Fergal Glynn of Docurated On Multichannel Marketing And How To Incorporate SMS Into Your Marketing Strategy

Fergal Glynn is responsible for all of Docurated's pipeline generation initiatives including marketing, sales development, strategy, awareness, demand generation, and driving growth.

To start, can you talk a bit about what Docurated is and does, and what attracted you to become their VP or marketing?

Docurated helps customers see and understand everything about their content. Our products are transforming how people and companies use and interact with content. From CRM to email to documents to meetings, Docurated maps the relationships between people and information, and acts as the intelligent fabric delivering personal and contextual content for every knowledge worker.

In the Introductory Video For Docurated, your Co-Founder and COO speaks the memorable lines, "No one needs 20 more file-sharing solution. What we need is one great idea." First of all, what separates Docurated from the many content management environments out there? And, just as importantly, how do you convince customers that Docurated will solve their data dilemmas?

Docurated is the only solution in this space that provides complete content activity and user coverage across all the time. Docurated acts as an intelligence layer that sits over all existing content stores providing users with a single access point to all content and activity data.

Along those lines, what ARE some of the most common problems facing business owners, marketers, and sales teams that you work with?
 

• Can't find relevant content.


• No insight or visibility into how content gets used in the field.


• No analytics on how content impacted a sales opportunity.


• No single source of truth for enterprise content.


• Marketing has no way of pushing relevant content to reps.









 
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Prior to Docurated, you were head marketer for both Veracode - automated applicated security software; BlueNote Networks - real-time interactive business communications, both of which are pretty solidly B2B solutions. How did you get started as a B2B marketer, and why did you take it so strongly? How are you able to both understand and solve the problems facing marketers and sales teams?

With a background in software engineering and product management, I moved over to Marketing because I wanted to be more involved in the decisions that drive company strategy. Working with great people at Veracode and Docurated certainly helped me grow as a marketer. At Veracode I built the company's inside sales function so that certainly gave me some valuable insights into the issues sales and marketing teams face.

Another trend in your marketing experience is working across platforms, incorporating data from all of an enterprise's channels into one solution. First of all, when did you first notice the need for such a service? And how far has that industry come since you first started working with data and multiple channels?

It is hard not to notice the need for a solution like Docurated. At pretty much every place I've worked so much time was wasted with people searching for and recreating lost content. I think the issues Docurated solves are still very relevant. Content is at the heart of everything Sales and Marketing do and any solution that drives efficiencies and increased effectiveness is going to have a major impact.

One reason platforms like Docurated exist is so many people are so overwhelmed with the amount of data they receive in any given day, from so many different platforms. Checking e-mail feels like a chore, and a drain of time and energy. With that in mind, what marketing techniques do you tend to prefer, and why?

I'm a believer in an account-based marketing model where each account is marketed to individually. Prospects demand personalization today. If you present materials that are irrelevant to their needs you will not get very far.

SMS marketing is still an overlooked option, in today's marketing schema, although that's quickly turning around. SMS messages have an open rate of an impressive 77%, according to business2community.com, and while e-mail open rates vary by industry, they averaged around 20% for 2016. What are some reasons why SMS marketing has such an unusually high open rate?

I think you touched on it in the question. SMS still gets overlooked so it is a channel that doesn't have as much noise as email for example.

One thing that's so useful about SMS marketing is it's not invasive, requiring customers to opt-in to receive alerts. How important is this likely to be, this year and beyond?

Vital. Customers only want to receive info relevant to them. Once they're opted in, you can start to incorporate SMS into your marketing strategy.

Many SMS marketing campaigns use a mobile keyword to receive a promotion of some kind. How might these keywords, when used in conjunction with a marketing database, help customers to segment themselves? Why is segmenting one's audience so essential for truly effective sales and marketing, these days?

It all goes back to the amount of info customers are bombarded with today. If it's not relevant they will ignore the email, SMS, etc. By segmenting your database, you can adapt your message and keep it targeted to each segment of your database.

At this point, there's nearly as many cell-phone subscriptions as there are humans - currently around 6.8 billion according to Quartz.com, and they're on their person at almost all the time. Keeping that in mind, how can a company incorporate SMS marketing into all of their other marketing efforts, maybe using targeting, location specific messages, audience segmentation, etc.?

Exactly yes all of the above. Again, it all goes back to personalization and relevance. Targeting, location-specific messaging, and segmentation are all techniques that should be incorporated into campaigns.

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