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Chandar Pattabhiram I was helping my daughter with her middle school math assignment this week when the proverbial light bulb in my head went off. Working through the various geometric patterns and equations, I realized that these same symbols and formulas also offer useful metaphors to frame the challenges that tomorrow’s marketer faces in the digital age. Let’s take a closer look. From Cones to Circles B2B marketers have spent decades obsessing about the marketing funnel, focusing on how to cast the widest net at the top. But in this new era of marketing, the modern marketer has stopped viewing the customer journey in terms of a funnel and instead thinks about it as part of a virtuous circle. In addition to finding ways to acquire customers faster, tomorrow’s marketer is thinking about customer retention and advocacy and in this way, she’s forging lasting, personalized relationships with buyers. The fact is that customers nowadays have many choices and very low switching costs. For this reason, it’s critical that marketers pay close attention to the quality of their customer interactions. Marketers who listen and then engage with their customers will see their efforts pay back in the form of brand advocates who tell others about their positive brand experiences. But for those marketers still stuck in the funnel, please beware. There will soon come a time when your customers replace your brand with one that knows them and markets to them based on their interests and past experiences.  E = MC2 By the time a prospective customer engages with a brand today, they have most of their research already complete. That’s what makes understanding your buyers so important. Tomorrow’s marketer is listening across all digital channels to understand who their customers are, what they care about and how they like to communicate. Tomorrow’s marketer builds long-term relationships using Engagement = Meaningful [Communication] times Continuous Context. When I say Meaningful, I’m referring to the fact that every interaction is relevant and meaningful and builds upon the previous one. Continuous Context embraces the notion that each interaction becomes part of a continuous thread, where brands listen and learn from previous interactions and then communicate with buyers in ways that are always contextual. So together, E=MC2 speaks to a personalized way that marketers engage with every individual. For example, when I log into Netflix, the movie recommendations that I see are based on who I am as well as my previous online behavior. My wife and I recently watched a romantic comedy so the next time I log on to Netflix, I’ll see new movie recommendations based on my previous selection. Netflix learns more about me at every stage of our relationship and their recommendations evolve based on each interaction I have with the brand. It’s a lesson every marketer should take to heart. There’s little that’s meaningful or continuous about mass marketing. The Shifting Curve of Customer Spend Historically, marketers have done very little to drive retention since customer behavior was relatively easy to predict. While the self-directed journey renders that notion obsolete, we still see 85% of marketing spend go to acquisition even though it’s more expensive to acquire a customer than to keep one. Tomorrow’s marketer is focused more on building relationships and engaging her customers in personalized, relevant ways. She’s recognized that it’s much more cost-effective to build brand loyalty and advocacy with current customers than it is to find new ones. S = T/S (Success equals Time over Specialization) The most successful marketing tells a story and creates an emotional connection with people. However, tomorrow’s marketer isn’t a specialist. This is contrary to what we commonly believed, but specialization is no longer the ticket to success. Our CMO Sanjay Dholakia, writes eloquently about the need for more latter-day DaVinci’s in marketing. Sanjay nails it. We need more multi-talented generalists who can comfortably handle myriad challenges from creative and brand design to product marketing and demand generation – and beyond. In other words, both art AND science. These are the kind of marketers who will flourish in tomorrow’s world. Convergence, Not Divergence For the longest time, there’s been a divergence in the best practices in B2B and B2C marketing. Each specialized in what it did best and perish the thought that they might ever learn from the other. B2B and B2C marketing best practices are equal sides on an isosceles triangle and they are rapidly converging.  We’re at the point where enterprise marketers can benefit by learning the personalization techniques developed by consumer marketers. And consumer marketers can learn to build long-term relationships by tapping into the nurturing techniques perfected by enterprise marketers. When it comes to the buyer journey, B2B and B2C cannot exist as different silos. Customers don't care about the old distinctions and definitions. Whether they're buying jewelry or mainframes, they expect to be engaged on a personal level and on their own terms. It’s not about B2B or B2C – it’s about B2H (Business to Human). Tomorrow’s marketer sees that convergence and aptly applies lessons from both sides to build lasting relationships with her customers.      So here we go – five mathematical symbols and formulas that will shape the success of tomorrow’s marketer in the digital age. Count on it.

Sanjay Dholakia The year was 2000. I—like the rest of America—sat down on Super Bowl Sunday with my friends to drink beer and enjoy some football. By most standards, I was a mature, responsible, fully functioning member of society. So why was it that for the next six months was I yelling “WASSUUUUUUP?!” like a lunatic?You may not remember that Super Bowl XXXIV was between the St. Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans, but long after the game was over and the final touchdown thrown, sane people around the country were still yelling “WASUUUP?!” thanks to one very clever and some would say iconic Budweiser commercial.Speaks to the power of traditional advertising, doesn’t it? Ironically, maybe not.We all have a Super Bowl ad or two that sticks in our memory. Flipping through a recent slideshow of the top ads of all time, I came across several favorites—Coca-Cola’s Mean Joe Greene and theHorse Showdown from McDonald’s with Larry Bird and Michael Jordan. Yet with each passing year, agencies and media monitors report that the efficacy of these ads is dropping lower and lower—why?I reflected on these five lessons as I simultaneously contemplated the demise of my fantasy football team as Super Bowl 50 approaches. 1. The irony of interest The fact that Super Bowl ads are awaited with such interest ironically highlights the fact that traditional television advertising is dying. No one watches ads anymore, or no one likes to watch ads anymore at least. Now, appointment TV is no longer the norm.Here’s why: DVR is king. Streaming services, like Netflix or Hulu, have made binge watching commonplace. On the Web, ad blocking is a game of table stakes. Our ability to isolate fanfare, deep interest, and iconic creativity to one day in the year is testament to the declining effectiveness of television advertising. The meme of start-up—or otherwise companies wasting or burning money on Super Bowl commercials—is part of pop culture. As marketers, business people, and consumers, we seem to have already moved on to a new reality without taking at least a moment to pay our respects to the old way. 2. More irony: The Super Bowl is drowning itself out It’s a common argument that the big game itself has been overshadowed by the commercials in previous years. However, now it seems as if even the ads are drowning themselves out. Super Bowl advertisers that pay millions of dollars for coveted 30-second spots are rotating away from the four hour game block. There used to be so much anticipation surrounding the debut of Super Bowl ads. Conventional wisdom was that the brand would draw more viewership to the game and therefore their spot by creating that anticipation. But at some point, brands started quietly releasing the commercials before the game just so they could get people to pay more attention. Now, it has become routine for brands to release their ads ahead of the big day on digital platforms—but why? Simply put, this single moment in time is no longer giving businesses the return on investment that they’re looking for. I think Frito-Lay North America chief marketing officer Ram Krishnan said it best when talking about the company’s Crash the Super Bowl campaign: “It’s not a one-and-done deal on the game day. It’s basically this five-to six-month engagement program that we had with the consumer,” he said. A decade old campaign, Crash the Super Bowl invited anyone to create a Super Bowl ad for Doritos this year. By posting the semi-finalists online and opening up the ads to fan voting, Frito-Lay came up with an ingenious way to create an online channel for consumer engagement. Here is an example of one of the semi-finalist ads: It wasn’t enough to just air a one-and-done commercial. Brands have already moved on to the new reality of long-term engagement programs as the requirement. 3. The icon of traditional advertising has gone digital Frito-Lay’s campaign also taught us that the icon of traditional advertising has happily gone digital. Crash the Super Bowl could not have existed without the ability to forge an ongoing relationship with consumers through the Web. Taking this a step further, I guarantee (ok, mostly guarantee) that every advertisement you see on Super Bowl Sunday will have some type of digital call-to-action—be it a website to visit, a Twitter handle to follow, a social hashtag to use, or even a promo code to plug in online. What advertisers are telling us is that traditional advertising—in this case, in the form of television ads—no longer works if it is not digitally connected. This is not just interesting, it’s actually quite useful insight, bridging the gap between television and digital yields more compelling and dynamic content for viewers and consumers. 4. Engagement is the new advertising Digital has opened up new ways for advertisers to judge the impact of their ads. In this digital era, simplebrand awareness is no longer enough to drive the needle. Websites, social, and tagging all enable marketers to see how far their dollar is going. A further irony here is that this new reality of advertising turning into digital engagement allows marketers to finally measure in new and precise ways. In the case of the Super Bowl, it provides some justification for tossing millions at a single moment in time. Actually, in a noisy environment like the Super Bowl, statistics show that it’s increasingly difficult for consumers to even remember what brands the ads are coming from. Low ad recall numbers reflect both the volume of marketing messages consumers are bombarded with daily (more than 3,000, to give you an idea) and also the quality or relevance of this content. Yet, over the last 50 years, Super Bowl Sunday has become perhaps the only day where people don’t skip through the ads on their DVR. They’re paying attention, but not all brand messages are sticking. Strategies that include an elongated approach to engaging with consumers  in personalized ways over time appears to be the way to break through the noise. Best of all, it can be measured. Brands and marketers are thinking about paid advertising now in fundamentally different ways. 5. There is no replacement for entertaining content But, there is still one marketing truth that comes through loud and clear here in the Super Bowl Ads:great creativity and storytelling still matters. Which brands are most likely to get recognized, break through all this noise, and drive real, lasting engagement over time? The brands that supply their audience with the most engaging content. Super Bowl ads—and all marketing tactics, for that matter—will continue to be just noise until they are both entertaining and relevant to the consumer. It teaches marketers that we need way more good content to accomplish our goals. In conclusion The evolution of something as iconic as the concept of Super Bowl advertising gives us fascinating evidence of the powerful and unprecedented speed of transformation in the world of marketing around us. Fifty years from now, one of my successors will likely be making her own observations, marveling at how virtual reality and Amazon’s direct-to-home instant purchases have further changed the nature of marketing and Super Bowl ads… and hopefully there will still be football. This post originally appeared on ClickZ, February 1, 2016.

Originally published on Econsultancy.com By Jack Simpson @ Econsultancy Sounds like a buzzword, but actually makes a lot of sense. Data visualization is the art of presenting often complex datasets in a visually engaging way. 
The hope is that presenting data in this way will make it more engaging and easier to understand, so it’s particularly helpful in terms of speaking to clients or internal stakeholders.  With this in mind, I’ve brought together 14 of my favourite data visualization examples from across the web. Why is data visualization important? In his 2010 TED talk, David McCandless argued that sight has by far the fastest and biggest bandwidth of any of the five senses. About 80% of the information we take in is by eye, he said. Students get very excited – and policy-makers and the corporate sector – when they can see the data. Researchers Emre Soyer and Robin Hogarth conducted a study in which three groups of economists were asked the same question concerning a dataset, and the results seem to support McCandless's claim: One group was given the data and a standard statistical analysis of the data; 72% of these economists got the answer wrong. Another group was given the data, the statistical analysis, and a graph; still 61% of these economists got the answer wrong. A third group was given only the graph, and only 3% got the answer wrong. The above results suggest that the visualized data on its own, without the accompanying analysis, was actually the most powerful format. But let me take my own advice and provide some visual examples... The internet in real time Slightly terrifying, this one, but it’s a goodie. A real-time visualization of data from all the biggest sites on the internet. Even if you work in digital, prepare to be amazed. Battle of the internet giants By the same people as the internet in real time site above, this one shows you how much money all the big boys in digital are making. In real time. Excuse me while I have a cry. The one million tweet map This is a good one for checking out geographical data for Twitter. It uses a clustering engine to visualize how people are tweeting about specific topics around the world. In the image below the keyword was ‘Terry Wogan’. Tweetping Live display of people tweeting across the world, but it leaves the ‘pings’ in place so the longer you watch the map the clearer the geographical trends become. Listen to Wikipedia Perhaps my favourite example on this list: a live visual and musical representation of Wikipedia edits. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions, and the pitch changes according to the size of the edit (the larger the edit, the deeper the note). Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. 
It’s strangely addictive, so click that link only if you’re prepared to spend your entire day watching and listening to dots. You have been warned. Google Trends We’ve written about Google Trends plenty of times on this blog, but this little bit of data visualization is wonderfully Google-like in its simplicity. It fills the screen with live trends and when you click on the text you’re taken to a Google SERP for that keyword. Earth wind map You don’t need to be a geography buff to appreciate this. A live visualization of wind around the world: direction, speed, and so on. You can drag the globe around and zoom in on specific points for greater detail. Just awesome. NOAA weatherView More weather visualization, except this one allows you to see representations of various types of weather data such as temperature, precipitation, pressure and so on. Every noise at once A scattergraph plot of almost any musical genre you can think of. When you click on any of the text you get a 30-second clip of a song in that genre. Its creator – Glenn McDonald of Spotify-acquired Echo Nest – explains the organisation of the genres as follows: Down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier. No Homophobia This site provides live visualization of all the homophobic language being used on Twitter, including live tweets containing homophobic keywords. Digital attack map This shows you where DDoS attacks are happening around the world, which is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. Not sure if I completely understand it, but damn if it doesn’t look and sound cool. Flight misery map A handy one for any travellers. Hover over an airport and get a neat little visualization of all outbound flights and their status. Green means good and red means bad. Can’t ask for simpler than that. Spotify musical map An interactive map that shows what music people are listening to in towns and cities across the world. London is mostly big on grime right now, apparently. World population Ridiculously simple but still kind of mesmerising, this site shows the world population increasing in real time. Click ‘watch as we increase’ to see the little stickmen appear in real time.  

By: Chris Gillespie Posted: January 25, 2016 | Sales Have you ever photocopied a piece of paper so many times that the copies faded and became hard to read? This is called a transcription error, and it happens when little mistakes add up over time to make a big difference. This also happens in sales when you repeat your pitch over and over again until small details get lost, the delivery gets muddied, and your pitch loses its edge and effectiveness. Once a quarter, it’s important to reset your habits to make sure that you’re not falling victim to this process. Essentially, you need to get back to the basics and start fresh. A big part of this refresh involves motivating yourself. Do you remember the bright and shiny optimism that you felt when you first started your job? How absolutely certain you were about your product? How you looked up to the more tenured salespeople and picked their brains to find out what they were doing differently? To dial in on this energy, you need to do assess yourself to determine what you’re doing well and poorly. So use this checklist to see how you stack up. If you start to feel a little inadequate, that’s great! You’ve identified the key areas that you need to work on, and there’s reassurance in knowing exactly what you need to do. And if you’re not selling more than you want to be (who is, really?), then this gives you a clear path forward to start the quarter with a crisp, clean page. Goals 1. Are my goals written down and up-to-date? Goals change over time, so it’s a good idea to revisit them. Keeping them consistent is good so you can track your progress, but it’s okay to tweak them occasionally. People learn as they go, and you shouldn’t stick to anything that doesn’t still make sense. Write your goals down, keep them visible, and share them with peers to hold yourself accountable. Don’t have any goals written down from last quarter? There’s never a better time to start than now. Sample goals: Achieve a 35% closed-won opportunity conversion by April 1 Hit 110% of year-to-date plan by April 1 Generate 3 new outbound sales opportunities each month, 9 per quarter this year 2. Am I on-track with my goals? Did I reach them? If not, where can I improve? Keep yourself honest. Many people set goals, but very few people keep them (just look at gym attendance in January versus February). Make sure your goals are SMART (simple, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound). This is a great article if you’re interested in the specifics on goal setting. Process 3. Am I following a template for discovery calls, or have I gotten lazy and just started winging it? What about my emails? This is where those nasty transcription errors start slipping in. I’ve found that over time, I may forget to do basic things like set agendas for my discovery calls, and then run into issues where we don’t cover the right topics in order (or at all). If your company doesn’t have a defined template, try your hand at making one. Consolidating your tried-and-true best practices into a template can be a great team exercise. 4. Did I refresh my prospecting emails and content links? The content that you share with your prospects can become stale, and links can get broken or outdated. Make sure that you’re not sending around any whitepapers from 2011 or videos that don’t work. This is a great time to check-in with the marketing team to see what new and exciting content you can share. 5. Am I still looking for leads in the same places? It might just be part of the nature of being a salesperson, but there’s a certain sense of fear that comes over you when you feel like you’ve run out of leads. Either you’re account-based and telling your boss “I need the Glengarry leads!” or you’re territory-based and you’re convinced that you’ve already sold to every single company in the state of New Jersey. Whether you’re a small start-up or large enterprise, you’re probably wrong. The total addressable market of territories—even mid-sized companies—is tens of thousands of leads. What’s really happened is that you’ve “photocopied” the same prospecting idea so many times that it’s become a blank piece of paper. So get a new piece of paper!Refresh your approach by having someone else take a look at what you’ve done and poke holes in it. Have you tried looking at the competitors of companies you’ve sold to? Have you tried looking at companies that your current customers have previously worked for? I promise you, the issue is not in the number of leads available, but your mindset. If you are able to shift it, you’ll magically start seeing new lists and thinking up new sources.Here’s a good exercise to help you find your focus: List off all of the deals that you won in the last quarter. Did the majority of your deals come from one vertical, region, or account? If there’s a noticeable trend, prioritize your efforts in the new quarter on that. And don’t forget to ask your now happy customers for referrals! 6. Am I utilizing all of my tools? Are you utilizing all of your sales channels or have you defaulted to just sending emails when you could be calling? If it’s the latter, create a goal for yourself to rectify that. A successful rep uses every available channel, so optimize your outbound prospecting strategy.Don’t forget about the tools that your company provides that you may not be taking advantage of. Some examples include data sources, partner co-selling, and email marketing tools. If none of these exist, be an innovator and start doing your own. Find a list of partners and start building a relationship with them to see if you can pass each other leads or help each other close deals.And there are personal skills and tools—what about your company’s learning-reimbursement program? Most companies will pay you to take classes in related areas that can either deepen your current skills or prepare you for your next role. Sales Skills 7. Am I selling to the best of my ability? Your selling skill is another place where transcription errors come into play, so have your colleagues listen to one of your cold calls and provide honest feedback. As salespeople, we may stop doing things by the book over time, including important parts of a call like up-front contracts, agendas, and staying on client’s calendars. Identify which fundamentals you need to touch up on, and nothing helps you do this faster than an impartial outside perspective.If you’re truly interested in improving, show your colleagues your worst calls. Don’t be shy, your colleagues feedback can only help you and will encourage a supportive relationship. Only sharing the best ones is like inviting guests in through the back door because the front of the house is on fire. 8. What are the top skills that I need to work on? As a salesperson, you’re probably well aware of your strengths and use these to your advantage whenever you can. But it’s just as important to identify your weaknesses and improve on them so that you can truly become invincible.To identify the skills you need to work on, draw a table with two columns like I’ve done for myself below. In the left column, list off all of your lost opportunities, and then in the right column, list all of the reasons why they didn’t close. Which ones occurred the most? Other examples: Not qualified properly Didn’t build a relationship Competitor told a better story Pricing Next to each reason, list the frequency, and then come up with ways to improve. Team Building 9. Did I make time for my team outside of work? Team building is crucial to building and developing relationships with your peers, but when things get busy, group activities are typically the first thing on the chopping block. Change this by getting lunch with your team and making time outside of work to catch up with them. Strong team ties can help you close deals. 10. Did I get to know people outside of my department? It’s extremely important for your success in sales to be aligned with departments beyond your own; you never know when you’re going to have to approach engineering or support with a question. By building these relationships early, you can avoid bothering them at the eleventh hour of your deal cycle when you’re completely frantic and begging for help. Tackle all of these one-by-one to set yourself up for a fantastic quarter. Remember, no matter how good of a salesperson you are, all skills are perishable and fade over time. If you’ve just been photocopying the same pitch over and over for too many months now, it’s guaranteed to missing some key details. Do yourself a favor and turn over a new page. ­ What other things should be on this checklist? Let me know in the comments below!

By Sanjay Dholakia We’ve reached the last installment of our “Ask the CMO: Lessons Learned” series with Mashable. What an incredible collection of reflections and insights from so many accomplished CMOs! For the final post, I had the honor of sitting down with Mashable to reflect on my own lessons learned and where I see our great profession headed. I hope you’ve enjoyed following this series as much as I have and are inspired to dive headfirst into this Next Era of marketing. And don’t worry—there will be plenty more “Ask the CMO” stories with great marketers in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! The following interview originally appeared on Mashable. The scene: A smoke-filled room clamors with anger, frustration and optimism as men in earth-tone suits and skinny wool ties debate—from art to copy to product placement—the best ways to sell dishwasher fluid. At long last, they agree, clink their glasses of brandy and set a plan in motion for six months down the road. That's marketing in a nutshell, right? A closed-door, one-size-fits-all operation that moves at the speed of molasses. Well, let's just say that picture is a little outdated. And not just because of the outfits. Today, technology plays a massive role in marketing strategy and execution: Automation has turned guesswork into a precise science and months of planning into nanoseconds. Companies like Marketo are leading the way in marketing automation technology, pushing boundaries and helping CMOs everywhere embrace the future. Of course, this is pretty complex stuff. So we had a chat with Marketo CMO, Sanjay Dholakia, to put the current state of marketing—and the future—into perspective. Q&A with Marketo CMO Sanjay Dholakia 1. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self that pertains to your career in marketing, what would it be? The path to success is embracing your unique skill set. Don't get hung up on being something that you think others want you to be. In my early professional years in the strategy consulting world, I believed that I needed to prove how smart and analytical I was. I vividly remember standing around with some partners during my time at McKinsey and hearing one partner observe to another, "Sanjay should be in sales and marketing." There I was trying to be this strategy guy, so I took it as a grave insult! But the truth is that he was just recognizing my unique strengths. If I had it all to do over again, I would still love strategy, but I would also focus on my natural talents and passion. 2. What's the most unexpectedly important skill from your past that you've found plays into your success? (For example, maybe a high school job taught you about the importance of teamwork.) Humility. I learned early on what it means to be on a team. When I was very young, I fancied myself a fairly good baseball player. I was in a friend's neighborhood playing in the sandlot, and I was barking instructions and orders and coaching tips to my team. I will never forget this—the mom of one of the kids on the team was watching us and yelled from her front door, "Hey, why don't you let Mr. Know-It-All do it?" We lost the game, and I went home and talked to my mom about it. She said, "Live life by the real estate theory." She didn't mean location. What said was, "You should always buy the ugly house on block, because if you surround yourself with prettier houses, your stock will rise. If you buy the prettiest house, you've already set the market ceiling. Always try to surround yourself with better, smarter people than you, and you will do great." Ever since, I've sought out environments and places in which I would be the dumb guy in the room. In order to build teams, I actively seek out people who are better than me in every dimension I can find. Throwback: I learned very young that surrounding himself with a great team leads to championships. 3. You're the barber's barber. What's it like being the CMO of a company dedicated to helping CMOs and marketers? I've held a number of incredible positions in my lifetime—CEO, GM of a public company, strategy consultant. I've said it on stage in a room of thousands of people, and I've said it in an interview to an audience of one: I consider this role to be the great privilege of my career. I feel this way for two main reasons. First, I love that I get to interact and learn from smart marketers around the world every day. Having an ability to translate that back directly into my day job is a gift. The second piece is that we are at a fortuitous moment in the world of marketing—we refer to it as the era of engagement marketing. Marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the last 500, and will change more in the next five years than we have seen to-date. The opportunity to be here in this moment in time working with smart marketers around the world to shape that change is a gift. 4. Marketo has ties to Madison Avenue, but is very much a Silicon Valley company—what are the misconceptions around marketing automation, and what are the three biggest trends you're seeing in the space? One misconception is that marketing automation is a thing strictly for B2B marketers. Another is that marketing automation is an acquisition-focused tool, designed to acquire "leads." It's really much bigger than that. In terms of trends, I believe this is the year that marketing automation goes completely mainstream—it's something for every organization. Our clients include schools, like George Washington University, and nonprofits, like OxFam. We have financial services clients like Charles Schwab and manufacturing companies like GE. We have sports teams, like the Portland Trail Blazers, or health and lifestyle apps, like Under Armour's MyFitnessPal. Every type of organization, marketer and industry—regardless of profile—needs this capability. This trend of marketing automation is growing up beyond the acquisition side of world to truly becoming the brain center or nervous system for all customer engagement across the entire customer lifecycle—retention, loyalty, advocacy, etc. Marketing automation is becoming the new advertising. Marketers are starting to figure out how to connect the art of paid advertising to the science of engagement marketing—the collision of advertising technology and marketing technology—which is creating this ability to get down to real individual levels of communication with customers. That is what’s making all the difference. 5. What's the most important thing for Marketo to communicate in its own marketing? How do you ensure the company stays above the "noise" from competitors/startups? Great question. Marketers are being given more and more responsibility and taking on more and more in their organizations, which is something we refer to as a "Marketing First world." So, first off, it's essential that Marketo really stays true to our very unique position in the market, which is that we are the only real Marketing First company. The only thing we do is think about marketers and their success, and our ability to stay true to that brand and emphasize that is unique. The second thing is really practicing what we preach, namely around the concept of engagement marketing that I mentioned before, which is the belief that the only way to successfully market is to build individualized relationships with people based on relevant and helpful content and ongoing interaction. All the other approaches are just noise. This approach will lead to people inviting marketing messages into the conversation and relationship as opposed to ignoring us. We're not trying to shout at people through billboards at the Chicago O'Hare Airport; that's not the foundation of a trust-based relationship. And third, it's necessary for us to develop and focus on a community of really smart marketers around the world, which is something we refer to as the Marketing Nation. Creating this community will further cement Marketo's position above the fray or noise, so long as it's the club that people want to be a part of because that's where they can interact with other smart people. It's the same type of value-add and trust that I mentioned in my last point. 6. One thing that appears to be unique to Marketo is the "Marketing Nation." Can you talk a little about what that is? In my travels as the barber's barber, what I've come to learn—and this may be shocking coming from the CMO of a software company—is that marketers don't care about the technology. What they really care about is being successful. They want to grow their careers and personal skill sets and brands. Marketo wants to continue to set the tech standard from an innovation standpoint—and we will—but we also want to create the definitive community literally and figuratively, physically and virtually where smart marketers come together to learn and shape the future of the industry. It's not the Marketo Nation—it really is the Marketing Nation. It's all about creating success for marketers across all the dimensions they desire, regardless of the tools they're using. Sure, if we help to build it and fuel it, there's an advantage that accrues for Marketo, but we're really doing it because we truly believe in this seismic shift that's happening in marketing and truly want to be part of this community that's helping drive success for marketers. It is a core part of our brand. We are for marketers by marketers. 7. Describe how technology is changing the backend of marketing. Do you feel like a modern CMO has to be equal parts CCO and CTO? As I think about it, the answer is probably "yes," with some nuances. It makes me think of my favorite quip about the "genius of 'and' versus the tyranny of 'or.'" People ask, "Is marketing art, or is it science?" The answer is really just "yes." Marketing will always be about art and creativity—that is what makes marketing great marketing. But because of this new digital, social world and access to technology and data, we're able to engage with customers on the personal levels that we've all aspired to reach. These CMOs have to be agile at least in the concepts of technology and analytical skill sets. They don't need to be able to do everything but have to be able to understand how these things contribute to moving their business and creating leverage. I talk about the new prototype for the CMO as a Da Vinci—they must be both a scientist and an artist. 8. Likewise, it's not just about the CMO—it's about his or her team as well. What skills do you look for at the non-executive level? Gosh, there are a myriad of skills that a marketing organization has to have. One of the things I often say is that there is no single marketing function. The reality is that inside of marketing there is an ever-growing number of disciplines, from creative and brand design to product marketing to demand generation to customer marketing to communications, etc. My cop out answer is that you're probably looking for people with all of these functional capabilities. But, more importantly, in this new world new era of engagement marketing, the skills I look for are marketers who understand how to create relationships with customers and partners as conversations—just like real relationships. The best marketers have storytelling capabilities. The ability to engage people with compelling stories and content is another critical piece. Regardless of where you sit, marketing is a team sport. Period—full stop. The ability to collaborate is imperative. We have to build relationships with people regardless of what channel they're on. It's a single conversation, and marketers likely have to collaborate with other marketers to have that conversation. It's about raw, intellectual curiosity. We need marketers who are going to be innovative because they are constantly looking to learn and try new things. 9. Ad blocking has become the newest disruptor in the marketing technology industry. What advice or reassurances do you have for marketers as they tackle this challenge? The concept of ad blocking has been around for a long time. Why? People don't like ads, and if they can find ways around them, they will use them. Why do you think the DVR became popular? People by and large don't want to see ads. If I'm browsing the web, I don't have a huge interest in seeing ads. We as marketers have to assume this trend is inexorable. Advertising as we know it has shifted toward a need for engagement marketing. The way around it is by permission, where people allow you into their lives and look forward to hearing from you because you are a trusted person who provides them with relevant and useful information. That's why we're seeing a collision of advertising technology and marketing technology. 10. Looking into the future, what do you think will be the CMO's most valuable resource in 15 years? Well, Marketo, of course, haha! Too much?

Posted: Friday, January 22, 2016 Author: Amber Tiffany The most personal conversations happen offline. While a personalized digital experience is certainly enticing and powerful, to really get to know a prospect—their interests, burning questions, and biggest challenges—you talk to them. And what better way to talk to someone than over the phone, where chances for misinterpretation are greatly reduced. I’m sure any sales rep will back me up on this one. Dial in on call intelligence Phone conversations are not only personal, but they’re also one of the most common interactions people have with a business. In fact, nearly three times as many people choose to call a business instead of filling out a form, according to Invoca’s State of the Mobile Experience report. And BIA/Kelsey reports that from 2014-2019, mobile calls to businesses will more than double, reaching an astounding 162 billion. This sharp rise in call volume makes sense when you think about how many people engage on mobile devices today. While digital marketers are certainly able to gather data on mobile engagement, many have little insight into what conversations are going on over the phone, and as a result, their personalization is suffering. Without visibility into these offline conversations, marketers are personalizing their website with the wrong messages or sending follow-up emails that have nothing to do with their prospect’s latest conversation with their company. The missing link is call intelligence. Call intelligence gives marketers visibility into the conversations that customers and prospects are having over the phone. With these insights, marketers not only get to understand customers on a new level, but their personalization is based off the entire omni-channel journey. Here are four ways call intelligence can help marketers personalize more holistically—based on both online and offline conversations: 1. Fix out-of-touch nurturing Lead nurturing is a great way to educate your prospects and keep them engaged with your business. Let’s say a prospect calls your business because they want to find out what differentiates you from your competition. Your sales rep has the perfect answers and makes the competition look pitiful. Well done! However, without personalization, nurturing can come across more like spam than a thoughtful way to educate and engage your prospects. If your marketing automation system didn’t get the memo about offline conversations because you didn’t have a way to share that information, like call intelligence technology, your leads remain in the same generic, top-of-funnel nurturing track. The next thing you know, your leads get an email talking about irrelevant use cases. Too bad you didn’t send them your new buyer guide complete with competitive advantages instead! With the right tools, you can automatically sync call data with your marketing automation, which helps you make sure prospects are dropped into the right nurturing tracks and your follow-up message are relevant. 2. Retarget with the right information Retargeting can re-engage a prospect with a personalized ad. For example, after having an in-depth conversation with one of your sales reps at a tradeshow, your prospect may do a quick Google search for your company and your targeted ad pops up. From there they click on it and head to your landing page. Instead of filling out a form, they want to talk through some question now, so they do what a lot of motivated buyers do—pick up the phone to learn more and get ready to make a purchase. Whoohoo! But if you’re retargeting based on an incomplete picture, you could be sending a dangerous message. If your retargeting platform is out of the loop, completely oblivious to the offline conversation (or other online conversations), it’ll think it’s time to retarget this “unconverted” visitor with a discount offer. The result is an annoyed customer who is now angry that they were about to pay full price. This is a terrible, impersonal customer experience, but unfortunately it happens all the time. 3. Do Web Personalization right Web personalization tools empower marketers to create digital experiences uniquely tailored to each visitor by showing them content and creating an experience based on their needs and preferences, as indicated by their previous activity. Sounds cool, right? For personalization to be truly effective, it has to take the entire omni-channel customer journey into account. If it doesn’t, you could be “personalizing” in the wrong direction. For instance, if you know someone is likely to call your business, why not personalize your website with your phone number and click-to-call buttons for your mobile visitors? Likewise, if a prospect has already called your company, their next visit to your website needs to reflect the conversation. Integrating call intelligence with your web personalization efforts empowers you to show web visitors content related to the product they mentioned over the phone and encourages them to the next step in the journey. 4. Get your sales reps in the loop Personalized marketing doesn’t stop after the digital journey, or at least it shouldn’t. If a sales rep answers the phone and goes through a generic list of questions followed by the boilerplate pitch, the personalized experience is shattered. The trick is to give your sales rep access to real-time information on the caller and their engagement history. Tools like call intelligence, combined with the power of your marketing automation platform, provide demographic data that allow you to share which campaigns and content a prospect has interacted with. The best part? The sale rep can access this data in real-time. This level of insight helps reps customize the conversation. As a marketer, you’ve helped create a seamless omni-channel experience. It’s easy to get lost in the digital realm, but remember that just as it’s important to explore new channels, it’s critical to go back to your roots and dial in on the basics. Use customer conversations, both online and offline, to personalize for your customer’s entire journey. Each conversation has valuable insights that can be used across channels and touchpoints to make your audience feel that they are valued and heard. If you don’t know what’s going on over the phone, you’re probably put your foot in your mouth more often that you’d like. What steps have you taken to ensure a consistent omni-channel experience for your customer? Share your experience in the comments section below!

  The marketing world has undergone a dramatic shift: digital now touches nearly every customer interaction. Marketing has become a technology-powered discipline, with the two areas so interwoven that chief marketing officers are projected to spend more on technology than chief information officers by 2017. The rise of digital has led to the emergence and explosion of marketing technology (MarTech) applications and platforms. Marketers can now collect and analyze large and disparate volumes of data—and make their insights actionable with a degree of precision just years ago was only a dream. This gives more power to the CMO, who constantly aims to address the basic question of marketing: how to engage and acquire customers for the long term by making engagement and acquisition more attainable and measurable. The best way to do this? Assemble and integrate a collection of complementary marketing applications – commonly referred to as a MarTech stack. MarTech To The CMO—“We’re Here To Help” There are so many facets in marketing that engagement and measurement can best be accomplished by tapping into data from a multitude of different channels. Think of some of the latest developments, from social listening to video engagement to chat analysis, which produce a treasure chest of customer and prospect data that, when combined, offer insights far greater than a single application could offer. As the channels continue to multiply, there is no shortage of MarTech companies offering the latest acquisition, engagement, retention and measurement tools. In fact, the number of MarTech companies has doubled in the last year to the point where there now are over 2,000 firms vying for the attention of CMOs.  Many marketers are still in the early stages of understanding the value that an extensive marketing stack can deliver. Others are leveraging the value that a rich set of complementary solutions can yield when integrated and working together. Companies including Citrix, New Relic, and Computer Associates are developing valuable marketing stacks with dozens of applications that share data with one another. But they are in the minority—just 9% of marketers have a complete, fully utilized MarTech stack, according to a study from Ascend2. The pace of adoption is bound to accelerate for the simple reason that marketers who harness the value of a well-considered marketing stack will out-perform their rivals and capture market share. Leading marketers will make sense of the vast amounts of data they acquire and figure out how to act on that information. A good MarTech stack can help you get closer to prospects and customers by obtaining information about what they are doing in the digital and offline worlds. For example, it is now possible to seamlessly combine information from a customer or prospect who completes a variety of online and offline actions - visits your website to learn about a new product, watches an online video, attends your annual event and the sessions related to their interests, tweets about their experience, and contacts your call center. This information coupled with an engagement automation platform will improve personalization, relevance, and timeliness leading to improved engagement, conversions, and ROI. Come together, right now It is imperative to develop a technology ecosystem that supports your company objectives—be they acquiring new business, retaining existing customers, or increasing your average revenue per customer. There are a lot of technology applications that can be implemented throughout the customer lifecycle to drive outcomes you desire (check out a fine piece by ChiefMartec.com CEO Scott Brinker on the MarTech landscape). Interestingly, the companies that are leading the investment in, and deriving results from, deep marketing stacks most often don’t come from the ranks of the Fortune 1000. Instead, it’s often emerging, rapidly growing businesses that are leveraging the available toolsets to build broad marketing stacks, sometimes involving more than 20 applications. And they are seeing the benefits. In a recent interview Bill Macaitis, CMO of Slack, emphasized the importance the right technology stack to create and deliver a great customer experience. Today’s CMOs need people within marketing who can think creatively about how to use software and data-science to improve results. People who are knowledgeable about both software and data increasingly have opportunities in marketing. In fact, in an “Ask The CMO” article, Barbara Messing, CMO at TripAdvisor, admits that very few of her acquisition team members come from a traditional marketing background; instead she has many more data scientists. A recent HBR study sponsored by Marketo described marketing technology as essential to creating agile and fluid structures and driving customer engagement. That’s because agile and fluid organizations are highly innovative. These teams understand that they can gain better insights into the unique relationships and connections with their customers and prospects by embracing technology. It boils down to this: The better your marketing technology stack, the more it will help you know how best to acquire, engage, and satisfy your customer.

By Sanjay Dholakia We’ve talked a lot about the fact that the rise of digital, social, and mobile has changed how every organization engages with its constituents. Taking this a step further, one thing that’s clear after reading the latest from our Mashable “Ask the CMO” series is that there are some industries more than others whose marketing approach has experienced compounded change driven from other dimensions. Healthcare in the United States, for example, is fundamentally shifting before our very eyes. The advent of the internet, its impact on information availability, and finally the Affordable Care Act have dramatically shifted the nature of patient-provider interactions presenting a slew of new challenges for marketers in the field. In this fascinating interview with David A. Feinberg, vice president of marketing and CMO of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, you’ll learn how one organization is reacting to and leading this shift from a provider perspective. He’s quick to point out that all this change has not only affected the structure of his marketing organization, but the very purpose of his strategies. It’s certainly been a big focus for us here at Marketo; how do we help marketers everywhere from Boston Children’s Hospital to the entire Kindred Healthcare system connect with patients in unprecedented ways that better serve their health? From the rise of consumer power to industry consolidation, read on for key trends in healthcare marketing. And of course, have a very healthy and happy New Year! The following interview originally appeared on Mashable. Thanks to the Internet, we're now able to instantly secure the information we need to make decisions in our lives. These can be mundane choices—like choosing a restaurant, or picking a gym to join to keep those New Year's resolutions alive—or important determinations, like selecting a specific doctor or hospital to receive care from. Today, hospitals, many of which have dozens of centers, thousands of employees and many more patients, know that access to healthcare information is one of the most important services they can provide. To learn how hospitals are innovating and communicating with patients in the Information Age, we spoke to David A. Feinberg, the vice president of marketing and CMO of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the largest hospital by number of beds in the U.S., according to Becker's Hospital Review. Feinberg discusses the biggest trends in hospital marketing, how the structure and purpose of marketing has changed in the past two decades and much more. Q&A with David A. Feinberg, Vice President, Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital 1. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self that pertains to your career in marketing, what would it be? I would give the same piece of advice I received early on: Don't be afraid to fail. Remember that everyone who you think is a success has also experienced failure. At the same time, learn from your mistakes, and don't make the same mistake twice. 2. What's the most unexpectedly important skill from your past that you've found plays into your success? Growing up, my father ran a shoe store in a small town in Pennsylvania. One day he showed me, in detail, how to properly stock the shoes. There was a science to it. I should have been paying more attention to his instructions. When it came time for me to stock the shoes myself, I did it completely wrong. The times when my father yelled were few and far between, so when he yelled at me for a job not-so-well-done, it made me realize the importance of listening carefully. The lesson has stayed with me. I always remember that how you do something—the process and attention to detail—is as important as doing the job. 3. What are the three biggest trends that you see in healthcare marketing today? The first trend is the importance and influence of the consumer. Patients are taking charge of their healthcare in ways that we could not have imagined even a few years ago. We are challenged to adjust our systems to empower our patients while still providing the best care; we want to help them make choices that are both medically correct and right for their individual needs. The second trend is the consolidation and expansion of healthcare institutions and the way organizations are coming together. Consolidation creates challenges and opportunities. Large organizations need to have a strong brand with a cohesive message that stands out. The final trend is the variety of ways that patients get information. There was a time when the majority of information was physician-focused. Now, people get information from multiple sources, like the Internet and from friends and family. (Physicians, of course, are still a main resource). Patients are able to drive their own healthcare through access to information on medications, procedures and their medical team. The challenge becomes making information useful to patients and helping them make the best decisions. It is incumbent on respected healthcare institutions to make sure people are able to decipher the information all around them and to provide accurate, timely and useful information for patients to utilize. 4. When CEO Steven Corwin took over at NewYork-Presbyterian, he announced his plans to put patients first. What does that mean, and how has the marketing department contributed to that effort? The meaning is simple: It means the driving force behind all of our activities is focused on patient needs. The patient and their loved ones come before the needs of the doctor and the institution. Dr. Corwin challenged us to think about what is right for the patient and that is where our success is. Having that focus makes us better at what we do and allows us to provide the best care. From a marketing standpoint, we look at what we do and let the patient drive how we do it. In our ad campaign, the language is totally unscripted. All of the words come directly from the patient and really showcase what is meaningful to them. We hope they create a positive impression; we know they are inspiring and helpful to those who see them. People have connected with the ads, often giving themselves the courage to get the medical care they need. We're very proud of that. 5. David, you've been with NYP for nearly 20 years. How is your marketing department structured today, and how has it evolved over the past two decades? When I first joined NYP, there was a different vision for marketing. We were going to be a department that was hired out to various internal departments to help with individual projects. We quickly realized this model was not going to achieve our strategic objectives. The job of the marketing team changed, becoming a more rounded department and creating an overall branding strategy that has become a driving force throughout the hospital. Over the years, the marketing department has expanded alongside the hospital. For example, we've created a coordinated branding effort that includes messaging, the hospital's website and signage. Most recently, we've been coordinating the branding as we expand our network and bring new hospitals into the NYP family. In order to keep everything cohesive, we (including the public affairs team, the social media team and the internal communications team) work as a team across the institution to achieve a common goal. 6. How does NYP use technology for its marketing initiatives? How does it measure ROI, and how has that changed since you first started your career in healthcare? When I started, the measurements were very basic and included only transactions and reputation. Today, we are moving towards a more complete picture of how we impact the organization and the results we can achieve. I'd be exaggerating if I said we have it completely figured it out, but we are getting better. We are analyzing types of reputation and looking to link our marketing activities with patient volume and revenue. 7. Brand loyalty is extremely important in healthcare. Patients want to be able to trust and build a relationship with a hospital, whether they're tapping into emergency services, specialists, preventative care, etc. How does NYP ensure that its communication with patients reflects their different needs, and how do you continue to build the relationship even after their treatment has ended? We work hard to provide the information patients need in the way they need it. We just completed a video project that we're proud of. It describes what it is like to have a child at our facility. It sounds basic, but knowing what to expect is so important for new parents. When patients feel they are cared for—beyond their immediate medical health—it goes such a long way. In addition, we have a robust and well-developed system, a patient portal called myNYP, for patients to get their information digitally and in real time. Patients can sign on and get all of the information they need about their medications, procedures, doctors and what to do when they leave the hospital. The information can be accessed any time and on any kind of device. One of the things that distinguishes NYP is our ability to provide complete care, meaning the care does not stop when the patient leaves the hospital; it continues beyond our walls. 8. With more people consuming health content and finding doctors on their mobile devices, health care professionals can no longer rely solely on word-of-mouth and traditional mediums. How does NYP make sure it has a digital presence? How do you make sure your conversations with current and potential patients are consistent across all channels—email, advertising, social, etc. It's a challenge across the board, so let me give you a few examples. We are in the process of re-imagining our website as an integrated digital platform built around patient needs, both current and future. Everything about the site is looked at through the eyes of our patients and families, and it will be device and platform agnostic. No matter how patients want access, it will adapt to their needs. Additionally, we have a relationship with one of the largest providers of digital physician information, allowing us to make sure we have the most up-to-date data on our doctors. Patients can connect to their doctors, allowing them to get the care they need. This is a digital tool that can be used across all platforms. 9. The "Amazing Things" campaign was applauded by the medical and advertising community. Can you give an overview and talk about the immediate results of that campaign? What were the main things NewYork-Presbyterian learned from it? Where do I begin! Of course we are very proud of the campaign. It is unique in that it is totally about the patients—unscripted and totally real. We have gotten a tremendous response. When our caregivers tell people they work for NYP, the first thing they hear is how much other people love the advertisements. People may love the ads, but they really love what the ads say. They say so much in such a simple way; it is a reinforcement of something I learned long ago: The quality of the advertisement is the inverse of the complexity of its execution. Our campaign exemplifies this completely. It is so simple and so real, and that has proven to be very impactful.

By: Mike Tomita Posted: January 8, 2016 | Modern Marketing Since the news first broke about Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, there has been a ton of speculation around whether Disney will be able to carry on the Star Wars legacy. Our questions were answered as Disney closed out the year by releasing Star Wars: The Force Awakens globally, and since then, it has been breaking box office records from left to right. While George Lucas is much to credit for building the massive Star Wars fan base, Disney continued his legacy by catering to the fans and giving them what they want. In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Lucas shared that, while it wasn’t what he wanted, Disney wanted to make something for the fans—a retro movie. And they did just that. By keeping certain elements consistent with the prequels and adding their unique Disney-esque touches, Disney succeeded in carrying on the legacy and impressing critics, earning a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. While it’s unlikely you’ll be directing a box-office hit anytime soon, there is a valuable lesson you can learn from this handover: your audience should always come first, whether it is a theater full of fans or your targeted prospects. It’s important to cater your messaging to them to give them the best experience possible because, at the end of the day, it’s their dollars that are feeding your bank. From my perspective, these are some of the key elements that Disney incorporated for the fans that contributed to the success of the new Star Wars movie, and can help you build your brand: (Warning: This blog contains SPOILERS) 1. Consistency Granted that this is the seventh installment in the Star Wars saga, so Disney had to build on the story that George Lucas had created. Since The Force Awakens occurs after the events of the original Star Wars trilogy, they had the advantage of bringing back the original characters and actors that established the fanatic legacy that Star Wars enjoys today. However, that advantage came with the peril of tarnishing the “happily ever after” ending that was implied at the end of the last Star movie, Return of the Jedi. When we last saw our heroes, the Rebels had just blown up the second Death Star and defeated The Empire, Han and Leia were young and in love, and Luke led his father (SPOILER ALERT: Darth Vader) to redemption, finally becoming a true Jedi in the process. Skip ahead a few decades and the events of the original trilogy are now a half-believed legend. Luke is a just a rumor of a broken man who ran away, Han and Leia are split up and trying to forget the pain of their alienated son by going back to old habits, and The Empire is back in a big way (now rebranded as The First Order). Did Disney just ruin the original Star Wars trilogy? In my opinion, no. What they did do is create believable continuity between the conflicts of the past and present. After all, who wants to watch a Star Wars movie about a universe where everything is going great? It would just be a boring movie about political debates and teen angst (*cough* the prequel trilogy). In The Force Awakens, Disney brings back the basics with the good versus evil theme that defined the original films. In the new movie, the ultimate villain, Darth Vader, still looms large even from beyond the grave. This time, instead of Luke Skywalker trying to resist the temptations of the dark side and ending up twisted and evil like this father, Han and Leia’s son Kylo Ren is struggling to live up to his grandfather’s terrible legacy as a master of the dark side and fights against the good within himself. Aside from telling a continuous story, Disney also paralleled key visuals into their movie that the old ones shared. This includes everything from the style of the opening crawls to familiar characters and scenes. Take a look at the opening crawls from Star Wars Episode VII (latest installment) and Star Wars Episode IV: Or what about when Han boarded the Millennium Falcon, blaster in hand with the same scoundrel grin he has always had (queue Star Wars theme song), backed-up by his sidekick Chewbacca who hasn’t changed one bit (and who we still can’t understand). Marketing Lesson: Consistency is critical because it’s a solid element that allows fans to connect with you, associating new messages with all the feelings they already affiliate with your brand. And with such a huge fan base like Star Wars’, this is definitely a key thing to incorporate. In fact, when these consistent elements appeared on screen at my showing, the audience even clapped and cheered it on. 2. Innovation While Disney had to keep certain things the same, they also needed to add their own flavor to show that they can not only reproduce the same type of film, but contribute to it. Just take a look at BB-8, Disney’s take on an R2-D2 type of robot. R2-D2’s machinery has aged and is pretty old-age, but BB-8’s is much more innovative with its spherical shape that allows it to move swiftly. Even its noises have changed, sounding much more high-tech than R2-D2 static, satellite-sounding noises. Personally, I think one of the best decisions that Disney, or J.J. Abrams, made was learning from the mistakes of the prequel trilogy and not overusing technology for the sake of technology. Just because something is old doesn’t make it obsolete (think light sabers or The Millennium Falcon). For The Force Awakens, they went back to the basics like shooting on real film, building sets on location, and utilizing practical effects and costumes. CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is definitely used, but it is used appropriately and doesn’t pull the viewer out of the story, which is what special effects are for and why the revolutionary techniques used in the originally trilogy were so effective—because they served the story and weren’t added just for spectacle. The new film has improved greatly on the types of special effects that were pioneered by George Lucas and his team when they created the first films and combined with today’s state-of-the-art CGI. This blending of new and old is exactly what the new film is about and carrying that over to how the movie is made, looked, and felt is a big part of its well-received success. The first trilogy had no CGI. The prequel trilogy had WAY too much. This trilogy has started off with just the right amount. Marketing Lesson: From the evolution of the droids, to the streamlined Stormtrooper uniforms, to the very methods used to bring the story to life, Disney has mixed the right amount of the past with the present to create an innovative evolution of a familiar universe. Take a cue from them and give your audience something new to keep them hooked. Otherwise, it’s just the same old, same old. 3. Adaptation The times they are a-changin’. The last Star Wars movie was released in 2005, which means it was filmed at least a year before that. Being that a decade has passed since the last film, Disney had to adapt to our current culture. So what does this entail? For one, did you notice that the main protagonist in this film is a female? While women like Princess Leia or Queen Amidala certainly took the stage before, the spotlight was typically on the main characters—be it Luke Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi. This time, Rey is the star of the show, and we watch her confidence grow as she overcames her fears to take down the dark force. When we first saw Rey, she had been left on the planet Jakku on her own, scavenging and selling things to survive, and certainly doesn’t fit a typical heroine stereotype. Even Finn’s commander is a female and perhaps the first female Stormtrooper ever. Not to mention that we get our first black Stormtrooper played by John Boyega. This was such a controversial casting decision that the hashtag #BlackStormtrooper was born to handle the debate. Again, this is a sign of Disney not only adapting to the times, but doing it in a way that felt natural in the Star Wars mythology. Long gone are the days of clone troopers and faceless minions. These modern Stormtroopers are tragic militants, stolen from their families as children, and indoctrinated in the beliefs of The First Order. Some have doubts, some do not, but we finally we get to see one of the faces behind the mask. And he just happens to be reminiscent of another likeable hero who started off working against the Rebels, in both character and color—Lando Calrissian. Like Lando, Finn’s is just another well-developed character who continues the theme of redemption that runs throughout the Star Wars storyline. Marketing Lesson: As Disney has proven, it’s important to keep up with new technology, emerging trends, and cultural norms to offer your audience new, engaging products and content. But this doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel each time. Go through your existing archives and recycle successful, old assets by tweaking it to make it more current. Do, or do not. There is no try. Disney did it. J.J. Abrams did it. And you can do it. Whether or not Disney’s take on Star Wars matched George Lucas’ vision, The Force Awakens is a successful continuation of the Star Wars story that resonates with the fans. Disney’s careful treatment of the core elements that made Star Wars such a beloved franchise provides the generation that grew up with Star Wars that familiar feeling of seeing old friends again, while its updates resonate with the current generation of fans-to-be to carry on the Star Wars legacy for years to come. With strategic marketing through consistent and innovative branding, adapting to new generations of people and technology, you too can awaken your fans and build a brand that carries on for ages. Here’s to your legacy! http://events.marketo.com/summit/2016/

By Sanjay Dholakia, Marketo CMO These days, it’s like I blink and six months are gone. That’s certainly how it felt for me this year—2015 was a whirlwind. Every year around this time, I like to sit down and reflect on the last 12 months, not only to remember that they actually happened, but to think about what I’ve learned as a marketer, and—more specifically — as a CMO. You’re probably thinking, what’s the meta takeaway? What’s the one thing that I should carry with me as I round out my marketing plans for the year ahead? You, my fellow marketer, will discover that the following findings boil down to one common theme: We are truly in a new era of marketing—the era of engagement marketing. This year, a number of key changes came into focus for all of us—contextual changes and imperatives for us to fundamentally reimagine how we connect with our potential and current customers and how we set up our organizations for success. For our organizations to connect with today’s always-on digital consumers and thrive in 2016 and beyond, we marketers need to evolve, innovate, lead and be change agents in our organizations. We need to create a “Marketing First” world, if you will. This is an incredibly exciting time. This year, I said over and over that marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the last 500 and will change more in the next five than it has in the last five. What lies in front of us is the opportunity to shape this change and be a pioneer for all the marketers, sales teams, customers, partners and CEOs to come. So here they are—in no particular order (because after this whirlwind year, I only have four brain cells left)—the seven key things I learned this year: 1. It’s About Engagement Marketing, Not Mass Marketing This has been a central theme for me in years past, but I really saw it come to life in 2015; smart brands that were not targeting consumers with the same messages over and over again were the most successful. Some of the organizations that I saw executing this best were sports teams. Franchises have succeeded in creating an ongoing dialogue with their fans to engage beyond game attendance. By observing that a football fan has taken his whole family to the big rivalry game every year for the last six years, teams are able to market more effectively both around that game and around other family activities. They have begun talking to that individual—not some generic, large group of “fans.” In terms that may sound too “inside baseball” (pun intended), this shift is captured in a move from a “third-party” world (pushing generic messages to someone else’s audience) to a “first party” world where the marketer and the organization are the keepers of individual behavioral and demographic information. This allows them to make every interaction—even paid advertising—completely relevant and personal. Just think of the potential! 2. It’s About The Whole Customer Life Cycle, Not Just Acquisition Over and over this year, I saw—and felt personally in my own day-to-day role—a shift toward the marketing organization being responsible for, and a driver of, the entire customer life cycle, not just the top of the funnel. I met with customers whose “acquisition” marketing teams weren’t even in the same building as their “loyalty and retention” marketing teams. And then I watched them dismantle those constructs to bring them all together. Yes, we want to think of innovative and engaging ways to obtain new customers, but we must place equal, if not greater, importance on keeping the customers we have happy. More engaged customers spend more with us, they renew at much higher rates, and they advocate for us to bring in new customers in a way that our “clever marketing” could never do. Investing in that this year is just good business. 3. It’s About B2H, Not Just B2B or B2C The old distinctions of marketing are disappearing. I repeatedly heard “consumer” marketers this year say things like, “I need to figure out how to nurture relationships like those B2B marketers do.” And, just as often, I heard “B2B marketers” say, “I need to figure out how to dynamically personalize all my messages and content on the website like those consumer marketers.” It’s no longer about how we see ourselves (e.g., “We sell to consumers” or “We sell to businesses”), but about how consumers see us. Not only does this mean that marketers are “crossing the aisle” to learn from each other’s best practices, it means that they’re taking a more personalized approach to their interactions with the “humans” on the other end of their marketing messages. Dedicating ourselves to this broader definition of “must-haves” or best practices will drive higher conversion rates and more revenue for all of us in 2016. 4. It’s About The Customer, Not The Channels Or Silos I heard a lot of marketers this year coming to the realization that people don’t live inside one or another imaginary channel—that they had to think about “everywhere” and “integrated” and “conversation.” For example, while there’s been great emphasis on “mobile first,” there was discussion about falling into the trap of “mobile only.” One marketer expressed to me his “aha” moment of realizing that the mobile device “actually contained a minimum of five different channels” as he described the fact that on “mobile” you and I could be in email or a social network or on the web or watching a television channel — all in addition to possibly interacting with an actual mobile app — all in the very same device. A focus on marketing by channel creates disconnected—and, really, really annoying—experiences for customers. We need to think of our marketing systems holistically. For 2016, it’s not just about mobile or email or social—it’s about how these all intertwine and drive a customer forward on his or her journey. 5. It’s About Renaissance Marketers, Not Channel Specialists Building on the above, there’s a need for today’s marketers to be a master of many talents, instead of specializing in one area or channel. The topics of people, skills, and the prototype for the new marketer were perhaps the most frequent discussion I had with CMOs and marketers in 2015. Mostly recently, Lara Hood Balazs, SVP, head of North America marketing at Visa, in a Q&A with Marketo (my employer) on Mashable described her talent search as looking for “human Swiss army knives,” i.e., “people who … can easily move between multiple work projects.” These folks are rare, which is why I predict that there will be greater emphasis on educating tomorrow’s marketer in the year ahead. This education will go beyond traditional marketing tactics to include mastering marketing technology. 6. The Power Of “And” Vs. The Tyranny Of “Or” In Martech Prior to this year, “martech” and “ad tech” might as well have been on different planets as far as marketers were concerned. “Programmatichttp://marketingland.com/library/display-advertising-news/display-advertising-programmatic-media-buying” was the big buzzword with advertisers in 2014, but in 2015, the buzz was all about the convergence of advertising technology and marketing technology. This was a particularly enlightening lesson from 2015—that the world of paid advertising can andshould directly be tied to direct marketing and the ability to connect with individuals. The result is the ability to personalize ads like never before. For example, sending a specific, relevant message to someone via a paid ad in their Facebook feed should be no different than sending them an email. In fact, wouldn’t it be great if I could send that person a relevant email based on their behavior on my website showing interest in product X, and then if they open that email, automatically put a follow-up paid ad message in their feed—but, if they don’t open that email, I could put the original message in that paid ad? This also means that, as a marketer, our marketing spend will be tracked in new and improved ways. Instead of throwing dollars at programmatic and customers who fit a specific profile, but may or may not be interested in our product, we’ll now be able to better target our dollars to the people who really do care and are therefore are more likely to buy. In many ways, this is the “aha!” moment we’ve all been looking for. 7. This “Marketing First” Phenomenon Is Global I was all over the place this year—mentally, and physically! From France to Japan to the UK to Australia to Germany and over to New Zealand, I was meeting with marketers of all backgrounds and industries. What struck me was that no matter the location, all of today’s smart marketers are grappling with the same challenges that this new digital era presents. They were all talking about the lessons and issues that I identified here—things were not isolated to a specific geography or segment or vertical or size of company. Despite changes and challenges, it was universal that the marketers that were diving head-first into a Marketing First mindset were the ones who were seeing the best results and making the most waves. This won’t happen for all us overnight—it takes a lot of hard work and planning—but if we invest now, and if we commit to drive just one of these lessons in 2016, the results will be worth it. I hope these insights provide a little bit of guidance and luck as you head into 2016. Happy holidays, Happy New Year, and happy marketing! This post originally appeared on Marketing Land on December 20, 2015.

By: Ellen Gomes Posted: January 4, 2016 | Content Marketing It’s a new year, which means it’s time to get started on making your resolutions a reality (both personally and professionally). If you’ve set personal goals already (like seeing the inside of 24 Hour Fitness more than once a week), but you’re looking for a professional goal that will make a tangible impact on your brand and organization, you’ve come to the right place. Does your business communicate with its customers? Yes, of course it does! So this resolution is vital to any and every business: create and maintain a consistent brand voice. This blog is here to help you make this an actionable resolution by sharing the importance of a consistent brand voice and some tips and tricks on to create and maintain it. Why You Need a Consistent Brand Voice It’s important to present a consistent experience across channels, and the best way to do this is to define your brand’s voice.  Whether you’re creating content for your blog, your website, or on social, the style you write in will become the “voice” of your brand. Think of your brand’s voice as its personality. It helps make your brand more genuine and personable, but it needs to be consistent. While you might adopt a more playful voice on Twitter and a more professional voice in a whitepaper, consistency is key if you want to create a brand that your customers recognize and engage with over time. How to Determine Your Brand Voice The voice you use for your brand depends on the persona you’re creating content for. In some organizations, you may address different personas. It’s important to identify both a “go-to” voice that addresses everyone and one that addresses individual personas. Stephanie Schwab of Social Media Explorer breaks down a brand’s voice into four categories: Character/ Persona, Tone, Language, and Purpose. Here’s her list of attributes for each category—which of these descriptors resonate with your brand? (Note: You may decide that some attributes fit with one buyer persona, but not with another.) Character/Persona Friendly Warm Inspiring Playful Authoritative Professional Tone Personal Humble Clinical Honest Direct Scientific Language Complex Savvy Insider Serious Simple Jargon-filled Fun Whimsical Purpose (different content will probably serve different purposes) Engage Educate Inform Enable Entertain Delight Sell Amplify Create a Consistent Voice Once you’ve defined your voice, you’ll want to aim for consistency across your entire company—allowing for some variability for each persona.Here are some strategies we use at Marketo to achieve a consistent voice: Create brand guidelines. Ideally, you’ll develop a distinctive visual and written style that makes your brand instantly recognizable by your audience. To create brand guidelines, simply translate this style into words, include plenty of examples, and get buy-in from the C-suite. Check all your content against these guidelines and be sure to share them with any outsourced design agencies and your writing team. These guidelines will work best as living documents that are updated as you encounter new questions. So what should your brand guidelines include? Here’s a list to get started: Visual Guidelines—Do you use stock photography? How can your logo be used? Anything that visually supports your brand should be included here. Style Guides—This is where you indicate any writing style preferences that support your brand. Do you capitalize product names? Do you prefer open or closed words—for example, web site versus website. Do you have a style guide you rely on as your guiding principle—like AP Style or Chicago? Document these here. Personas—If it’s an internal document, it may make sense to include the details of your personas in your brand guidelines. Personas help writers and designers understand the audience they are trying to reach and make your visual and style guidelines come to life. Align your writers. Make sure anyone writing for your brand (whether it’s advertising, press releases, ebooks, or blog posts) is closely aligned. Start by ensuring that they have access to your brand guidelines. If multiple people handle these functions, meet regularly to review and improve. Extend the review process. We firmly believe that everyone needs an editor, so if the structure of your organization permits, having someone to share your writing with and get feedback from can make you a stronger writer. For example, at the end of each day, the social team could send their scheduled tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn posts to a cross-functional team of reviewers. This way, members of the PR, demand generation, content, SEO, and PPC teams all have a chance to weigh in. (This is also a great way to catch typos and bad links!) A consistent brand voice is one way to make sure that your customers recognize you and understand that you are talking to them. Take these tips with you into the new year and see the impact it has across your organization. Do you have tips to share on building a consistent brand voice? I’d love to hear them in the comments section below. http://events.marketo.com/summit/2016/

By: Johnny Cheng Posted: December 30, 2015 | Marketing Metrics Just like the saying goes to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, it’s important to keep tabs on what your peers are doing as a good benchmark of your own results. While your email campaigns may be hitting all of your marks, you may want to set your goals higher for 2016 based on how other companies in your space are doing. After posting my earlier blog around email performance, in which I revealed which types of email perform the best, I received a ton of requests to break it down by industry so marketers can compare the performance of their email campaigns to those of their peers. The numbers are in and the wait is over! Refresher on Email Types In case you’ve forgotten the three types of email campaigns, here’s a recap from the original blog post: Batch Emails: Also known as “batch and blast”. These types of emails don’t have any “intelligence” built in. Instead they just gather a list of contacts and send them the same email. A great example of this is your company newsletter—it goes to everyone, no matter what. Nurture Emails: This is a series of targeted emails based on personas (e.g. by industry, role, or use case). Nurture emails are primarily used to lead prospects through the sales funnel and warm up leads for a sales handoff. A nurture email offers something different to a person based on where they are in their buying journey. If they are just learning about you, your nurture email might offer a fun, light infographic versus a buyer who has engaged with you many times and consumed your content might get a webinar invitation to a live demo. Trigger Emails: These are personalized emails that are delivered based on prospect actions. Some range of email “intelligence” is built in based on behavior (think of it as a two-way conversation of listening and speaking). An example of a trigger email would be this: a prospect visits your events webpage and then, based on that activity, receives an email invitation to an event in their area. Email Performance by Industry Here’s the email performance for the three types of campaigns across all industries. As you can see below, batch campaigns performed significantly better in Healthcare and Life Sciences and Travel, Recreation, and Leisure. Nurture campaigns, on the other hand, performed the best in Energy, Healthcare and Life Sciences, and Transportation and Storage. Trigger campaigns prospered across several different industries, with the highestaverage click rate across all types of campaigns. This data represents average click rate for the 3 email types across all industries. Per the legend on the right, the green shades indicate the relative click rate performance (0.2% – 23.5%). Only industries with statistically significant averages are shown above. What We Learned This chart speaks for itself, but there are definitely some cool data points that stand out. Here’s my take on why certain email types do better or worse for certain industries. But I’d love to hear from readers of that specific industry (I’m looking at you…) to give their opinion. 1. In General–High Performance Trigger Emails I know I sound like a broken record, but despite its proven success at Marketo and beyond, there are still plenty of email marketers that don’t realize the potential of trigger emails. So I’m going to say this one last time (no promises)…personalized messages based on behavior are much better than batch and blast. In fact, they’re 3x better on average. They are an important customer touchpoint so spend that extra time and effort to create those triggers campaigns! 2. Energy–The Power of Nurtures The Energy vertical has the highest nurture email performance of any industry, at a whopping 12.4%! That’s as high as some trigger email metrics. It makes sense if you think about how an energy utility company communicates with their customers. Do you get regular emails around your energy usage, ways to save energy, and updates to policies? Those highly relevant targeted emails are nurture programs at work. Below you’ll see a similar example from a water department. 3. Travel–Brochures for Everybody! This one is really interesting. The Travel, Recreation, and Leisure industry has the highest batch rates, but the lowest nurture rates. Their batch programs perform almost 40x better than nurtures! This is most likely due to the nature of the travel industry. Interest in travel traditionally happens by time of year and less dependent on the individual. Nurturing a customer every month probably isn’t as effective as blasting your entire database with beach excursions right before summer or a trip to the mountains right before ski season. 4. Healthcare–You’re in Great Shape The most well rounded email performance award goes to Healthcare and Life Sciences. They excel in every type of email campaign. I think this is due to two main factors. First is how technologically advanced healthcare has become in the past few years. The overnight shift to the digital era definitely shows in their marketing efforts. Second is the wide range of use cases that each email type solves for this specific industry. Patient doctor office visits? Triggered emails! Ongoing preventative care tips and tricks? Nurture emails! Hospital announcements and newsletters? Batch emails! You can see that different types of emails serve different purposes, but I hope that digging into this data gave you some ideas on how you can use email more effectively for your organization. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Have suggestions on what data to dive into next? Got follow up questions for me? Leave your comments below

This interview is part of Marketo’s “Ask the CMO: Marketing for Growth” series, which explores how marketing is helping to drive business at high-growth companies. In this session, we'll look at an interview with Suneet Bhatt, the CMO at LiveIntent. LiveIntent At A Glance Year Founded: 2009 Size of Marketing Team: 15 Marketing Stack Components: Social Listening/Automation, Sales Communication Platform, Sales Automation, Marketing Automation, CRM, Publishing Platform, Analytics Number One Reason for Choosing Marketing Automation: To keep up with the demands of salesforce automation and an increasingly hyper-efficient salesforce. Q&A 1. You’ve held marketing positions at a number of companies in various stages of growth. How has your marketing strategy at LiveIntent differed from your strategies at other start-ups or even well-established companies? I’m obviously smarter today because of the mistakes and opportunities I’ve made in the past. So, the biggest difference is another few years of knowledge and experience as well as greater clarity personally and professionally on the person I want to be. But high-level philosophy aside, the model and framework I’ve brought with me to LiveIntent is similar to what I’ve used to build marketing teams in the past. The core principles are exactly the same: Marketing is a servant function to the rest of the organization. Everything we do should be in support of an internal stakeholder’s goals and should push them one step closer to their stakeholders (internally or externally.) Practically, that means helping executives tell thought leadership stories, helping People Development communicate with candidates, as well as helping sales people throughout the sales cycle and into customer advocacy. Marketing is a servant function to the customer experience. Everything that Marketing does should impact some aspect of the customer experience. Whether that means: improving and automating reporting so Account teams can spend less time looking for information and more time serving clients, or helping our SDR team identify tools and use templates that improve their productivity, or helping our Sales team get closer to the point of sale with more qualified leads and better content to facilitate outreach. There’s always more work to be done than you have people to do it. The single best thing a manager can do is to identify what needs to be done at the highest-level (including soliciting feedback from all levels of the organization) and marry that to the skills you have around you. When you have gaps between the two, you also have your hiring plan. Sure, some people will have to take on some aspects of work that no one wants to do but needs to be done, but it’s rare that people are doing such things for too long. And when empowered to do it their way, they will tend to like it. The biggest difference for me at LiveIntent is that I walked into a highly functioning team of incredibly committed people. My biggest responsibility was simply to not screw it up, while helping the team think bigger about their roles. 2. One of the biggest problems that high-growth organizations face is the ability to scale. Within marketing, how have you kept your customer interactions effective and personal as LiveIntent has expanded? The first thing we did was structure and hire to ensure the entire customer experience is supported. So we have sub-teams focused on: PR/Corporate Communications, Events, Demand Generation, Marketing Intelligence, Product Marketing, Customer Success, and Creative Services. By having a horizontal team, more people are closer to the decision point, and more people have both the visibility into what needs to be done and the autonomy to make the call against what needs to be done (based on a system of shared values we’ve agreed to quarter over quarter.) As a result, the teams are nimble enough to adjust to not all customer needs, but to the most pressing, the most urgent, or the most impactful. 3. Fast-growing companies reach a point at which they need tools that will not just work for “now” but will grow with them. At what point in your growth trajectory did you realize it was time to future-proof your marketing tools? Our biggest point came last summer when we were using one very specific marketing automation system that was holding back our outbound sales efforts. We needed to make the switch. And as a result, we spent exceptional time researching (thank you to Scott Daily, Marketing Intelligence Manager on our team) and arrived at Marketo as the optimal solution. What I’ve learned is it’s important to let the business need and objective write the RFP for the appropriate technology solution without looking at a solution first. And we’ve had great success with Marketo, including making an investment in our newest team member and Marketo Expert, Alexis D’Alba. 4. Describe the marketing team’s relationship with sales. What was the biggest factor inaligning to the two areas of the business? I have run several sales teams in the past, and have had the benefit of running several functions (including product, service, and obviously, marketing, as well as overall integrated business lines.) I lead with that because one thing I think I have learned is empathy for successful cross-functional relationships. So to answer the question, we have a highly functioning relationship across sales and service, team member by team member. Because we’ve built empathy and respect for each other, and we all are focused on the customer’s need. 5. What advice would you give to other CMOs who are thinking about strategies for growth and how to structure their teams to support that growth? Have a model you believe in and can sell through and build support for. It will structure your thinking but it will give you a compass to guide you and refer to throughout. Start with what you need to do and who/what you have to work with so you can make progress quickly and efficiently. And use that starting point as a way to evaluate the longer-term decisions you need to make (team structure, technology solutions, partners, goals.) If done correctly, you can have enough of this work done and sized in 30-60 days.

You can find a video here: How Marketo Structures Marketing Operations – Marketo.com

By: Crystal Vaughan Posted: December 15, 2015 | Modern Marketing If building a customer community for an organization were like planning a wedding and inviting guests, customer communities often are the second cousin who’s invited only when slots open up on the attendee list. But take it from me (I’m in the middle of planning my own wedding), they really should be a guest of honor. The Importance of Building a Customer Community Many companies see communities as a ‘nice-to-have’ and not as critical to the organization as sales and marketing, but the reality is that a customer community is a critical direct line to your customers and has the power to build your brand with your most powerful advocates. 2016 is the age of the customer, as the market moves at a speed not yet seen before, driven by customers’ high expectations for personalization of their journey. Businesses will need to realign and reorient their strategy specifically around the customer or risk losing out on developing and fostering a valuable channel as customers form communities of their own. During the last few months, I’ve researched and planned for the 2016 execution of an online community for Invoca. At the same time, I’ve also been planning a wedding and actively applying the lessons I’ve learned along the way to help lay a successful foundation upon which I’ll build Invoca’s community. Below, I share my advice on the three most important things I’ve learned from wedding planning that’s helped me assemble an online community proposal: 1. Get Executive Buy-In Early On While the tradition of asking the bride’s father’s permission before proposing is somewhat outdated and not as frequently used anymore, asking permission and getting buy-in is still a vital part of a community-building process. Getting internal buy-in and support is a rule of thumb within organizations as they build large initiatives. But, like a nervous fiancé about to ask permission, I bet you’re wondering: what’s the best way to set yourself up for success when you ask? Start by doing your research. Then create a project plan and define methods to measure your results—think about what success looks like for this initiative and ask yourself the hard questions you’ll likely get. Then present your plan to an executive sponsor. Their buy-in as you build an online community will help support your goals and guide you with your project plan, ensuring you stay in alignment with the overall business objectives. It will also assist with defining exactly what is being built and the importance of the initiative to the rest of the organization. 2. Customer Experience Matters Just like you have to understand your wedding guests and gauge their interest in the different elements of your wedding (did someone say photobooth?), you’ve got to gauge the level of interest your current customers would have in an online community. This may not be the main channel they are interested in actively participating on–perhaps they interact more with your brand on your blog or want instant support via chat or a Twitter account. But can you incorporate these elements into your community so they can get everything in one place? Getting consensus on what your customers want before throwing money into developing an online community should be part of your research. You want to establish a channel that supports development of the customer and helps them get value out of their current investment, while also ensuring you see a return from your investment. Establishing this type of customer experience broadcasts that you are listening to what they want and creates a strong foundation for your first interactions with them. So set up a primary channel to communicate with them and nail it. 3. You Need a Team to Bring It to Life When you’re planning a wedding, you’re either one of two brides: a bride that thinks in siloes or a bride that thinks all-encompassing. Those that think in siloes are the equivalent of marketers who have “tool bloat”, needing a decorator for wedding decor, florist for floral arrangements, and caterer for wedding menu. However, in my experience, I’ve found if you bind everything together, it’s a great way to indirectly support the main initiative. For instance, find a venue that incorporates catering, décor, lighting, floral, all in one complete package, and you’ll have an entire team working toward one main goal instead of trying to coordinate between all of them. The same goes for building an online community. Many think online communities are strictly for customer marketing, upsells and advocacy, and as such, marketing-owned. But it is much more than that–they allow for instant, unlimited communication and unparalleled networking, giving customers a chance to build stronger relationships with each other and the business. If your community is going to be a success, it needs to be rebranded internally, adopted widely and owned company-wide. Sales, marketing, customer success, product development and even finance need to work together in order for the business to have a successful community. By putting together a cross-functional team of champions, each person will be able to promote and indirectly support the online community. Aligning the goals of the community with the goals of all your organizational stakeholders is vital. When companies align the community goal across all departments, employees know to make decisions that put the customer first and are more likely to contribute to the world-class customer experience you are trying to build. Ready, Set, Plan The online customer community is often a neglected opportunity. Businesses that incorporate the launch of customer communities in their plans and immediately hire customer community managers know community is a strong driver of business value and revenue. When community is seen as an actual product of the business, organizations will invest in it because they understand that building engaged communities will keep their customers happy, which results in lower churn. Businesses that don’t incorporate communities into their plan will need to play catch up quickly in order to remain competitive in a customer dominated world. In 2016, my prediction will be that organizations will begin to reinvent themselves to focus on the value of loyal relationships and critical real-time customer engagement over resolutions and transactions. I want to invite you to join me as I traverse through the world of the online customer community (sorry, unfortunately, my wedding guest list is already at full capacity!) If you haven’t already, consider building one out yourself. It’s a great time to be a community manager! And if you’re already on top of it, leave me some feedback below on how you have built out your own community, what tips and tricks you can offer, or any other comments you may have!

Today, we’re continuing our inspiring “Ask the CMO” series with Mashable with the following Q&A with Lara Hood Balazs, SVP, head of North America marketing at Visa. I remember the first time I met Lara; I was inspired because she was not only talking about some of the same organization and structure challenges that were most on my mind, but she was actually doing something about them. As a result, Lara was a central thought leader in the piece we did with HBR on the org of the future. Not surprisingly, in this interview she provides some interesting insights about not only how we market in this new digital era, but what teams and marketers must look like to be successful. I particularly loved her Swiss army knife reference, which you’ll find below. In addition to the organization commentary, the other theme that I loved has to do with Lara’s thoughts on innovation. Innovation is critical not just for marketers in this fast-paced world, but for companies themselves. When you think of a company like Visa that is so successful and has existed for decades, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were comfortable and slow to change.  But, reading below, you realize that Visa isn’t standing still – they’re moving as fast, if not faster than everyone else in their space. Think about it; you can’t watch TV these days without seeing ads and news about new payment options and brands. In a static world, a company like Visa could find themselves being unseated by new technology. Instead – and I love this comment – Lara points out that Visa is, at its core, a technology company. As a result it is looking to disrupt some of its own models and drive its own innovation in order to stay ahead of the curve (Read below to hear some of Lara’s hints about their first direct to consumer product). We’re certainly living in exciting times! The following interview originally appeared on Mashable. The credit card and payment space is in flux. Consumers want the newest technology and the most efficient shopping experience, merchants seek more seamless checkouts and both parties demand increased data security. It's in this frenzied state that Visa is innovating like never before, reminding us that first and foremost, it's a technology company. What consumer insights do Visa's game-changing payment solutions, like Visa Checkout and Apple and Android Pay with Visa, come from? We spoke with Lara Hood Balazs, SVP, head of North America marketing at Visa, and asked her how the company remains a technology company, what it does to prepare for shopping monsoons like Black Friday and how it keeps its heritage taglines fresh and relevant. Q&A With Visa's SVP of North American Marketing, Lara Hood 1. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self that pertains to your career in marketing, what would it be? I would tell the younger Lara to not be afraid to take risks. When you are starting off in your career, you can have a tendency to be cautious because you think failures may affect your ability to advance. I've learned that taking risks allows you to learn and, therefore, become more knowledgeable in your craft. In fact, it is the risks I've taken that have contributed to my career progression. 2. What's the most unexpectedly important skill from your past that plays into your successes? I graduated from my undergraduate program into a recession. I was Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, but I had a hard time finding a job! I knew I wanted to go into marketing, so I offered my time free of charge to Seattle’s iconic Pike Place Market, which was suffering from a decline in tourist visits. I delivered a program to drive local consumer visits. This gave me experience to get a "real" marketing job in a down economy. I learned that resilience, tenacity, passion and drive can never be underestimated. Today, I look for those traits in the people I hire. 3. What are the three biggest trends that you see in financial services marketing today? Innovation, innovation, innovation. The world of payments has never been more dynamic. Companies that you never thought would live in the world of payments are in the middle of some of the major changes in how people pay today and will pay tomorrow. If brands like Visa or startups like Venmo don't constantly innovate, they'll quickly be left behind. 4. Before joining Visa, you worked for two clothing/apparel companies. What experiences and lessons from those industries did you bring to Visa? Visa is one of the best co-marketers in the world with partners and merchants. Having worked for a retail-driven businesses, I know what a retailer goes through and I have a deeper understanding of their world, needs and worries. It helps shape how I approach their business when partnering on any marketing campaign or activation. For example, we are in the midst of the holiday season, which is the peak season for both retailers and payments, so there are a lot of synergies. 5. Coming from those areas, financial services is a highly regulated industry. How do you challenge your marketing teams to create innovative campaigns while balancing the regulatory environment? Visa at its core is a technology company. We're innovative while we maniacally focus on offering our clients and consumers acceptance, convenience, ease and security. It is an "and" not an "or." 6. During the past year as SVP, head of North America marketing at Visa, you've shifted your marketing organization's structure to be more horizontal and project-based. Given the evolving skills needed to be successful in marketing, how do you approach attracting and retaining the right talent for this model? We are constantly looking for talent that we refer to as "human Swiss army knives." We look for people who thrive in the "grey" and can easily move between multiple work projects. These individuals tend to be the best team players and they get more job satisfaction because they become more exposed to different parts of the organization. This gives employees opportunities to build a larger skill set base. 7. To that end, how do you determine the most effective mix of advertising across all channels? In which channel are you seeing the greatest growth? When we work with our merchant partners, we are looking for the right campaign for the right audience on the right platform. We've committed over half of our media investment to social and digital these days. We still, however, see value in appointment television—specifically as it relates to sports. Our partnership with the NFL and Olympics provide a great audience for our brand and clients, both issuers and merchants. There are so many ways to reach consumers these days. We are always looking for the optimal way. For example, we recently produced a campaign for Chevron where they wanted to help educate consumers on how to use their mobile phone in order to pay at the pump. We created an entertaining and educational video with soccer star Carli Lloyd and put it out over social channels and on video screens on top of pumps at select stations. It was a great way to engage with their consumers in a meaningful way. 8. As you mentioned, Visa is a major player in the world of event sponsorships. How do you measure success and ROI from these activities? When it comes to events and sponsorships, it's all about standing up our brand, products and partners. As proud sponsors of the Olympics and the NFL, we have a global stage in the coming year in which to activate along with our issuers, merchants and partners. In fact, next year's Super Bowl 50 (already a landmark event given the tenure) is right in our backyard and in the heart of the tech sector. 9. Last year, Visa brought back (and expanded) the tagline "Everywhere you want to be." It's a long-running campaign. How does Visa keep it current across all channels, particularly mobile? "Everywhere you want to be" is more than a tagline for us; it's a mission statement. With Visa as a partner, merchants will be able to find your customers in the moment and at the moment. They will be able to grow their business and they won't have to even think about it. We use that lens with our campaigns the same way we approach any part of our business. 10. The holidays and Black Friday are upon us—and they're both important hallmarks of the payments technology industry. Describe the process for shaping your holiday marketing strategy. How will this year differ from 2014? We are in our sophomore year with our first direct-to-consumer product, Visa Checkout. Last year we had just gone to market, so this year we have new partners, returning merchants, more data and some interesting announcements in the queue that I can't reveal today. Some of the merchants we have recently signed up include Under Armour, Shutterfly, Taco Bell and United Airlines. Look for more as we get deeper into the season. 11. Busy shopping seasons and the holidays are also full of moments, which marketers love to seize. What key moments will Visa define and leverage this winter? How does Visa Checkout play into your approach? Our hero product for the holidays is Visa Checkout, whether on the desktop or via your mobile phone. We provide the security and simplicity that Visa has always stood for and consumers have grown to expect. Cyber Monday is still expected to be the biggest online shopping day, so expect us to leverage that moment. And we may have something up our sleeves for last minute shoppers! Stay tuned.

Updated on December 30, 2015 To celebrate the New Year, we just launched the new designs -- and updated the ​ and ​ pages. In the next few days, we will update the other pages. Check them out. And keep providing your feedback in the Comments area. Thank you. Written on December 1, 2015 Thank you to everyone who commented and provided feedback on ​. Your ideas are very helpful and your participation in improving the site is appreciated. Based on your feedback we've come up with a few more mock ups and would love to hear from everyone and anyone on what you like, dislike or need to improve your findability and usability of Community. We've removed a lot of the widgets and clutter, and have only left a search box, recent activity so you can see what you post, and the categories so you can filter / find conversations quickly based on what you're looking for. The top CTAs are meant to get you quickly to the top 4 places we recommend you go in hopes to guide instead of confuse. Thank you in advance. Mock Up 1 Mock Up 2 Mock Up 3

By: Michael Powers Posted: November 20, 2015 | Modern Marketing Ladies and gentlemen—stop everything you are doing. She. Is. Back. Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for (or at least I have). After three long years since her last musical masterpiece—the James Bond theme song for Skyfall—Adele is back. If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting in anticipation for the release of her new album, 25, which dropped worldwide today. While Adele has awed us with her consistent success—producing hit after hit—I was curious to see if her new album would rest on the same themes, ideas, and messages of her last successful album, 21. After years and years everyone (in my opinion) has been waiting for a teaser, which happened when “Hello” debuted as a television ad in early October. But some fans may have been slightly disappointed when watching the video for “Hello,” thinking…”Really? Another album about a break up or a man from her past?” But this thinking was shattered by a recent Rolling Stone interview with Adele: The lyrics sound like she’s addressing some long-lost ex, but she says it isn’t about any one person—and that she’s moved on from the heartbreaker who inspired 21. “If I were still writing about him, that’d be terrible,” she says. “‘Hello’ is as much about regrouping with myself, reconnecting with myself.” As for the line “hello from the other side”: “It sounds a bit morbid, like I’m dead,” she says. “But it’s actually just from the other side of becoming an adult, making it out alive from your late teens, early twenties.” Mind blown, right? Once again, Adele’s done it—blown the socks off of her audience. A reinvention, a whole new message, and not to mention a whole new (fantastic) look (in case you’re reading this, Adele). Alright I know what you’re thinking, how does this tie into marketing? My point is that we have seen Adele go through the rapid-growth, fast-success, early stages of her life, but we’re witnessing and participating in her transition into adulthood—a shift that has been expertly managed by Adele and her team, making her fans feel like a part of the change without alienating them. We get to see a whole new side of her, while still enjoying her power ballads. This translates directly into how companies manage growth and change. At a certain point in your company’s growth, there comes a time to reinvent your brand and bring your company to the next level. But to do this, it takes very careful and strategic planning to make sure that there isn’t a negative impact for your customers and that there aren’t negative connotations for your brand. So, to create a smooth, successful transition from a high-growth adolescent stage to mature adulthood like Adele, here are 3 things to consider: 1. Don’t Totally Reinvent the Wheel If you’ve noticed it’s time for a transformation, it means you’re paying attention to the perception of your brand in the industry. However, fight the urge to totally overhaul your brand. You have customers and fans who like you for who you are now, so start by determining which aspects of your product/service offering are the most successful. Then figure out what you need to take it to the next level. The smallest tweak or alteration could do it. Once you’ve made this change, now it’s time to work on your messaging—how are you effectively communicating this change? For Adele, this meant definitively stating in a Rolling Stone interview that her album is about growing up versus breaking up, and offering insight into her life. For you though, Rolling Stone might not be the best place. Determine the medium based on where you will best reach your audience and communicate your change there. When Yahoo revealed their new logo after a month-long marketing campaign, they first shared their news on Tumblr and gained a ton of organic traction from likes and reblogs. In a Tumblr post that followed, CEO Marissa Mayer stated, “We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo – whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud.” Given Tumblr’s user demographics and the fact that Yahoo had just bought the social network earlier that year, Tumblr was the perfect channel for them to first announce the news because it aligned well with their vision. 2. Challenge Yourself As your brand transitions into the new phase you want to just continue to build on the success you’ve had in the past. However, your main goal here should really be to establish a higher credibility with your audience. This is going to take some fresh eyes, so bring in someone new to help with this. Whether that’s a new executive to work with the group, a consultant for a special project, or, in Adele’s case, adding a percussionist to her already fantastic band to keep 25 sounding fresh. You need someone in the group to identify and bring your mistakes to the surface; this will make you more successful with the transition. 3. Take Your Time The last thing you want to do is make this big change and have it be a huge flop. Develop a strategic plan for how you’re going to build this new brand, or elements of the brand, and test it. Use a consultant or test groups to test your messaging with your different personas. Once you’ve received feedback and made the proper alterations, build your roll-out strategy. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Even our lady Adele slowly released her new album one song at a time. (Wait, that seems familiar…do I sense a drip campaign?) Last year, Airbnb re-branded around the feeling of “belonging”. As reported by Bloomberg Business, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia explained that they had grown so quickly since their founding that formal branding had initially been sidelined, so they collaborated with design firm DesignStudio to help them build a better brand. DesignStudio conducted in-field research, interviewing staff members and even dispatching a few of their own team members to stay with hosts in 13 cities across 4 continents, resulting in insightful stories and hours of video footage that all yielded the same message about the brand: No matter where you were on Airbnb globally, the one thing that’s consistent is belonging. From that, they reshaped their messaging around what they dubbed the Bélo: the universal symbol of belonging. Your dedication to the transformation and maturity of your brand will show the industry that you are here to stay—and this is true for both musicians and companies. This will be what sets you up for your next round of funding or your IPO, can help you break into new segments or, in Adele’s case, simply grow up in the public eye (easier said than done for celebrities). The important thing to remember is that as you break into new audiences, never forget where you came from. If it fits into your new business plan, you always want to make sure you’re still expanding on your original buyers or personas. To do this successfully, you need to hold on to your die-hard fans, as well as reinvigorate them with something fresh. Take me for instance, today I’ll be revisiting the #duchessadele hashtag I created around the time 21 was released. A poor attempt to have Adele be recognized by the royal family, but hey there’s still be hope! So as you take short breaks throughout the day today, spending 5 minutes each time to really absorb the message and experience of Adele’s new album, think to yourself: What were the stages of your company’s brand? Can you look back on the time when you were a young star on the rise or the time when you were singularly focused and it didn’t work? If that’s the case, ask yourself what you’re going to do to make the transition into your new adult brand.

By: David Cain Marketers often believe that investing in analytics and digital marketing tools fully prepares them to compete in a data-driven world. These tools are built to quickly and simply helpmarketers translate data into actionable metrics. But in reality, that’s just half the battle. Keeping pace in the digital age also involves hard decisions about the setup of their marketing organization. But for too many companies, slowed down by old, corporate silos, that’s not going to be an easy transition. Marketing departments in the pre-internet and early-internet era created individual departments (sometimes in excess), which were based on functional expertise and often dedicated to specific channels, such as print, television, email, web and social. These departments were built in a time when companies believed that marketing controlled the customer in a linear process, pushing them methodically through their marketing ‘funnel’—from awareness to purchase and the various steps along the way. That approach worked historically, but the explosion of additional digital channels like mobile and social, and higher consumption across them scrambled the equation forever. The buying process nowadays is anything but linear. Think about the typical consumer’s day. They may start by doing something on one channel. But then later, they may interact with a brand again—this time on a different channel. If the brand is treating each channel as a silo, they won’t be able to have anything but a jumbled, disconnected conversation with their consumer. The new world requires constant company engagement with customers, supplying personalized and relevant information that offers value and informs their decisions wherever they are and whenever they are engaging with you. Shift To Support The Customer Journey This evolution to what we, at Marketo, call engagement marketing, is forcing marketers to move as quickly as their markets and their customers. The challenge to CMOs is to take a sledgehammer to their corporate silos and reimagine a new way to structure their marketing departments. We’re seeing successful CMOs transform traditional marketing silos and channel-focused roles into organizational structures that allow for greater focus on the customer journey as a whole. To be fully prepared for the digital age, your organization needs to be organized around your customer, and you need people who can listen and respond to your customers in a coordinated fashion. In action, this translates into the “hub and spoke” model, that Marketo’s CMO Sanjay Dholakia nicely explains. It’s an approach that features “centers of excellence” (think service bureaus but with a much greater strategic focus) that all of the company’s marketers can turn to when they need help. The shared service model that is at the core of centers of excellence helps teams think about and respond to your customer more collaboratively while also removing inefficiencies. The Value of Centers of Excellence The main building block is the creation of a centralized skills-based competency center,which we call the center of excellence (COE). There can be any number of them inside the company, embracing everything from content to marketing operations to design to events. Replacing the myriad decentralized functional groups that accumulated over the years, these centers of excellence provide a consistent and comprehensive set of services to other parts of the organization. No longer will different groups make arbitrary decisions about the same things. Now and forever, the left hand will know what the right hand is doing. What’s more, you’ll help light creative sparks. People working side by side can better brainstorm and, hopefully, come up with magic—the idea being that 1 plus 1 will equal 3. While this value-added has obvious and subtle benefits, it doesn’t change that people are creatures of habit. You’ll find that people inside your organization may take a while to adjust to the change. They may initially feel frustration that they don’t “own” the resources needed to accomplish their objectives. By definition, centralizing expertise in a COE means that expertise won’t live under the multiple silos. Still, that’s a small price for running a leaner, more nimble organization and eliminating potential duplicate efforts. Consider that the benefits outweigh the downsides. For example: Focus: You get like minds working together, often resulting in a team that pushes each other’s boundaries while focusing on the task at hand. Economies of scale: Better load balancing means you ultimately need fewer people to get more done. Collaboration: Your specialists are no longer laboring in isolation. The potential upside from peer-to-peer collaboration is limitless. Quality: You now can better enforce standards such as brand guidelines and style guides. Consistency across the organization saves time and fosters better quality output. Single voice: A single point of contact ensures a consistent message throughout the organization. The benefits gained from COE’s make organizations more flexible. As companies scale in size, this organizational arrangement makes increasing sense not only because it offers organizations the benefit of streamlined, creative, high-quality work, but because this structure best supports the true customer journey—one that’s dictated by the customer, at their own pace. Siloed teams can flex in their individual units, but without an understanding of the big picture, whereas a customer journey focused organization supported by COE’s can nimbly respond to the customer’s (changing) needs, throughout their journey, and across channels. Today, marketers must understand their customer and communicate with them with the right message at the right time, but it doesn’t end there. To be successful, today’s marketing leaders must not miss the critical step of structuring your organization to adapt quickly.

This post originally ran on ClickZ, November 4, 2015. If the CMO is supposed to foster customer relationships through personalized experiences and ultimately drive digital transformations, should the role of CDO even exist? While the intent behind the chief digital officer (CDO) role is right, the execution is wrong. A good chief marketing officer (CMO) should be responsible for driving digital transformation—not the CDO. Therefore, marketing leaders are required to step up their game. Every now and then, you run across business ideas that experts initially laud, that later ends in tears. (Does anyone remember business process reengineering?) As the nature of our world and our interactions has become more digital than ever before, companies are adding a newly created role of CDO to their executive masthead. It seems that this year, experts and firms around the world have increasingly been talking about the rise of the CDO. In fact, research from Gartner predicted that by the end of this year, 25 percent of organizations would have hired a CDO. Among other things, the CDO is supposed to drive their companies' digital presence as well as their digital consumer experiences. This is a bad idea. Some are absolutely thrilled by that prospect and contend that the CDO really ought to be the CMO of the future, but I beg to differ. I know this is provocative but the CDO, in title and role, just should not exist: the CMO is really the new CDO of the future. CMOs and marketers need to rise to the challenge of our new digital world and take control of the transformation in their organizations. As a recent Accenture study noted, it’s up to CMOs to prove they can serve as catalysts who can help embrace broader digital opportunities for their organizations while defending against threats. Digital: the new apple pie Chief executive officers (CEOs) now operate in a vastly different marketing landscape from what they faced just a few years ago. Everything used to be offline, but within a relative blink of time, every business has become – or is in the process of becoming—focused on digital. Digital is now as ubiquitous as “apple pie” American values. Even now, you can’t watch a TV ad without having it drive some digital action. Think about the broadcast ads enticing fans to sign up for fantasy sports leagues – there’s always an offer for a code to sign up online. This is an instant way to turn an analog experience into a digital one. Sure, the code is meant to identify when the company interacted with the consumer, in addition to what city the consumer lives in and even which team they were watching, but this also allows the company to have a more personal and relevant discussion with its audience. Brilliantly, this also makes large marketing investments—TV ads—directly measurable for the first time. So who can blame the CEO for feeling compelled to hire a CDO to help define a digital business strategy to make sense of it all? Like data, quality, collaboration, or people; digital is more than a universal good, it is a universal imperative. It is simply just that important. The wrong tool for the job The world of digital has changed forever how we think about brand engagement with customers, and engaging with customers at different digital interaction points is considered a good and necessary idea. There’s now an onus on companies to maintain an ongoing dialogue with customers on a personal and individual level, engaging with them over a lifetime. CEOs are aware of the imperative, and they’re clearly trying to solve the problem. Digital is core to every facet of customer interactions and relationships. Likewise, customers are the center of every business—without them, the business doesn’t exist. So, it would seem to follow that the champion for making a business digital should be an executive who has operational responsibility—and familiarity—with customer related processes and interaction points, right? But the superfluous addition of another executive function—one that, by definition, is distant from the customer relationship and doesn’t directly control the interaction points—is just not a good idea. This conversation must be directed by the CMO. If not, the result is just one more voice at the table that is disconnected from all of these places. As one expert at a leading analyst firm said to me, “It’s just a title that lacks definitional integrity." What isn’t digital? It’s like having a chief collaboration officer, a chief PowerPoint officer, or even a chief breathing officer—why put someone in charge of something that everything must own? Don’t get me wrong—I have many friends that carry the title of chief digital officer. They are smart, bright, talented people. However, the fact is that the CDO is fated to fade away. Even industry pundits readily state that success for a chief digital officer will be the fact that the title goes away or that their role is no longer needed. If we can see that end-state now, shouldn’t we all save ourselves the trouble, skip that step, and put the responsibility where it belongs? Calling all CMOs Sadly, CEOs feel that they can’t turn to CMOs for the solution. When Accenture asked C-Suite executives about who was responsible for driving their company’s digital strategy, only one percent answered that it was the CMO. That is a failure in the job function and a failure on our part as marketers. We’re at a pivotal point where marketers must grab the mantle of responsibility. A good CMO should be responsible for driving digital transformation—period. This is no longer one of things that CMO has to do: it is the thing that the CMO should do. So marketers—grab the brass ring! Go get smart, build your skills, build your org, assemble your technology, and take more responsibility. CEOs want marketers to own the entire customer relationship. In turn, you’ll be doing the right thing both for your career and your organizations.