MarTech Interview with Bonnie Crater, CEO at Full Circle

Bonnie Crater, CEO at Full Circle talks about a few best ways to optimize your marketing  mix and plans to drive better attribution and engagement in a multichannel marketing world;

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Bonnie, tell us more about Full Circle’s journey since early 2021 and key highlights? 

2021 has been a busy year for Full Circle Insights, mainly due to the increase in customer demand that resulted from so many industry shifts. Specifically, the pandemic forced marketers to adopt a digital first approach they weren’t prepared for. Knowing this, we decided to look at what our customers needed during a time of unpredictable change and thus launched updates and enhancements to our existing product suite. This not only helped meet those customer needs, but also gained us industry recognition with three major award wins, including BIG Innovation, The Stevies and now most recently, The Sammys. Some of these product developments included launching a new product bundle called Full Circle Enterprise, combining the company’s popular Response Management, Campaign Attribution and Digital Source Tracker products. Another enhancement was the launch of Full Circle’s Journey Explorer for Digital Source Tracker, which provides a new feature that gives marketers a visual insight into the customer journey and maps out digital and non-digital touchpoints across sources over time.

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What are some top trends you’ve been following and observing in marketing analytics today? As analytics and data platforms evolve and marketers get smarter with the insights they feed into their processes, how do you feel the data-marketing-analytics connect will deepen or change in future? 

The biggest trend I’ve seen hit the industry is the increased use of agile marketing, which focuses on being quick, nimble, and responsive to change. This is a direct result of the ongoing disrupted economy and shift to digital channels, especially as in-person work and/or events were cancelled and postponed. This caused marketers to have to pivot their marketing strategies and change course quicky, relying on digital-first data for future planning. Because the industry is still in flux, our marketing technology solutions continue to evolve. I feel the connection between data, marketing and analytics will not only grow stronger, but will be critical for corporate survival. Marketing departments will need to work closely with their C-suite executives to properly plan for the future and continue to be profitable, all while still maintaining brand and customer loyalty. 

Can you share a few highlights on the top analytics and measurement best practices that brands and marketers should be following today?

Measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing is one of the highest priorities and toughest challenges facing marketing professionals today. To succeed with digital campaigns, you’ve got to have a comprehensive understanding of how campaigns are performing in terms of engagement, cost, effectiveness, and revenue so you can allocate spend efficiently. This will also help to maximize lead generation and demonstrate marketing’s contribution to deals won. To get digital marketing metrics right, you need a way to connect clicks from digital ad campaigns, social media channels and other digital marketing campaigns to leads inside the CRM system.

With digital marketing, you also increase the reliance on real-time marketing data.  Real-time marketing analytics help marketers to detect underlying threats and problems. From there, targeting and messaging can be quickly adjusted to optimize performance.

Closer home, we’d love to hear about some of Full Circle’s innovations in this regard and what are some upcoming introductions that users can look forward to?  

In 2020, we announced our Digital Source Tracker offering that allows marketers to measure both their digital and non-digital marketing using attribution and funnel metric techniques right inside the Salesforce platform. In 2021 we are continuing to expand this offering with the customer Journey Explorer visualization by adding Bing to our direct advertising network integration.

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What some are critical mistakes you would caution marketers against as they measure real-time marketing performance to better their future outcomes?

The biggest obstacle for B2B marketers is streamlining the process of analyzing the data sets and manually assembling them into multiple systems for the different company stakeholders. This is partly because many companies have not gone fully digital yet, preventing their marketing teams from having access to all the proper tools they need to effectively track data – which is what commonly leads to human error. I would caution marketers to not stick to the status quo when it comes to marketing tools and explore the different platforms that will help cut down reporting time while also allowing for better communication amongst other departments in the organization. 

A few MarTech tools you feel marketers today need to integrate into their overall tech stack and why?

Two key tools every B2B marketer should have in their current tech stack are attribution models and funnel metrics. The right attribution model can ensure smart investments of marketing spend and closer coordination between sales and marketing, while funnel metrics inside the CRM can help you achieve marketing and sales process efficiencies. Marketers have been able to double their overall productivity with the combination of these tools and are able to provide a 360-degree overview on what campaigns are driving ROI and therefore, where to keep investing their money.

A few last thoughts and takeaways for marketing leaders to keep in mind through 2021?

2021 presents several challenges and opportunities for B2B marketers.  As teams become more knowledgeable about how to leverage their marketing reporting and analytics, they will need to improve alignment not just with the sales team but also with critical company goals.  Optimizing the marketing mix to achieve the highest potential growth of a company and being able to explain how marketing is a key driver for this growth will allow CMOs and their teams to be recognized and rewarded for these significant company contributions.

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