Turning “I’m frustrated” into “I’m empowered” is underlying the objective of embedding Bizible into Marketo. For marketers struggling with reporting and attribution, news of the merger was met with great excitement at Marketo Summit—and Bizible’s momentum hasn’t shown any signs of slowing. In a quiet moment, I connected with Bizible’s CEO, Aaron Bird, and VP of Product Marketing, Jenn Steele, to talk about the impact of Bizible for Marketo customers as well as share words of wisdom from one marketer to another.
Alexandre Pelletier: What does Bizible’s merger mean for Bizible? For Marketo customers?
Aaron Bird: Our #1 company value is “customer first, always,” and joining Marketo allows us to do exactly that. The acquisition gets us where want to go faster—providing customers with the highest quality marketing data and insights that will help them make smarter decisions and succeed. It means more investments in the product, more partners and integrations, and more revenue-driving insights.
Hundreds of Marketo customers use Bizible today to gain greater visibility into their marketing performance, and we’re excited to bring Bizible to more of the Marketing Nation. Bizible gives Marketo customers a deeper analytics offering than currently exists within Marketo, and we continue to build deeper product integrations with the Marketo platform.
AP: How does the acquisition impact current Bizible customers? What will stay the same and what changes should they expect?
AB:The acquisition is a positive for all Bizible customers. Bizible remains committed to delivering the highest quality data and insights to all marketers—we’re now just able to achieve our roadmap faster. From top to bottom, we believe that Bizible must continue to lead the B2B marketing measurement space.
As far as product changes, we can now invest more and bring in more engineers to continue to innovate and build great products for our customers. We will leverage Marketo’s partner resources and build really strong integrations. And for Bizible/Marketo customers—more than half of Bizible customers—we’ll build deeper product integrations between the two platforms to make measuring Marketo programs more robust and streamlined than ever.
AP: What’s next for Bizible? What new innovations might be looming ahead?
AB: We just launched Bizible Discover, our new analytics platform that couples unparalleled data with powerful visualizations. We’re rolling that out to customers and we’ve gotten great early feedback. Discover is a huge step forward and we’re continuing to build new features and functionality in it to increase visibility for our customers.
AP: What are common gaps in attribution and reporting? What should marketers keep their eye on?
Jenn Steele: Most marketing organizations, especially at large companies, don’t have a problem with a lack of data, but they do have a problem with creating processes and having the technology to turn that data into insights.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will have a big impact on marketers in the coming years, reducing error from manual processes, and doing things in seconds that would take people hours/days/weeks to do. We see a ton of martech fatigue—especially empty promises and unmatched hype—and AI/ML is going through a giant hype cycle, but it’s starting to have a real, positive impact on marketers and will continue to in the coming years.
AP: How are marketing tactics and strategies changing?
JS: I’ve seen significant growth in more targeted, personalized tactics. With technology, marketers know who their target accounts are and how to reach them. At least in theory. In practice, many of them are scrambling to try to execute and measure personalized tactics.
Marketing strategies are becoming more closely aligned with business objectives. When marketing teams can plan, engage, and measure their marketing efforts for revenue, marketing strategy breaks out of its silo to combine with sales strategy and customer success strategy—they all become aligned to business growth.
AP: How do marketers stay ahead in a noisy world?
JS: Marketers must deeply understand their audience. The more you know about what they value, their pain points, and their existing knowledge of you and your space, the more you can tailor your message to something that resonates and provides value.
Marketers also must be able to measure the revenue and ROI results of their efforts. If you’re confident in your ability to measure effectiveness, you’re empowered to test new ideas and innovate. If you know the ROI, you can double-down on what’s working or cut your losses before they hurt too much. At Bizible, we have a bit of an unusual marketing mix because we know exactly how much revenue tactics generate, and we cut out anything “traditional” that doesn’t generate revenue.
AP: What advice do you have for marketers?
AB: My best advice for marketers is to connect your efforts to revenue—it’s what marketing leaders should care about and it’s definitely what CEOs care about. If you can prove that you’re driving revenue, you’ll have more successful budget conversations with your CEO and CFO, and it’s an effective way to grow your career.
JS: Three pieces of advice:
- Demonstrate your value with revenue. If you can accurately and credibly prove how much revenue impact you have, it will be infinitely easier to grow your budget, your team, and your career.
- Build diverse teams. Diverse teams bring new perspectives, challenge the status quo, and statistically outperform non-diverse teams. Remember to always challenge your own status quo as you do it!
- Don’t be afraid. The Marketing Nation Summit was all about the Fearless Marketer, and becoming fearless—whether that’s trying new tactics, making sure you get a seat at the revenue table, or going skydiving—comes with unexpected, and awesome results.
Special thanks to Aaron and Jenn for their candid comments. For organizations who would like to learn more about Bizible or need help getting started, please reach out—my team is ready to assist!
