Marketing Automation, the Importance of Storytelling and the Death of Social Media: Interview with Mana Ionescu

Our President, Mana Ionescu, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series to share her insight on the intersection of sales, marketing, and technology. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.

In this episode we discuss storytelling, the buyer’s journey, and creating personalized content.

Below are a few highlights from our conversation:

TechnologyAdvice: What should your goal be when creating more personalized content and communication?

Mana Ionescu: Social media marketing — the way we used to think of it — is dead. These days, we’re looking at how we can create content that’s compelling, that would motivate one to take action, and how we can get that content in front of the right people. That’s where marketing automation comes into play.

It has to do with creating content, really knowing your customers, and using your databases and other analytics tools to really identify customer groups. What motivates each one of those groups? What type of content do you need to use for each one of those to get them to move?

That type of content can be distributed through a blog, but also through email marketing. Typically, automation tools are known for being part of the email marketing toolbox. It’s actually a lot bigger than that.

We’ve worked with tools that track visitors to the website and do a reverse lookup. We’re able to tell what someone looked at on the website and we’re able to pull a list of decision makers in different areas of that company and then feed that content into a salesforce process. Then a member of your sales team can call or directly email the content in a personalized way to see if there’s anything you can do to help them, to see why they were looking at the website.

The big question though is, it’s not about having the tool, it’s how do we use that tool to get the outcome that we want? That has to do with really understanding your customer, how they interact with your websites, with your web properties, what type of content is appealing to them? It takes a lot of testing and looking at the data before you can figure out the customer flow. Then you can build that flow into an automation system.

TA: How important is it to follow the customer along their journey and only contact them when they appear ready for content?

Ionescu: Nobody likes getting phone calls out of the blue, or email contacts that are not at all relevant to them. Even those websites that had you put in your email information for your downloads – such as a white paper – they pretty much blindly contact you right after that. There’s a bazillion reasons why you would have downloaded that white paper. This doesn’t really mean that you’d be interested in buying their products.

The more sophisticated marketing systems and user workflows that we build have more to do with only contacting the people who give us enough indicators that they may be interested in talking to us. And contacting them also based on the content they interacted with, in order to tailor that communication a little bit more to the actions they took on the website.

TA: What are some challenges that you’re seeing in the industry right now?

Ionescu: The biggest challenges have to do with not understanding that results don’t happen overnight, even when we talk about the conversion rate. We talk about conversion rate optimization. You can look at a company such as Basecamp where they tested hundreds of variants of a landing page. Each one of those variants led them to a slight improvement in the conversion rate.

It could’ve been 0.10 percent, but all of those added up. Most companies don’t have that patience and dedication with its time or resources to go through a process like that to significantly improve a conversion rate.

This stuff takes time. It takes guts and it takes brains, and there is no shortcut.

You have to do the work.

That’s a challenge we encounter across the board, across industries as well as across channels. It’s expected to get instant results from social, from content, from websites. That’s not realistic. You’ve got to put in the work to see the results.

This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice. Interview conducted by Josh Bland.