else, remember this: “Relationships are created with information first, people second”.
2. Radical Transparency
As in life, the truth in marketing always comes out. So, if your customers are going to figure everything out, why not be radically transparent? After all, trust is the filter through which all business success must pass. Jay highlighted the example of McDonald’s, who provides the option for web visitors to ask any question about their food. Best of all, trust is measurable – after implementing this program, McDonald’s received a 16% increase in customer trust. Transparency for the win!
3. Real-time Relevancy
Are you having conversations with your customers? Demand Generation is important and PR is sexy, but focusing on your customer can truly produce some amazing results. Real-time relevancy is all about the best possible solution for your customer at a given point of their buying journey.
Jay shared the example of Ikea “moving day”. In Montreal, most of the population moves on July 1st. (side note, how scary is this image!?) Ikea consulted with their customers in advance, and discovered that their true need was boxes. So, they decided to give away boxes as part of their campaign, resulting in a 24.7% sales increase.
The presentation also highlighted the importance of using the power of marketing technology (OMC or other) as a catalyst to achieve success. We often see our clients buy into the dream of marketing technology only to find out that their outdated processes prevent them from succeeding.
Most of us knew going into MME that modern marketers need to cater to digital buying behaviors, but the concept of Youtility was something fresh and, well, we’re just going to say it: USEFUL!
