Ensuring High Quality Communications and Marketing Consistency

Amy Scissons, Head of Global Marketing, Moody’s Analytics

Strategic Direction for Business Goals

We start with the business objectives and sales goals for the year. Once we have an idea of our strategic direction, we build our marketing initiatives and dive into channel assessment. Depending upon our past successes in generating leads and impacting sales, we will adjust our investment in channels.

Tracking Customers for Effective Marketing Analytics

The key to planning and organizing our digital marketing efforts is in using marketing automation platforms or customer engagement engines. By ensuring all programs are tracked in the system, we can better evaluate how effectively we can engage with our clients and prospects, and support the sales cycle. My philosophy is, “If we can’t track it, don’t do it.” Without measurement, there is no real benchmark for ensuring that marketing is a key contributor to the growth of the company.

Measuring Success for Smooth Marketing

We implemented a marketing automation system in 2012 and with more than 12 months of data, my team truly appreciates the value of measuring success. The conversation has changed and we’re talking about marketing attribution to sales and engagement levels.

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My three main questions regarding marketing programs are:

a. What business objective are you trying to achieve?
b. How do you plan to measure success?
c. Is the sales team on board with accepting the leads and providing feedback within the system?

"Social listening is a powerful tool, yet there is no integration to help in the development of content"

Biggest challenge in the technology of Marketing

The challenge lies in workflow tools, processes, and governance. As a global marketing organization, we need to ensure high quality communications and consistency in our execution. With the increased focus on data protection and respecting consumer privacy, organizations like ours need to ensure all our marketers execute in the same way. Software vendors need to think more about how they can help organizations scale their activities and support measurement.

I would like to see more advanced permissioning for managing the system. The administrative functionality could use some development to help govern the system and its use. I would also like to see better social media tracking. Social listening is a powerful tool, yet there is no integration to help in the development of content. I would like to get to a point where we are crafting our marketing messages around conversations that our influencers are having.

Social Media to Impact Customers

We still experience difficulty tracking most social channels, especially as they evolve so quickly. We are observing many emerging trends, from social media to video content marketing to online communities. Using software to track interactions with us is the key to piecing together the impact we have on our customers. We are finding new ways to build relationships and communicate with our audience in a way that they want to be approached.

Diverse Approaches to Marketing

I have to flex new muscles and think more about technology versus just marketing effectiveness. Marketing leaders now need to understand system integrations, design, and data quality. In addition to becoming more involved in designing and managing systems, marketers have to spend more time on reporting the value created through marketing.