Interview with Eric Keating, VP, Marketing, Zaius

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to be part of a B2C CRM platform?
As the fortunate person who heads up marketing at Zaius, the team and I are focused on educating the market about the incredible value that B2C CRM brings to marketers and their businesses. After having led the software-as-a-service division at market research firm, Millward Brown, and launched ZoomInfo’s strategic freemium product, I knew that I wanted to be at the intersection of data and martech. Data — and in particular the unification of data to create a single source of truth — is the key to making intelligent marketing decisions and delivering the most effective, engaging customer experience.

MTS: How do cross-channel attribution and analytics help in maximizing the Customer Lifetime Revenue?
When data is fragmented (by channel, device, browser, etc), you’re only seeing a sliver of the truth. If you can’t understand how your shoppers behave across channels and devices, you won’t have the insights you need to truly maximize Customer Lifetime Revenue. When you know what they want and how to motivate them, you can offer them the right message at the right time on the right channel.

MTS: How does Zaius enable marketers to orchestrate multi-channel marketing campaigns from the ‘word go,’ using real-time analytics and dynamic customer segmentation?
The prerequisite to getting real value out of analytics or segmentation, or being able to orchestrate multi-channel marketing campaigns, is establishing a single source of truth – unifying customer attribute and behavioral data across all channels and devices. Zaius makes that quick and easy with a product that enables you to orchestrate multi-channel marketing campaigns. Because you know every interaction that a buyer has had with your brand — every page they’ve clicked on, every item they’ve added to a cart — you understand what they may be interested in. Then, you can build out targeted campaigns based on their behaviors, triggering automated emails, Facebook ads, push notifications and more.

MTS: How should businesses determine the boundaries of single-customer view for omnichannel marketing?
B2C marketers are tasked with creating engaging and effective customer experiences that drive repeat purchases and ultimately, loyalty. In order to do that, they need a complete view of the customer experience – every interaction that a customer has with your brand – including sales, marketing, and support data. Without understanding all interactions in a single customer view, you’re bound to miss something vital. In order to best serve your customers, you have to know if they have a customer service request pending even as you market to them.

MTS: Do you see the B2B CRM models converging with the B2C landscape for better customer engagement?
While I absolutely see the general convergence of B2B and B2C marketing (people are people after all), I really don’t see the convergence of B2B and B2C CRM. For starters, there are fundamental differences in the way that the sales process works in B2B vs B2C – account-based vs. person-based, lower frequency of transactions vs. higher frequency of transactions, planned purchases vs. spontaneous purchases – and also the purpose the CRM serves – sales-centric vs. marketing-centric, manual vs. automated data entry, etc. A CRM built for B2B is simply not equipped to engage consumers effectively.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Within the industry, Terminus is definitely one to continue watching. Account-based marketing is continuing to gain momentum and Terminus is at the forefront of it. More personally, I’m keeping an eye on local Boston startup Mylestone. I first heard about them when a friend joined the company last year to lead their product team. My initial understanding was that they curated media-centric biographies of the recently-deceased, which I thought was not only super-interesting but also kind of weird and futuristic. Now they seem to be focused on expanding their use cases and broadening the market, so I’m interested to see how they leverage their unique approach and technology to do that.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Pardot, Terminus, Bizible, Wistia, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, SpyFu, Moz

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign?
Our most significant campaign to-date is the one we’re currently running. We call it the ESP campaign, and the primary question is: “Still running your business on an ESP?” Being a B2C CRM, Zaius solves the problems that marketers’ reliance on ESPs has helped create – all rooted in a siloed and channel-centric approach to marketing – while still delivering the value that marketers expect from an ESP. There are a number of ways we’re measuring the success of the campaign, but a two of the more quantifiable measures are overall traffic to the campaign landing page and downloads of the related long-form content.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
AI is obviously poised to have an incredible impact on marketing and business overall. That being said, regardless of the next innovation in marketing, the fundamentals won’t change – understanding your customer and developing a brand are critical to being a successful business. Marketing leaders do, however, need to prepare for a more data-driven future by staffing their teams with nimble, data and tech-inclined professionals. On a bootstrapped team, the dream is someone who, in addition to having a strong understanding of marketing principles and creative bent, can also manipulate and interpret data, iterate quickly, and even write code.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Deliberately

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Spotify, Google Drive, Fitbit

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Hire people smarter than you, give them goals, and let them do their jobs.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
On Trails by Robert Moor, which is a “wondrous exploration of how trails help us understand the world—from invisible ant trails to hiking paths that span continents, from interstate highways to the Internet.” Obviously not my words. But next up is Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. I know I’m late to the party, but I’ve been meaning to read it for some time. Most books that I read aren’t directly related to business, but I do primarily read non-fiction. I consume business and marketing information primarily online in shorter-form content from publications like HBR and MarketingProfs, as well as based on recommendations from peers on LinkedIn.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Roughly: “Don’t underestimate the value of your ideas.” When I was younger and far less confident, I needed encouragement to speak up, especially in meetings with management, etc. I think the best young talent needs that encouragement because they are humble and have respect for those who have been there and done it. That being said, it’s definitely important to balance this with also knowing when to prioritize listening.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Katie Staveley from Mautic!

MTS: Thank you Eric! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.