Even before COVID, Marketers were challenged to deliver high-impact campaigns, accelerate lead qualification, and automate core digital operations. But despite the mounting pressure, there are digital solutions available today to help.

In addition to managing Avanade’s own global Marketo Operations team, my main responsibility is to lead, build and execute campaigns through various online and offline channels to increase awareness and lead generation. I also provide insights to our global marketers to optimize campaigns by sharing historical campaign performance analysis and metrics. I understand first-hand the need for marketers to harness enterprise technologies to understand customers, improve performance and increase agility.

Here are three ways we are using the power of combined Adobe Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to provide a better customer experience.

1. Improving segmentation to help enable personalization and impact engagement
Audience segmentation is a foundational capability for marketers. It can help us to better define and understand our target audiences and ideal customers for campaigns, and target activities more effectively. Critical success factors involved are identifying the right audience for specific content and putting rules in place to target and personalize interactions.

At Avanade, we combine Adobe Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to enable customer segmentation as part of our broader marketing automation engine. Our comprehensive content engagement framework ensures we communicate relevant content and messaging to the right audiences.

This segmentation capability improves our client experience and campaign efforts in a few ways. It’s helped us define and segment campaign alignment across our programs, email alerts and engagement activity which allows us to give proper attribution at both the channel and content level. Our marketing and sales teams are equipped with the tools and insights needed to deliver personalized, action-oriented experiences for clients across touch points, driving consistency and ongoing value. The system allows us to engage with prospects and clients in more creative, innovative ways, providing them with a more relevant and positive experience.

2. Transforming marketing operations by connecting Martech with CRM
If Marketo wasn’t connected to our CRM powered by Microsoft Dynamics, we’d be missing out – and missing the mark. This seamless integration is now enabling us to:

• optimize clear views of data quality and integrity
• create a view of our ‘single record of truth’ between marketing and sales
• capture the full scope of the lead lifecycle journey (thanks to Microsoft Power BI)
• automate our lead routing and management process
• capture full insight of engagement touchpoints

Plus, by integrating deeply within the Microsoft ecosystem, we’ve found Power BI to be a highly effective data modeling and visualization tool that empowers marketers to use data to make strategic decisions and measure performance. We have a one-stop-shop for all the company’s marketing data and analytics needs, including Power BI-based dashboards, web analytics and social listening.

3. Providing omnichannel experiences our customers expect
The solution integrates the company’s marketing systems and technologies, including paid search, SEO, segmentation and lead enrichment, content and collaboration tools. This enhanced integrated environment gives Avanade the ability to engage with its existing and potential clients in the most meaningful and relevant manner, whether it’s through emails, events or targeted advertising. And since all web form data is fully integrated into Marketo with backend processing and logic, we can capture conversions, engagement, inquiries and more across hundreds of webpages.

Another area that leads to ensuring we’re communicating relevant content is our ability to assign users with “area of interest” codes within various activity channels, which are then used to determine which nurture flow to add them to, to continue the engagement. By the end of this past fiscal year, Avanade yielded a significant increase over the click through rate industry benchmark between paid search, social and programmatic channels.

Marketing automation is also enabling Sales to be more effective by providing:

• engagement insights needed for lead follow-up: it offers a cohesive and automated lead-routing data flow and management process for qualification and conversion, including information-rich automated sales alert emails sent out via Marketo.
• a single source of truth - the Marketo Sales Insight plug-in allows sellers to be more proactive and intelligent in conversations they may have while pre-qualifying opportunities.
• marketing influence and collaboration - by capturing key items like web activity, email campaign touches and performance and score progression, we have a stronger and continually evolving infrastructure and better alignment between marketing and sales.

We are bringing together both sales' and marketing's funnel stages into a unified model. These stages are the foundation for segmentation, scoring, nurturing, routing, reporting and analytics and create a common language between sales and marketing.

4. Helping Marketing continually evolve for the future
The impacts of COVID-19 – specifically, the sharp increase of digital activity - impacted the Marketo Ops team’s bandwidth, but despite aggressive timelines and volume, we achieved some great accomplishments in great part thanks to our Marketo-Dynamics 365 technology solution.

• Accommodated a rapid switch to a virtual-first world
  To meet the surging demand for virtual event and/or webinar requests, we immediately created enhanced and robust global virtual event tracking and requests processes and collaborated extensively with our website team for delivery/execution ahead of SLA deadlines. As a result, we’ve executed close to 200 virtual event campaigns in Marketo in less than six months.
 
• Reduced manual tasks to focus on higher-value work
  We’ve reduced end-to-end manual processes and content loading by 53% thanks to automated translations and other internal efficiencies resulting from standardized templates and user-friendly campaign frameworks. It’s enabled us to alleviate many manual processes in managing data within spreadsheets, reporting, and even campaign buildouts within Marketo now that we have more enhanced and dynamic email and landing page templates.
 
• Turned new insights into action to help Marketing improve effectiveness
  When it comes to online events and webinars, we’re improving data accuracy and laying the groundwork for more powerful KPI measurement in the future. We’ll also be improving how we track webinar attendees pre- and post-event to help marketers define the next best action and use the right nurture program. Plus, our web team has scaled training and processes to deliver high priority content in less than a day during a record-setting year of requests.

The benefits of effective, modern marketing automation are helping us evolve our customer experiences for the future. Learn how Avanade seamlessly weaved Adobe Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 together and contact us to get in touch with our team of global Digital Marketing experts.