This episode features an interview with Lynne Capozzi, CMO of Acquia, the leading cloud platform for building, delivering, and optimizing digital experiences.

Lynne is a multiple-time tech CMO who first served as Acquia’s CMO in 2008, before leaving in 2011 to pursue nonprofit work full-time. She returned to Acquia in late 2016 to lead the marketing organization into its next stage of growth.

On this episode, Lynne explains why demand gen always needs to be an integrated strategy, how to create a great website experience, why it’s so hard to do personalization well, and why the next phase of the industry is moving from marketing operations to revenue operations.

• Integrated campaigns always work the best for demand gen
• You should be evaluating and re-platforming your website every 18 months
• Intent data is the next opportunity for marketers

“What we do for demand gen is all about integrated campaigns. The one thing I know about demand gen is that it's never a one-and-done type of task. Demand gen is very much an integrated strategy…it’s everything that falls under that roof to generate demand–it's multitouch, it's nurturing campaigns, it’s all about using the right tools…and so much of it is based on data and data analytics.”

“I re-platform [our website] every 18 months or so. That's the recommendation that I give to people. If you haven't [done] an evaluation of your website in the past two years, it's time to do it…A lot now is based on design. Do you have a modern, sleek design on your site? That's really important because that level of Netflix and Apple–that's kind of the experience that everybody is expecting now. So you need to make sure that your site is reflective of your brand, reflective of your messaging, and really have it be a great experience for customers.”

“I think there's a lot more to be done using intent data and using AI and machine learning…As marketers, I think we’ve got a lot of opportunity if we can look at intent data--looking at intent data and not waiting, but seeing where people are raising their hands and where the interest already is…to help you figure out what's the next action to take or the next market to go after.”

“We’ve spent the past couple of years in our industry in marketing gathering the data–now what? I want people that can help make the determination of what happens next and how do you use that data. And now I'm finding some really great marketing folks who are geared towards that. So we're moving from marketing operations to revenue operations, which is really the bottom line.”

“I think conversational marketing is critical. We're using it a lot right now…we use it to really drive our leads. And I expect that to continue even more in the future.”

(2:06) Lynne’s Marketing Journey

• First role was at Lotus Development, which was acquired by IBM
• She has been in product marketing, event marketing and then arrived at demand gen
• Now she’s at Acquia, which is a digital experience company that helps organizations be successful with their web properties
• Event sites like the Super Bowl, Olympics, Emmy’s, Grammy’s; those are hosted by Acquia
  

(3:58) Overview of Demand Gen at Acquia

• For her, demand gen is all about integration
• Everything that generates demand should be linked together, from how you segment to your ABM strategy, to nurturing campaigns and event strategies
• Acquia focuses on two main personas - the CMO/marketing persona overseeing budget and the IT-related persona responsible for the marketing technology and integration decisions
• Both personas want to provide the best experience possible  
• Her demand gen team is divided by products in Acquia’s portfolio
  

(11:18) Keeping Your Website Fresh and Effective

• Website refreshes need to happen more often and take less time now
• Lynne replatforms the Acquia site every 18 months or so
• Make sure messaging is updated, content is audited, and that the experience is reflective of the brand and the customer needs
• Ensure that your website is designed to help visitors carry out their own research
• Everybody is expecting a better website and design experience based on their consumer website experiences
• The website flow should work for each of your diverse personas
  

(15:40) Website Personalization

• Lynne believes everyone feels they have room for improvement with personalization
• It’s daunting but it pays off - personalized experiences lead to better conversions
• She recommends starting with small wins and growing from there
• For example, start with some achievable segmentation by geography, for example
• Make sure you have a personalization product in your tech stack that enables this
• Be sure to get that product connected to your Salesforce instance, so you can gather as much valuable data as possible about your customers
• Then you can make the best decisions around personalization, and know the next best action to do for them, like what price promotions would suit them, for example
• Delivering personalization in real time is the ambition, and it’s difficult, but to get there you need the data squared away on the back end
• She is attentive to sales and marketing integration so that the messaging used by demand gen is taken, updated and reinforced by the messaging that is coming directly from sales
  

(19:18) Lynne’s Marketing Budget Priorities

• She sets her demand gen budget first, and sorts out the dollars needed to generate the revenue goal
• A big priority is her digital content, anything on the website, and making sure that the team has the right tools to capture the analytics from the site for visitor interaction
• Building the partner community relationships is a big thing too, ensuring that they have strong joint programs for go-to-market solutions together
  

(20:37) Most Effective Demand Gen Campaigns & Tactics

• This year, campaigns with a digital and email component, based on ABM, for a seamless, integrated experience, have worked well
• Her best campaigns are based on how Acquia drinks their own champagne, showing how they run their own business on their products
• The pandemic meant that she had to cut out one of her most effective tactics, which was big physical awareness campaigns on billboards, like train station takeovers in specific geographies
• Those types of campaigns were measured by site traffic, tracking the visitors to the site by geographies, and they found a direct correlation between their billboard campaigns and web traffic, and even by lead volume
• She’s looking forward to doing more with intent data and AI to help them understand customers better - 6sense is one tool she finds really valuable
• She makes sure her marketing team has enough people to track those tools, evaluate the data, and decide what to do next
• What’s great about customer intelligence tools like 6sense is that sales and marketing can share the same dashboard and gather the same understandings 
• One-off campaigns don’t provide much value, campaigns need to have a broader, more intentional purpose
• Conversational marketing is critical, they use it to drive leads, and she’ll be using it even more in the future
  

(33:02) Advice to Marketing Leaders for 2021

• Keep your digital strategy solid and updated, put money and attention behind it, it’s not the time to fall behind
• Get support from both your CFO and CEO - talk about the business reasons for big decisions (like a website refresh), share what the ROI will be, engage them
• Allocate resources and dollars to make sure you know your personas and have value-based messaging
  

(37:03) Lynne’s Quick Hits

• Best thing to do in Boston in a day is go to Fenway Park
• Her new hobby has been gardening
• If she wasn’t in marketing, she’d be a lawyer - she loves the storytelling aspect of it