After Salesforce partnered with Omnicom and Adobe allied itself with Publicis, Marketo becomes the third marketing platform to partner up with a host of digital agencies.
Marketo announced that its Engagement Marketing Platform (formerly its Customer Engagement Platform) would now be available to the clients of 150 digital agencies, including Digitaria (a JWT company) and Babcock & Jenkins.
“We have always been practitioners of customer-centricity and know there’s deep value in truly understanding the needs of customers at each stage in their buying cycle,” says Lauren Goldstein, vice president of strategy and partnerships at Babcock & Jenkins. “Partnering with Marketo helps us merge things like marketing automation with a cohesive content strategy to reach customers when, where and how it’s meaningful to them. The result is a continuous and consistent conversation with customers that converts into lifelong relationships.”
Marketing automation platforms such as Marketo have traditionally been associated with the world of B2B marketing, where the focus was on generating individual leads through digital outreach. That sort of one-to-one approach is now being applied to consumer marketing, which has long been the realm of ad agencies.
This latest partnership illustrates a big shift in how the agencies are thinking about marketing platforms. If it was all about Mad Men before, they’re increasingly starting to see the important of Math Men, or people who can use data and digital channels to reach customers on an individual basis.
Marketo VP and co-founder Jon Miller says marketers need to move away from the campaign mentality, where content reaches everyone but targets nobody.
“It’s no longer enough to do the mass national campaign across print and TV,” says Miller. “We know who customers are, what their recent purchases and preferences are, which helps us talk to them in a highly personalized way, targeting them as individuals on every digital channel they use.”
With most customers interacting with brands through some sort of digital channel, Miller says we are moving into an “addressable” world where every customer is known and marketers can’t afford not to tailor a response to each individual. “If we don’t start doing those things, we’re going to end up being ignored,” says Miller.
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