Shaping the success of a brand relies on a marketer’s ability to create an intelligent and fully-connected marketing funnel. A funnel moves like a swarm of birds — fluid, collective, and constantly moving to new opportunities.
After spending the entirety of his professional life within the funnel, Matt Donovan, general manager and partner at Microsoft, has worked with numerous brands who have all viewed the purpose of the funnel differently.
In a Merkle-hosted webinar titled The Building of an Intelligent Funnel, Matt outlines some key insights for what should go into creating an intelligent funnel, such as the foundational elements and practices that create a well-rounded path of generating interest, then converting leads into customers. From the many funnel perspectives that Matt has worked within, be it content, experiential, or data , he has come to realize that they are all important aspects of forming a modern funnel-marketing experience..
To create an intelligent funnel, a brand needs to:
- Put people first
- Love the science
- Know your story
- Build to grow
- Be cloud smart
Matt presents these five key factors for shaping an intelligent funnel within the context of his time working on Microsoft’s Office 365, a product that has transformed the workplace in the last 20 years. In this time, Office 365 has gone under tremendous transformation itself — from an upgrade every three years to weekly updates, from managing licenses to managing the customer lifecycle with subscriptions, and constantly expanding to new channels to create more business opportunities. Matt quotes Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, who said, “our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation.”
At the core of all this change has been an understanding of Office 365’s purpose; to foster achievement. Placing this value into Office 365’s funnel has allowed Microsoft to achieve amazing things for its business and its customers.
For a deeper dive into the five relevant ideas for creating an intelligent funnel, listen to Matt’s webinar, hosted by Merkle, here.
This blog is an excerpt from Merkle’s 2016 B2B & Tech Marketing Exchange. The B2B & Tech Marketing Exchange is an intimate forum where leaders of the best B2B and TECH brands can gain perspective from each other in the areas of performance marketing and CRM. The 2017 B2B & Tech Marketing Exchange will take place October 3-4 in Charleston, South Carolina at the Belmond Charleston Place.
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