Sanjay Dholakia, the chief marketing officer at Marketo, a leading provider of marketing automation software, recently spoke with marketing luminary Seth Godin as part of a series on the future of marketing. Some of the highpoints:
The shift to the era of engagement marketing
“Only in the last 20 years have we seen marketing change from spending money to interrupt people with advertising to market everything you make and everything you say. The problem is that a lot of marketers didn’t get that memo. A lot of marketers want it to go back to the way it was. Those people have been pretty generally disappointed with everything that’s happened recently because they’re still working as if marketing equals advertising.”
What makes for an effective marketer?
“The short answer is five words long: ‘Make things worth talking about.’ The longer answer is that the marketer now needs to be in charge of everything the company does. And the ad agency isn’t the last step of the process anymore… It needs to be the first step.
What tangible metrics can show the impact of customer engagement?
I don’t have a glib answer. Any mass metric is going to be false. Rather than ask for rating points or share of mind, I would ask questions like, ‘Who would miss me if I was gone? With whom do I actually have permission to follow up? How many people call us on the phone asking when our new thing is going to be ready?’ Those questions show depth of feeling and concern. If you want to be meaningful, you can’t be too general.
The full Q&A is available at blog.marketo.com. We’ll put a link to it in our Additional Web Resources box at SalesandMarketing.com.
