Enabling marketers to adapt with speed and insights in a changing landscape
Essential to this re-calibration is a reset of business outcomes. This involves shifting from a relentless focus on growth and efficiency to perhaps a greater focus on agility and resiliency, so as to not just withstand future shocks but to take advantage of the unique opportunities afforded by these events. Just like culinary ratios are one tool that every chef needs to run a successful kitchen, equal parts agility and resilience is the recipe for success for marketing leaders – to thrive in an increasingly complex and continuously shifting B2B marketing landscape and emerge stronger.
"Agility and that notion of how fast can you get there, how fast can you change an offer, how fast can you change experience, how fast can you change promotion, how fast can you integrate. The past algorithms aren’t really that helpful right now, so agility is really important."
Michelle Peluso, Chief Marketing Officer, IBM
A new B2B marketing agility and resilience recipe is emerging
The need for B2B marketing transformation that puts agility and resilience at the fore has become urgent. It is pointing towards a marketing strategy that emphasizes capabilities in both areas that provide flexibility to adapt to stay ahead as well as the ability to quickly recover when they get disrupted. Just like a chef that focuses on the key elements of good cooking, a good cookbook that focuses on the key elements of any recipe, will bring the right level of scientific insight to raise the bar of cooking and help you master your cooking skills.
Learn more about the best practices for B2B marketing organizations.
Release Highlights
The need for speed and agility has never been greater. Here are three key highlights from SAP Marketing Cloud 2011 Release that help companies to increase speed of execution, better respond and adapt to customer needs and increase productivity.
B2B Contact-to-Account-Relationship
Today’s customers no longer follow linear journeys when engaging with brands. And that’s true for both B2B and B2C brands. Today’s B2C and B2B purchase journeys share more similarities than differences. Both are data-driven, self-directed, and set a high bar for emotional and contextual engagement. In many B2B industries, successful relationship depends on being able to direct personalized communication to your contacts based on their role in the organization and business context. It is important to target your marketing campaigns precisely to the right people with the right relationships to the right accounts.
To drive meaningful buying interactions, B2B marketers need to deepen the understanding of the account and develop a holistic picture of opportunity of the account with a focus on both the needs of buying groups and individual leads to support their decision-making process. One of the most important elements to hyper-relevant buying experiences is to understand the persona dynamics through contact-to-account relationship. This evolution towards contact-to-account relationship builds on the foundation of digital engagement and pushes the use cases for account intelligence to provide greater insight into each buyer, and creating personalized experiences that demonstrate deep customer knowledge and understanding.
Marketing-driven sales enablement for B2B contact-to-account relationship
In 2011 Release, we deliver marketing-driven sales enablement for B2B contact-to-account relationship to align marketing and sales to take advantage of strong synergistic effects. Multiple messages can lead to customer confusion and negatively impact sales while coordinating campaigns will benefit from marketing to build awareness, interest and purchase intent and sales to close the deal and build strong and lasting relationships with the most valuable customers.
Bridging the gap between the idea of individuals whose disconnected buying interactions across marketing and sales channels cannot accurately predict an opportunity and overly broad account definitions that can easily mask the potential for multiple opportunities, the B2B Contact-to-Account relationship conceptualize how we should think about identifying and actioning real demand and sharpen the focus of marketing and sales teams by leveraging the full context of contacts in their role within a company. It grows out of the already common understanding that in B2B, each of the individuals involved in the buying decision will need different information, depending on their role, and the much less recognized fact that there are potentially contacts with multiple roles at one account or contacts with relationships to multiple accounts.
You can now automatically create sales activities (or tasks) for marketing qualified leads with the right business relationship with the accounts in SAP Sales Cloud, in addition to telephone calls and appointments, using information from the contact-to-account relationship and empower sales reps to engage high-level buyers according to the buyer’s organizational and functional needs.
Learn more about next generation B2B marketing based upon multi-faceted contact-to-account relations...
Adaptive User Experience
We're taking all that we have learned to create a completely re-imagined user experience to help marketers work faster and smarter. Plus we're bringing together content and productivity for marketing in whole new way. The new adaptive user experience has redefined the way marketers work. We think the central metaphor of adaptability is like a living organism: nimble, responsive and empowered to shift its shape in response to the changing environment - carefully balance preparing for the unexpected and thoughtfully rethinking the present. With a new visual design and appearance, we're making work more delightful and are ready for marketers. This is the exciting future of user experience.
With Release 2011 comes the new Spaces and Pages features for designing home pages in the SAP Fiori Launchpad. Spaces and Pages provides a more robust and more scalable layout of content on the launchpad for marketers. Spaces and Pages provide a better default user experience and starting point for marketers to encourage high user adoption and optimal productivity. The home screen for SAP Marketing Cloud users can now be enabled in a more straightforward and structured way for instant productive use together with pre-delivered templates for the workplace of business roles according to a “lean homepage”, an “Insight to action” approach” or a “day in a life” of a business user.
Space with Multiple pages enable adaptive user experience for SAP Marketing Cloud users that are personalized and structured based on the business role to which space and page templates are assigned. Each Space represents a work area, typically a business role a user would be assigned, and it contains multiple pages and with each page representing a work context with multiple sections that further list apps or tiles. The pages can be personalized either by adding or removing tiles or by adding or removing sections.
The new user interface (UI) theme designer provides flexible theming and branding of SAP Marketing Cloud according your corporate brand identity theme. Using UI theme designer, you can create your own themes to adapt the visual appearance of applications. The UI theme designer is a browser-based tool for cross-theming scenarios. You can easily build your corporate identity themes by modifying one of the standard theme templates in SAP Marketing Cloud.
- Customization of the home page, including skinning and theming, with the new UI theme designer tool
- Updated workspace with SAP Fiori user experience
- A default custom theme as the standard theme for users with flexibility to select, for example, a high-contrast theme in the user settings for SAP Fiori launchpad
- An alternative SAP standard theme with additional custom themes through selected user settings of SAP Fiori Launchpad
Low-code Application Development
Today, empowering marketers with low-code development technology is part of the digital workplace charter, supporting the large scale of departmental and workgroup application development. The need for open marketing platform and low-code application development to deliver greater marketing agility and accelerate time-to-value of business applications have become increasingly important as marketers need to respond quickly to changing business and customer needs.
With all these changes going on, Gartner projects that by 2024, 65% of enterprise application development will be done with low-code tools. And in this space SAP Marketing Cloud is launching low-code application development in Release 2011 to enable SAP Marketing Cloud users (both domain experts and citizen developers) to easily create apps for marketing using SAP Cloud Platform Rapid Application Development by Mendix.
- Develop innovative marketing applications rapidly without coding and enable your business and IT teams to collaborate in real time
- Automate your marketing processes, from simple marketing functions to complex cross-functional operations, to gain speed and agility
- Leverage a modeling-driven environment to rapidly design and develop end-to-end marketing applications with point-and-click configurability and seamlessly integrate with SAP systems, data and services
Learn more how SAP Cloud Platform Rapid Application Development by Mendix delivers high ROI from For...
With this integration, you can supplement marketing capabilities with apps that you've created on the low code platform Mendix. You can extend SAP Marketing Cloud with customer-specific applications for dedicated business use cases, for example, a trade fair app for registration of contacts for demo sessions.
Example of low-code scenarios using SAP Cloud Platform Rapid Application Development by Mendix:
In B2B scenarios, apps can enable sales people to enter leads and maintain contact data in marketing.
Other companies' access to customer contacts for registration at session events or to request a product demo.
For B2C customers, it’s beneficial for their call-center agents to put together a well-tailored factsheet of the most important profile data of their consumers by means of a low code app.
You're already running SAP Marketing Cloud and want to take the next step in your digitalization by offering individual product demo sessions at a trade fair. The registration can be realized by sending out emails with registration codes, for example, using offer coupon codes.
Take advantage of the SAP Marketing Cloud 2011 Release now!
- Check out the key new features with the SAP Marketing Cloud – What’s New in 2011 Release
- Go in-depth on every feature update in the What’s New in SAP Marketing Cloud release page
- Watch the SAP Marketing Cloud 2011 What’s New webinar to learn more about new product updates with insight from SAP Marketing Cloud experts
Have ideas for product improvements? Post them on the SAP Customer Influence, or vote for existing ideas so we can help maximize your impact with SAP Marketing Cloud.
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