George P Johnson: Creating Undying Consumer Experience

By: Scott Kellner, VP, Marketing, George P. Johnson Experience Marketing

Scott Kellner, VP, Marketing, George P. Johnson Experience Marketing

Can you give us an overview of marketing automation?

When I came to marketing automation world, few companies provided marketing automation software platform within their marketing organization. Businesses still looked at it as an e-mail marketing platform where CRM system was utilized at the most basic level. The way I think about market automation is in three buckets¬¬-content bucket, measurement bucket and organizational bucket. For content, I focus on a mixture of content; I focus on how content marketing automation ties onto other market communication or in social media. The second, measurement bucket is how often and intensely are we doing multi variants casting or using messaging. The third one, organization bucket, in my experience, is the most difficult one because people sometimes forget it entirely or they don’t know how to manage it properly. That is where the marketing campaign comes into play; here the goal is to make company participate in the area they lack in. This campaign created through market automation lets businesses socialize properly with the organization. So, one of the things that I found is that it’s essential to get and buy organizational level partners that are affected or getting benefits from content marketing. Market automation is broader than just content marketing; today the discussion is on how the nature of the marketing automation effects the IT department. One of the key things from my perspective that can elevate the autocracy of marketing automation program is to provide the connective tissue between what is happening on social media and what is happening through the automation work.

"The way I think about market automation is in three buckets—content bucket, measurement bucket and organizational bucket"

Is there any rule you follow while implementing automation marketing?

Whenever we put out marketing communication for a general awareness campaign, we follow two golden rules.

• 80 percent of the content should be audience serving and not self-serving. That means we share studies, research, trends, information, forecast that are not specifically about the industry. And the 20 percent is self-serving in case studies where we don’t burn people out by cost we put on selling them but helping them. So when you put out sale type message, they are more likely to get destructed.

• The second rule includes three different content buckets. First, is the content bucket where we try to understand the challenges that the audience face and create marketing automation campaign that will deviate that. The second one is academic content, such as survey, research, white paper, where the audience can take the content to their CEO, CMO, and help their company make a difference. And the third is self-promoting content that includes research, case studies or projects done by the company.

What specific approach do you follow while developing content?

We deal with different types of client on a daily basis to make sure we are not too heavily weighted in one industry vertical. We start with understanding what our clients want; we don’t have a single target inside of the target company we have 2-3 different people that we target. For example we do a spiritual marketing also known as the vent marketing; we do about 5,500 of advices per year. When we look at the targeting new industry or new company, we target people who are responsible for that specific marketing function within the relation team. We watch closely the concern of the CMOs and VPs of the marketing team, marketing people and procurement audience because different people have different opinions. So, we have a segment of the audience within the organization with different messaging, content and we create marketing automation program that addresses the needs of each audience accordingly.

Any projects you are over seeing currently?

We have got a multiple marketing automation programs in running. One is ethnic, spiritual marketing agency; we have a campaign aimed at CMOs and VPs of marketing. These two have the power of experiential marketing in the overall marketing trends. One of the campaigns we are doing is jumping on that momentum and pushing on that message to our potential clients. We are also running a camping that is innovative and experimental. So we are underscoring that concept by doing a campaign that speaks to the five senses. We talk about five senses and how they engage during the experiential campaign. We are doing a couple of different task for each of the senses. That one doesn’t have a long call to action as marketing automation campaign do. Sometimes we send information that makes the audience think. So, we are constantly looking for ways to communicate the same message in fresh ways so we attract the consciousness of the audience.

What advice would you like to give it to young marketing managers?

Never forget that the marketing is like a story. One third is creative, science and anthropology. People think its 50-50 science and creative and they forget anthropology part. As a marketing manager, you should be able to identify a person and their problems.