Product Documents

What terms should we add to this magical list? A/B Split – Refers to a test situation in which a list is split into two pieces with every other recipient being sent one of two specific emails, to determine which email is more desirable. A/B Testing – A method of testing a control sample against other versions in which a single element varies Above the fold – The part of an email message or web page that is visible without scrolling. Material in this area is considered more valuable because the reader sees it first. Accelerator Campaigns -- Campaigns that attempt to move prospects along the buying cycle faster by providing relevant “nudges” triggered by specific buyer behaviors or sales updates Account – Companies or organizations; can be prospects, customers, partners or even competitors Acquisition Cost – In email marketing, the cost to generate one lead, newsletter subscriber or customer in an individual email campaign; typically, the total campaign expense divided by the number of leads, subscribers or customers it produced. Alert – An automatic notification in sales and marketing technologies triggered by a lead’s specific behavior, change in status or the reaching of a specific lead score threshold Apex – A development platform for creating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications on top of Salesforce.com functionality Attachment – A file that is sent in addition to the text or html in an email message Authentication – Technical standards through which ISPs and other mail gateway administrators can establish the true identity of an email sender Authentication - Technical standards through which ISPs and other mail gateway administrators can establish the true identity of an email sender. Examples of proposed authentication standards include: SPF (PO Box, AOL), Sender-ID (Microsoft), DomainKeys (Yahoo), and DKIM (Cisco and Yahoo). B2B Blogging – Also known as corporate or organizational blogging; involves the use of a blog or online journal to promote a company’s products or services with the goal of increasing conversions and driving revenue B2B Social Media - the various channels of the social web (blogs, social networks, wikis, etc.) as they pertain to business-to-business interactions. B2B social media also refers to how prospects, customers and businesses use the social web to research, listen, communicate and engage with each other through the exchange of content. BANT – The acronym for budget, authority, need, timeline— critical attributes that are used to determine the sales readiness of a lead Blacklist – A list of IP addresses believed to send spam Blog – A contraction for “weblog,”; an online diary or journal Blog – An online journal, with new entries appearing in sequence as they are written Bounce – A message that is returned to the sender because it was not deliverable. Buying Committee – Refers to all individuals involved in the B2B buying decision at an organization Campaign Management - The process of creating, executing, and measuring marketing programs directed at specific audience segments Campaign – Any marketing program to be tracked in Salesforce.com or Marketo CAN-SPAM – Federal legislation governing unsolicited commercial email that went into effect on January 1, 2004. This law does not prohibit unsolicited commercial email, but it does regulate how it must be sent. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) – Controls the design and format of a document written in HTML Closed Loop Marketing -- Campaigns that send communications based on a prospect’s previous actions and their place in the buying cycle Cloud Computing – A term referring to a development platform in which applications are delivered as services in the “cloud,” requiring no hardware or software to maintain Company Score – The total score of all leads for a specific company. This may also be calculated by average. Also known as Account Score Contact – An individual belonging to an account Conversion Path – A specific online path offered to web visitors after clicking on a landing page Conversion Rate – The primary success metric for landing pages Conversion – A specific event that represents the goal of the landing page Converted Lead – A lead that has been deemed qualified for sales and that converts into a Contact Custom Field – A field outside of the preconfigured fields provided within Salesforce.com created to fit the specific needs of a business Custom Object – A custom Salesforce.com database table that enables organizations to store information unique to them Custom Report – A report outside of the standard set of Salesforce.com reports created to measure and analyze data in a specific way Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Systems and strategies that seek to drive revenue through an improved understanding of customers and an increase in customer satisfaction and relationship building Dashboard – A visual display of a company’s performance metrics based on one or more custom reports De-duplication – The process of finding and consolidating and/or updating duplicate sets of contact information Deliverability – The ability of an email message or campaign to reach the intended recipient’s inbox, which is affected by spam filters, client-side filters and junk folders Delivery Status Notification (DSN) – Also known as “bounce message”, a system that informs the sender of a delivery problem Demand Generation – The act of using marketing to create interest or demand in a company’s products or services Depreciation – The ability to automatically lower a lead score due to inactivity, status change, or any other attribute that signifies a decrease in the level of interest – sometimes known as Lead Degradation and Score Decay DNS Records – The database records stored in the domain name system Domain Name System – A naming system for computers connected to the Internet or private network DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) – A method for email authentication that allows an organization to take responsibility for a message in a way that can be validated by a recipient Drip Campaign -- A series of scheduled emails that deliver thought leadership to prospects that have opted in to receive marketing communications Dynamic Content – Email content that changes from one recipient to the next according to a set of predetermined rules or variables, either by preferences the user sets when opting in to messages or based on behavior or demographics of the recipient. Dynamic Site Change – Dynamically changing content, images or other elements according to a user’s real-time preference (e.g. search term used) Email Campaign Management – The process of creating, executing and measuring email marketing programs directed at specific audience segments Email Marketing – The use of email communication to increase awareness, generate leads and build relationships with prospective and existing customers Email Service Provider (ESP) – A company that provides email services, including batch email and email marketing Explicit Data – Information that a prospect provides that is unambiguous such as title, industry, company, etc. Force.com – A cloud computing development platform that allows for the building of SaaS applications and enables them to be run on Salesforce.com servers Groundswell – A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations Hashtag – A community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to tweets Heuristics – Quick methods often involved in problem solving, such as gut instinct, educated guesses or “common sense” Implicit Data – Information that is revealed by a prospect’s online behavior such as pages visited, and recency or frequency of visits Inbound Marketing – A type of marketing characterized by prospects and customers seeking out and finding companies rather than vice versa Incoming Lead Processing Campaigns -- What you do and how you act when you first meet someone will affect how he or she perceives you from there on out Influencer – A person who is highly recognized in an online community and has the ability to sway others’ thoughts or opinions Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) – A number assigned to each computer or network in order to distinguish each network interface and networked device Internet Service Provider (ISP) – Sometimes referred to as Internet access provider (IAP), gives customers access to the Internet Interruption Marketing – A type of outbound marketing that seeks to capture a prospect’s attention by forcing marketing communications in front of them; opposite of permission marketing ISP Feedback – When the ISP forwards complaints of recipients to the organization that sent the email Landing Page Optimization – The process of obtaining the greatest number of conversions from a landing page by continuously testing and revising various landing page elements Landing Page – A web page that a user encounters after clicking on a link from a search engine, advertisement, email or other marketing vehicle Lead Database – A system used to collect information on a company’s leads, such as demographic; budget, authority, need, timeline (BANT); and behavioral data Lead Handoff -- The process of passing a lead from marketing to sales Lead Lifecycle Campaigns -- Campaigns that ensure movement and interaction with prospects, even if they are not ready to buy or sales does not engage Lead Nurturing – The process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready Lead Recycling -- The process of passing a lead from sales back to marketing because a lead was not yet ready to buy Lead Scoring – The process of determining the sales readiness of leads using a pre-determined scoring methodology and ranking them accordingly Lead – An individual or company that has the potential of doing business with your organization LinkedIn – A business-oriented social networking site List Fatigue – A condition producing diminishing returns from a mailing list whose members are sent too many offers, or too many of the same offers, in too short a period of time. List Hygiene – Process of cleaning and de-duplicating email files to ensure all addresses are accurate, unique, current, opt-in and deliverable. Marketing Asset – A piece of marketing content (e.g. whitepapers, videos, newsletters, webinars, etc.) used to educate and generate interest for a company’s products or services Marketing Automation – The use of technology to manage and automate the process of converting prospective customers into actual buyers Marketing Lead -- A lead generated by marketing, which has not yet being qualified as a sales prospect Meme – A catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet Microblogging – A type of blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia, such as photos or audio clips, and publish them. The most popular microblogging platform is Twitter Microsite – A small website consisting of a few related pages that is part of a larger website Multiple Scoring – The ability to assign multiple scores to a lead, which can be useful for companies with multiple products or campaigns that need to be managed separately Multivariate Testing – A method of testing a control sample against other versions in which multiple elements may vary Opportunities – Deals that constitute a sales pipeline and contribute to forecast Opt-in – The agreement to receive email from a business source. Confirmed or Double opt-in refers to a double-check procedure in which a decision to be included on a mailing list is confirmed. Parent-child Campaign – A campaign that involves an umbrella “parent” campaign record (e.g. “2010>Q1>Email”) that is comprised of numerous “child” campaigns (e.g., “2010-Q1-Email-Introduction,” “2010-Q1-Email-First Follow-up,” etc.) Permission Marketing – A type of marketing that seeks to first gain permission from prospects before marketing to them Persona – A fictional person used to represent a specific target segment for a company; personas aid in marketing, product development, usability and other areas Personalization – A targeting method in which an email message appears to have been created only for a single recipient. Personalization may include any known demographic or behavioral information including recipient name, company name, website page visited and more. Phishing – Sending email that claims to be from a legitimate organization to trick recipients into providing personal information Plain Text – Text in an email message that includes no formatting code Point Cap – A limit placed on a lead score to prevent scores from being inflated by repeated actions or triggers (e.g. multiple downloads of the same white paper) Post-Click Marketing – Everything that happens once someone clicks on an organization’s website, but before they are a known lead. This includes the site itself, but also all landing pages that work to drive conversions for a company Post-Conversion Marketing – Includes all activities and communications from marketing after a prospect shares their information with a company until they become a customer. This includes email marketing, lead nurturing and lead scoring, all of which are critical for B2B companies to get the most of their pre- and post-click marketing Pre-Click Marketing – Everything that happens prior to someone getting to a company website. It’s the area of marketing that focuses on driving a prospect to an organization’s website and can be just as important as the website itself, since without pre-click optimization, the website may never be seen Product Score – The score for a lead that indicates their interest in a specific product. An organization may capture multiple product scores Qualified – The lead characteristic of being ready to engage with sales—a definition that is agreed upon by marketing and sales according to the profile of an “ideal” customer and a scoring methodology Revenue Cycle – A new way of looking at the traditional sales cycle, the revenue cycle starts from the day the organization first meets a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship Role Accounts – An email account that is associated with a department, office, position or task RSS – (Really Simple Syndication) A web standard for the delivery of content — blog entries, news stories, headlines, images, video — enabling readers to stay current with publications without having to browse to their content. Sales 2.0 – Also referred to as social selling, the merging of Web 2.0 technologies with traditional sales strategies, enabling salespeople to better prioritize their time and serve as experts—not just negotiators— in the product selection process Sales Ready Lead -- A lead that has been qualified by marketing based upon criteria agreed upon by both sales and marketing Scoring methodology – The framework by which leads are scored (e.g. points, letter grades, etc.) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising; the process of paying a search engine to advertise a product or service Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of employing different tactics to improve a business’s ranking in organic or unpaid search results to ultimately increase conversions Seed Email Accounts – Accounts created by a monitoring service with each of the ISPs Seed Nurturing -- The process of building relationships with qualified prospects before you have their contact information Segment – A portion of an audience that is targeted to receive a specific marketing campaign Segment – The ability to slice a list into specific pieces determined by various attributes, such as open history or name source. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) – An email vailidation system that is used to prevent spam Sender Score – An indication of the trustworthiness of an email source Sentiment – A level of assessment that determines the tone of an article, blog post, a company, etc.; usually positive, negative or neutral Short URL – An alias short URL used for redirection of long URLs Social Media Monitoring – The use of search engine technology to ‘listen’ for specific keywords as defined by your organization Social Media – Any strategy, software system or media outlet that relies on social interaction and the participation of individuals or communities to create and publish content Social News – Websites where users submit and vote on news stories or other links, thus determining which links are presented Social Proof – The determination of what is right by finding out what other people think is right Social Selling – Also referred to as Sales 2.0, the merging of Web 2.0 technologies with traditional sales strategies, enabling salespeople to better prioritize their time and serve as experts—not just negotiators— in the product selection process Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – A way of deploying software so that users access the software “on-demand” as a web-based service, and the software vendor hosts the application on its own web servers Spam Traps – Old inboxes that ISPs reactivate specifically to trap spammers. Because these addresses have never been registered to receive email, any mail that lands in the trap inbox is labeled as spam Spoofing – A fraudulent email activity in which the sender address and email header are changed to look as though the email originated from a different source Statistical Significance – In the case of online testing, the probability that an event did not occur by chance Stay in Touch Campaigns -- Campaigns that “drip” out relevant content to prospects over time, helping to educate them and build trust and credibility for your company Suppression File – A list of email addresses you have removed from your regular mailing lists, either because they have opted out of your lists or because you do not wish to email them (competitors, etc...)_ Threshold – A score used to determine whether or not a specific action should be taken on a lead Trigger – An event based on a change or update in status, demographic information, or user behavior that causes a lead to proceed along a specific workflow branch or new path Twebinar - A mashup between a live podcast/audio broadcast and Twitter as the backchannel for discussion Twitter -- A social networking and microblogging service in which users send and read other users' updates known as tweets that are 140 characters or less Unsubscribe - To remove oneself from an email list, either via an emailed command to the list server or by filling in a web form. Web 2.0 – A term used to describe the second generation of web tools and software that encourage users to become more active participants, creating content and interacting with each other within web-based, social communities Website Monitoring – The ability to monitor page visits, click-throughs, form submissions, and other online activities from either known or anonymous visitors Widget – A mini application that performs a specific function and connects to the Internet YouTube – A video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos What terms should we add to this magical list?

Basic Nurturing Advanced Nurturing Measuring ROI Calculating the ROI of Nurturing Understanding the Engagement Dashboard Basic Reporting - (Login Required) Measuring ROI Understanding Engagement Scores Engagement Stream Performance Reports Defining Nurture How to Create a Nurturing Strategy Working with Engagement Programs (Login Required) Add Streams to Your Program Optimizing Nurture How to Test and Optimize Nurturing Engagement Engine, Scoring, and Data Management - (Login Required) Segmenting for Nurture Basic Nurturing Segmentations Segmenting for Nurture Advanced Nurture Segmentations Transition Leads Between Engagement Streams Engaging with Content How to Create Content on a Budget Content Marketing Tactical Plan Worksheet Add Content to a Nurture Stream Nurturing Across Channels Your Multi-Channel Nurturing Strategy

Information on the latest industry metrics for email marketing. Enjoy

  Whether you’re new to Marketo or trying to clean up a mess, you may wonder what you can do to keep your Marketing Activities organized within your instance. Through hiccups and hair pulling, our team has finally discovered a great way to keep ourselves organized, which has enabled us to work more efficiently. Take a look at what we’ve done and determine if it’s the right fit for your organization. In the Marketing Activities section of our Marketo instance, our main folders are set up to represent different activities that are performed in Marketo. Example: >Active Marketing Programs >Demand Generation Programs >Customer Support / Operational Activities >Operational >Archive Folder >Learning Folder Within those folders, we have additional folders that are broken out by the various channels we use. *Active Marketing Programs example below Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events > Newsletter > PPC > Website Within those folders, we've create more descriptive folders for the various campaigns running in each channel. *Event example below Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events                 > Trade Shows                 > Webinars > Newsletter > PPC > Website We have several campaigns running in each channel, so we've built out folders to specify by a specified time frame (year and quarter). *Webinars example below Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events                 > Trade Shows                 > Webinars                                 > 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q1 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q2 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q3 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q4 – 2015 Webinars > Newsletter > PPC > Website Within the specified time frame folder is where we house our individual campaign folders that contain our programs and other local assets for the campaign. For these folders, I’ve found it helpful to follow a very structured naming convention. This helps to ensure that our instance stays organized and everyone working in our instance knows how to label items. My recommendation would be to use the channel type, the date (YYMMDD) and brief description of the program (for our webinars we use the time of the webinar, the service name we're promoting, and the target audience of the campaign). Below is an example of our webinar folder structure. Example: >Active Marketing Programs > Digital Ads > Email Blasts > Events                 > Trade Shows                 > Webinars                                 > 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q1 – 2015 Webinars                                                                 > Webinar – 150205 11 AM SERVICE A – PERSONA 3                                                 > Q2 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q3 – 2015 Webinars                                                 > Q4 – 2015 Webinars > Newsletter > PPC > Website This folder houses our event program for the webinar (the event program has the same naming structure as the folder). We also use the same naming structure for our SFDC Campaign Name. Check with your Sales team to see if that’s a viable option for your organization. The folder also houses our "granular channel programs" that we use to attribute success to the various channels we use to drive traffic to the webinar event (such as PPC, email, social, etc.). Happy Building!

Use the Salesforce workflow engine to supercharge your marketing automation in this presentation from the Marketo Summit 2014. Presented by Delinda Tinkey and Charlie Liang.

Creating an A/B Test program in Marketo Create a new Program in Marketo:                2. Choose the Campaign folder, provide the program name and choose the program type and the channel: Channel should be Email blast 3. Create a new asset within the program: 4. Choose Email program as the asset: The idea of creating Email program as an asset within a program is to have the ability to track progression statuses in a better way with the original program being the one tracking statuses.        5. Give a Program name and choose the type and channel:     6. Create an email within the email program and approve the email:        7. Go to the Email program created: 8. Choose the email created and approved in the steps above: 9. Add the A/B Test to your email:    10. A/B Testing can be done based on Subject Line, Whole emails, from address and date time: 11. For this example let’s choose subject line: 12. Define the subject lines for the email on which we are trying to test and choose the sample size of the test: In the above example, we chose 20% as the sample size and we have 4 subject lines to test. So 5% of the audience list will each receive email with a particular subject line and the winner will be send to the remaining 80%. 13. Define the Winner criteria based on which the email would be treated as a winner and you can also declare winner manually after viewing the test results: 14. Schedule the test and the winner, choose the email address you want to send notification to: 15. Click on Finish: 16.Verify the details and click on close: 17. Define the smartlist(audience) for this email send: 18. Define the filters for the smart list:    19. The audience details will be reflected in the program now: 20.  Approve the program:    21. Once the test is run successfully, the results can be seen as shown below:   

Written by  , one of Marketo's Champions. I often get asked where I do my research on various marketing automation and digital marketing topics. When I first started writing this post, I wanted to break out the top 5 blogs—then I gave up. It’s like picking players for the baseball Hall of Fame with only 1 pick. The fact is there are a ton of great resources you can lean on for digital marketing and technology content. In the end, I broke out some of the blogs based on what I consider to be the core part of digital marketing technology–that’s marketing automation and its effect on driving leads through the funnel. Content is the fuel that fills that marketing automation engine so you’ll find several content blogs on the list. And yes, there are a couple miscellaneous blogs included because the content is so good. What’s not included: There are some great general marketing, SEO and social blogs but they are not included in this list. And yes, I’m probably missing a bunch—I apologize in advance. If there are sites you find useful, please note them in the comments. A special thanks goes out to our content manager Alyssa Reeves who helped pull together this nearly 2,000-word post. The Blog Categories I did however break up the blogs into categories. Top Overall – Expert Blogs. These blogs may fall across several categories but they rise to the top in the content they provide. Marketing Automation/Technology Vendor Blogs. There are hundreds of vendor digital technology blogs out there. I focused on marketing automation blogs as I view these platforms as the engine that everything else feeds into. Professional Services and Agency Blogs. Like the vendors, these blogs put out some great best practice content. Blogs with a Marketo Twist. I am a little biased to Marketo so blogs that highlight Marketo get a little extra attention. Top Overall – Expert Blogs These blogs rise to the top for blogs to check out. There is some overlap with the agencies but the way I broke it out…if I think of the leader before the agency, the site falls into this bucket. Otherwise, the site drops into the Services category. In alphabetical order….. 1) BeachHead Marketo Champion Steve Moody and his team give tips on everything marketing automation with a Marketo focus. @AskBeachhead Visit Site 2) Brian Solis Blog Brian Solis is a digital analyst, anthropologist, and futurist. Not sure I have ever seen those three words together. Brian’s blog focuses on digital marketing’s effect on transforming business. Brian’s blog is consistently ranked in the Top 10 of the Ad Age Power 150, and ranks among the top 1% of all blogs tracked by Technorat @briansolis Visit Site 3) B2B Marketing Insider Michael Brenner is the Head of Strategy for the leading content marketing platform, NewsCred. He created his blog to focus on emerging business and marketing strategy topics such as content marketing, lead generation, search marketing, digital media, and social media. B2B Marketing Insider is dedicated to sharing the ideas, topics and marketing strategies that drive real results. @BrennerMichael Visit Site 4) Chief Martec Scott Brinker runs this blog on everything marketing technology including Marketing Automation. If you have seen that crazy Marketing Tech Landscape Supergraphicwith 1,876 vendors, that’s Scott’s baby. @chiefmartec Visit Site 5) Content Marketing Institute Content is what fuels the marketing automation engine and CMI covers everything related to content. Over 100K subscribers. @CMIContent Visit Site 6) Convince and Convert Jay Baer is a marketing visionary who has worked with more than 700 brands. His blog is one of the top content marketing sites on the web. @jaybaer Visit Site 7) Duct Tape Marketing Content is what fuels the funnel and John Jantsch gives useful advice on how to create content that drives brand. @ducttape Visit Site 😎 Etumos Ed Unthank loves his whiteboard and puts it to great use bringing some key marketing automation concepts to life. Posts about once a month and the posts tend to be on the technical Marketo side. @EtumosLLC Visit Site 9) Fill the Funnel Miles Austin spent 30 years in B2B Sales and Leadership roles. In addition to helping business with their demand gen needs, he now writes blog posts on email marketing for Fill the Funnel. Miles posts about Sales & Marketing tools and ways that they can be applied in your business. He also has a steady following of 11K. @milesaustin Visit Site 10) The Funnelholic Craig Rosenberg is the co-founder and Chief Analyst of TOPO. His blog was created so he can have fun talking about all things revenue. The Funnelholic focuses on sales, marketing and everything in between. @funnelholic Visit Site 11) Heinz Marketing Matt Heinz is all over the place speaking on the importance of digital marketing. His blog covers everything from marketing automation to best practices in sales. @HeinzMarketing Visit Site 12) KissMetrics Although this site is not marketing automation at all, I had to drop it somewhere because their blog is just so good. They have great articles on analytics. @KISSmetrics Visit Site 13) Marketing Land Marketing Land is a general digital marketing site that covers a wide variety of topics. It also has a great marketing technology section. @Marketingland Visit Site 14) Marketing Profs One of the biggest marketing blogs/portals on the web run by Ann Handley and team. Not marketing automation focused but it’s a must read for content marketers. 600K+ members. @MarketingProfs Visit Site 15) Marketing Rockstar Guides Don’t expect fancy graphics but Marketing Rockstar Guides gets my vote for the top Marketo-focused tips and tricks blog out there. Targeted at the Marketo practitioner. It is run by Marketo Champion, Josh Hill, and you get a 844+ page guide for signing up for blog updates–try reading that on the beach. @jdavidhill Visit Site 16) Marketing Tech Blog This blog was founded by Douglas Karr and has over 75K subscribers.  It covers mainly marketing in new media but has a section focused on marketing automation. @douglaskarr Visit Site 17) Money Ball Marketer Channeling your inner Brad Pitt, Moneyball Marketer is Zak Pines’s blog on data-driven demand generation and marketing best practices. Great blog to check out once a month as it updates once or twice monthly. @MoneyballMktr Visit Site 18) Relevance Chad Pollitt cofounded this site and grew it to 50K subscribers in six months (Read amazing story here). The blog brings in industry experts to share expertise on content marketing and promotion. @relevance Visit Site 19) RevEngineInsider You are reading this post so you already know marketing technology is important to us. We cover everything digital that is related to moving leads through the funnel. At a deeper level, we also cover top tips for organizations leveraging Marketo. Primary contributor is Marketo Champion Jeff Coveney. @RevEngineMarket Visit Site 20) The Sales Blog Digital blog with a Sales focus. Anthony Iannarinno is a publishing machine and gives great Sales process tips EVERY day. I keep waiting for him to miss a day but he’s the Cal Ripken Jr. of Sales blog writing. Technology is not a big focus of Anthony’s but his Sales process stuff is vital to overall marketing automation and funnel success. @iannarino Visit Site 21) The Sales Benchmark Index Blog Here’s another site that doesn’t quite fit into “digital marketing technology.” However SBI’s content on Sales and Marketing methodologies and best practices is central to any company trying to develop a marketing funnel. Updates daily. SBI delivers some great  podcasts too such as this one: Case Study: Aligning the Marketing Strategy to the Skills of the Marketing Staff @MakingTheNumber Visit Site 22) The Sales Lion Blog Mark Sheridan runs this inbound marketing blog with a Hubspot focus. Great podcasts also. In six years, Mark went from pool seller to content marketing king. That’s a career path you wouldn’t expect.Read more on Mark’s pool story success. @TheSalesLion Visit Site 23) Sirius Decisions Sirius Decisions is where all the smart people go to try to get smarter about optimizing the revenue funnel. You sometimes need a MIT degree to completely get all the concepts but their forward thinking enables you to plan for the future. Jay Famico is the go-to guy for technology and services so make sure to follow his posts. @JayFamico @siriusdecisions Visit Site 24) SmartInsights Blog This blog (and membership site) offers tons ofactionable digital marketing advice. There are plenty of planning templates, ebooks and online training courses. Some are no cost, others have a fee. There is a no-cost weekly newsletter I’d recommend signing up for. 80K+ members. Co-founded by Dr. Dave Chaffey, Dan Bosomworth and Stu Miller. @SmartInsights Visit Site 25) Topo Blog Topo Blog is UK-based and covers a mixture of sales, marketing and technology data and research. @scottalbro Visit Site 26) Top Rank Marketing Lee Odden’s blog is another extremely strong content marketing focused blog. I almost didn’t include it because the site is heavy on the social flavor and light on digital technology. The content stuff is just too good to leave off. Attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors and has over 50,000 subscribers. @toprank @leeodden Visit Site

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/

From Heidi Bullock is the Vice President of Demand Generation at Marketo. She has over 13 years of B2B marketing experience in high tech companies. Her expertise includes product positioning, brand strategy, product marketing, and demand generation. Now is a great time to be in marketing. Not long ago, if you were asked at a cocktail party what you did and replied, “Oh, I’m in marketing,” you were almost guaranteed a response like, “Wow, you’re the one that works on all the fun logo-covered fleece vests!” Historically, this misconception was largely due to the inability of marketers to demonstrate their impact on the business, i.e. showing the efficacy of campaigns and knowing where to invest (or not)—and clearly understanding the process the buyer takes when evaluating a product or service. But times have changed. Thanks to technology—especially marketing automation—we now have tools that help us understand the digital footprints of our buyers—how they like to be communicated with, the frequency, the message, gain visibility into which programs drive real business results and which don’t, and even ultimately help us predict buying preferences. With such powerful inputs available, marketers today are uniquely situated to understand all facets of their customers and the journey they undergo. One function that has originated as part of this new data-driven era is the role of the demand generation marketer. This role and organizational function is dedicated to driving demand and ultimately revenue. In many organizations demand generation is often associated directly with acquisition, but a better and more modern wa to think of it is as “transformative demand generation,” and this is where marketing executives need to focus. If you align your team around this concept, you’ll gain better insight into all areas of the customer journey—not just the early stages. Transformative Demand Generation Transformative demand generation is comprised of three key criteria: Having an agreed upon, shared model, set of definitions, and goals for aligning marketing and sales efforts. Creating a shared revenue model with clearly defined stages, conversion points, definitions, and service level agreements (SLAs) is critical. This is your blueprint for what marketing and sales are responsible for. A good model should be customer-centric and should model the customer’s journey.  There should be clear handoffs between marketing and sales, and ideally you can put SLAs in place to ensure consistency in response times. By doing this, you can clearly assess the health of your business, identify bottlenecks and respective fixes, and begin to predict your business outcomes.  There needs to be an ongoing focus on the model and an emphasis on iteration as learnings come in—but this is great way to make sure both teams are aligned. A focus on driving revenue first and foremost—and throughout the ENTIRE customer life-cycle. This lens must be used across all marketing programs—throughout the journey, from acquisition to retention. You should have a clear way to evaluate if a program makes sense for the business. Now a large brand initiative may be more complex to assess, but it is still important to understand. This starts with identifying goals and determining when you will measure impact, and when (what are the different points in time?).  There are times you go through this exercise and it becomes abundantly clear that a program does not make sense to continue. That learning is equally valuable. Here is a simple example: Your team may be considering a tradeshow and the goal is for acquisition. If the event costs $20K, the organizer tells you there will be 300 people attending. You estimate that the team can scan half the people, and you estimate that 30% will have the right demographics. At that rate, you are spending over $400 / lead.  That may be fine for your business—or not—but the point is you need to KNOW and then use that knowledge to evaluate the opportunity—and all opportunities with this lens. Being data-driven to measure and iterate to make the best decisions for the business. This one goes without saying—but you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The key here is being laser focused on the right things to measure for your business. It’s helpful to have a mix of performance metrics (answering how did you do?), diagnostic metrics (what’s working, how can we improve?), and lastly leading indicators (these should help you forecast how you will be doing). A key part of your planning process is to identify up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then build your measurements to capture the right information. This means you should measure things not just because they are measurable—but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability. 3 Key Benefits of Transformative Demand Generation When done well, transformative demand generation provides marketers the ability to do these 3 things: Align with sales and other key stakeholders within your organization. By establishing an agreed-upon model upfront, definitions and goals—both marketing and sales efforts are pointed in the same direction. Make the right investments for driving the desired business outcomes. It is critical to identify goals for programs (whether it’s a brand campaign or retention) and estimate upfront if your investment makes sense to achieve your desired outcome. Be forward looking—and forecast what will occur. You should be able to discuss not only what just happened, but also what WILL happen. This is one of the most critical thing marketers can do to build credibility. Today’s demand generation has fundamentally shifted. It should no longer be thought of as simple acquisition or the team that focuses at top of the funnel and only generates volume. Transformative demand generation has the power to drive revenue throughout the entire lifecycle of a buyer. Applying transformative demand generation principles will ensure your marketing organization has a framework to align with sales. It sets a new standard to employ tools to attribute, predict, plan, and benchmark campaign performance. You may start to see that half of your programs are not worth the investment—but instead of being disappointed, be glad that you know and are able to identify the gaps. Ideally, the team should be able to predict the future revenue impact of marketing dollars invested. Marketers—from executives down through the practitioner level—that work within this framework will be able to drive and show the impact across the entire buyers’ journey. These are the marketers that will succeed and, of course, have respect.

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

Written by Sanjay, our CMO It’s been just over a month since I spent four days in Las Vegas for our annual Marketing Nation Summit, and I’m still excited about the time I had with more than 5,000 attendees and some of the best minds in the business. The chatter in the halls was infectious and often lasted well past my bedtime as attendees swapped ideas and traded war stories about what they were doing to stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing digital world. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to offer my own ideas about the challenges to tomorrow’s marketers in the Day 2 keynote address, where several marketing icons joined me on stage. The program captured the theme of “Tomorrow’s Marketer.” The future of “what” As Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo (my employer), said during the Summit’s opening keynote, marketers now play on a bigger stage, so the expectations for both content and success are high. As Ken Wincko, the CMO of PR Newswire, noted during his Day 2 talk, credibility follows only when your customers trust you. That means marketing to moments that matter and delivering exceptional customer experiences take on increased importance. Consider the following: Trust equals credibility. Credibility is shaped by the accumulated expertise of every person in an organization who interacts with current or prospective customers. By the end of this decade, most boards will be asking their organizations to create metrics that measure how well they fare when it comes to customer trust. Great marketing is about serving, not selling. The question will be how well you know your customers’ wants and desires. Invest to foster customer advocacy. Great customer experiences will need to be contextual, empathetic and inclusive. In tomorrow’s marketing world, it’s vital to adopt a holistic approach that can engage your customers no matter the channel they choose. The future of “how” When Gary Briggs started his career in 1985, marketing had little idea of what worked and what didn’t. In 2016 we’re awash with data on our every campaign.Briggs, now the CMO at Facebook, rightly noted that consumers nowadays spend more time than ever on multiple devices, and while their interactions may be more fragmented than before, they are also more measurable than ever. A couple of points to keep in mind: We’re at the dawn of the era “of people-based marketing.” Use this measurable information to bolster your ability to tell a great story and get people to interact with your business. Marketers now have an opportunity to understand consumers at a level they never could previously. Take advantage of the ability to communicate with them like never before. The future of “who” If the chatter today is around decoding millennials, Wunderman CMO Jamie Gutfreund offered an astute reminder that the next generation is coming — Generation Z. This group, she noted, has become a proxy for all consumers. By 2020, it will make up 40 percent of the global population, and it is a picky bunch. (I should know — I have two of them at home right now!)Generation Z doesn’t like the way the world is going and has little confidence or trust in brands, governments or politicians. Consider this when marketing to these unconventional consumers: Trust is the new currency. It is a challenge to capture this generation’s attention, loyalty and confidence. They don’t only judge individual products but also take a broader look at the companies behind the brands. These digital natives, who are growing up with technology, are the ones who will decide whether or not to engage with you. And they will immediately head elsewhere if they believe you’re lying to them. This is the “optimization generation.” Gutfreund told us that Generation Z prefers to rely upon themselves and wants things to work well. If you want to cultivate a relationship with them, you’ll first need to understand their passions, values, issues and needs to communicate that you really get them and aren’t just interested in trying to sell a new widget or service. They have higher expectations, so disappoint them at your own risk. The future of “you” That leaves me with the fun stuff: the future of YOU in tomorrow’s world of marketing. What is the organization and talent profile required to succeed? You need special types of marketers to navigate this new world, and you can’t narrow your criteria to the same old experiences and personas. We’ve seen some of the most successful marketers come from backgrounds as diverse as zoo keeping and biology and teaching. These are not people who are classically trained four-P marketers, but these are people who had the right intrinsics for this new world. Marketers need to be intellectually curious and possess the grit and determination to power through whatever challenges you throw at them. Look instead for intrinsic traits to find the people with the right stuff. In a world where data drives everything that we do, marketers need to adapt and be analytical. Find these people and bring them into the profession — they will soar. At the same time, look for people who love customers and have a gift for storytelling. After all, this is marketing. You’ve heard me refer to them as the “Da Vincis” — the unique individuals who are talented across a variety of interconnected disciplines. They are in short supply, so don’t let the opportunity slip when you find one, and also strive to cultivate these traits within yourself. There’s no single marketing playbook anymore, and you and your people will need to be creative, analytical and strategic. Straitjackets and narrow specialties don’t work anymore. And finally, take no sh*t How should future Da Vincis behave in this marketing world of tomorrow? Very simply: Take no sh*t. Our Day 2 keynote ended with an inspiring performance by singer-songwriter Rachel Platten. Her inspirational hit “Fight Song” became popular after she had already been demonstrating grit, determination and passion…for 14 years. She faced a lot of naysayers and a lot of challenges, but kept at it until her talent and commitment paid off tenfold. It’s a life lesson to keep in mind. The fact is that tomorrow’s marketers will never get all the recognition, credit and popularity they deserve — at least not at first. So count on resistance from entrenched thinking — you’ll be in pretty good company. But remain determined and persistent, and you’ll overcome any and all obstacles. You will soar. This post originally appeared on Marketing Land on June 30, 2016.

Note: This White Paper was provided by our LaunchPoint partner, Cake. This guide explores how multi-touch marketing attribution can increase the success of your digital advertising campaigns.

Note: This survey was created by our LaunchPoint partner, Annuitas. From April 8 to June 15, 2014 ANNUITAS conducted a study to analyze current Enterprise-level B2B Demand Generation Strategies and discover key patterns, including where B2B marketers produce the best results and where they continue to struggle. This survey was unique in that it focused exclusively on the B2B Enterprise (organizations with revenues that exceeded $250M in annual revenue). More than 100 B2B enterprise marketers responded to the study.

Quick Event Checklist: Quick Event Checklist – Marketo.com Checklist for Webinars: Managing Successful Webinars: A Marketer’s Must-Have Checklist – Marketo.com Checklist for Setting up Webinars: Managing Successful Webinars - Marketo Checklist Social Media Calendar Template: Your Sample Social Editorial Calendar Worksheets for Lead Generation: Worksheets Marketing Measurement Checklist: The Marketing Measurement Checklist [Infographic] – Marketo.com Email SetUp Checklist: Secret Email Checklist Improve B2B Email Deliverability with Marketing Automation Marketo Email Marketing: Thinking Outside the Inbox Mobile Email Marketing Nine Signs That It's Time to Switch Automation Systems Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Blogging 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: LinkedIn Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Google+ Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Pinterest and Instagram 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Twitter 2015 Tips for the Social Marketer Cheat Sheet: Facebook Inbound Marketing Cheat Sheet The Marketing Measurement Cheat Sheet Online Community Cheat Sheet SlideShare Cheat Sheet Podcasting Cheat Sheet Content Marketing Cheat Sheet Lead Nurturing Cheat Sheet Email Deliverability Cheat Sheet Marketing Automation Cheat Sheet Lead Scoring Cheat Sheet B2B Email Marketing Cheat Sheet Landing Page Optimization Cheat Sheet The Changing B2B Buyer Salesforce.com for Marketers Cheat Sheet Sales 2.0 Cheat Sheet Social Sales - Truth about Sales 2.0 How to Attract, Hire, and Grow a Rockstar Marketing Team Marketing Automation and the Marketing Battles What to Test in Your Emails The Cost of Delaying Marketing Automation When "Boring" Means "Amazing": How Testing Makes Go-Live Day a Snooze 17 Email Rules You Absolutely Have To Break 5 Ways That a Solid Marketing Automation Solution Can Help Small Teams Succeed 30 Things to A/B Test for Lead Generation 5 Lead Generation Metrics Every Marketer Should Track Mapping Lead Generation to Your Sales Funnel Here's How to Make Your Website as Personalized as Your Email How to Create a Marketing Persona for Your Business Cheat Sheet: How to Design a Marketing Automation Discovery Guide SEO and PPC Keywords What To Seek In A Lead Nurturing Solution 4 Pieces of Social Media Real Estate You Shouldn't Ignore SEO Cheat Sheet: Best Practices for On-Page Optimization A Marketer's Guide to Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) Email Deliverability and Design: Email Deliverability Design and Creative Checklist – Marketo.com

Here are a couple campaign request form templates that were developed to capture all the information needed to build a webinar program in Marketo. I build a lot of these one-off programs and was finding myself spending too much time tracking down information from various people. The attachments are as follows: Campaign Request Form - External (used when campaigns originate from a department outside of marketing (ex. Sales)) Campaign Request Form - Internal (used when campaigns originate from a member of the marketing team) Campaign Request Form - External First tab: this is the tab that the campaign originator will complete Second tab: this is an example of what a completed webinar campaign request form will look like Third tab: this is an example of what a completed email campaign request form will look like Campaign Request Form - Internal First tab: this is the tab that the marketing team member will complete to originate the campaign Second tab: this tab contains the appropriate tokens used for emails/landing pages Third tab: this tab contains the appropriate information for GoToWebinar Fourth tab: this tab contains information need to post a portal ad The additional campaign tabs are added to the external request form once received by the marketing team. We also use a Google form for some project requests. That may be an option too!

ABM campaigns are about making one-on-one human connections despite the impersonal barriers of big business. If you want to cut through the noise, reach your champion and sway a whole organization you need to act outside of the inbox. Direct mail works and we’ll show you how it integrates with digital channels to make your ABM campaign connect. This guide shares best practices on why and how marketers should incorporate direct mail into their ABM strategies. It includes example campaigns and tips on when to send mail, how to personalize it and how to measure its effectiveness as part of a multi-channel ABM program.

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: 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.

Marketing and the Internet of Things, closer than you think For many years, we kept being promised that “the year of mobile” was upon us. When it failed to materialize, it was easy to become jaded and write off much of the discussion of that coming wave of innovation as hype. But somewhat suddenly, we now look around, with everyone reaching for their phones every other minute — or checking them on their Inspector Gadget watches — having integrated them into their soaring digital expectations of daily life, and we realize, “Whoa, it’s a mobile world.” Businesses who figured out how to leverage that ahead of the rest — Uber is the poster child example — gained a tremendous advantage. Keep that in mind as you read this Q&A with Andy Hobsbawm, the CMO of EVRYTHNG, one of the leading companies powering the emerging ecosystem of the Internet of Things. Surely, at least some of you rolled your eyes thinking, “Et tu, Scotte?” You’ve been hearing the drumbeat of the Internet of Things for long enough without seeing it materialize that you’re inclined to write off all articles like this as hype. My humble advice: don’t be so quick to dismiss this. The acceleration of technology adoption is real — revisit The Second Machine Age — and widespread distribution of the Internet of Things is probably much closer than you might think. Once it hits its tipping point, what we accept as everyday reality is likely to change very quickly. Now is a good time to start to learn about what’s possible, even today, and the challenges and opportunities that we’re going to face as marketers. Andy has a vested interest in this, of course. But in conversations with him, I find he does a wonderful job of explaining the technology and the scenarios by which it is able to impact marketing. More importantly, he has a wealth of real-world examples to share to demonstrate those effects. While we haven’t unveiled the MarTech Europe agenda yet — stay tuned for that next week — I am excited to say that Andy will be one of our speakers, helping to bring more of these examples to life for us. 1. Tell us a little about your background and how you came to EVRYTHNG. My background hasn’t involved a formal career path. I ended up following the things I’m most curious, fascinated, and passionate about and seeing where that led me. This explains a singular lack of cohesiveness in the story so far – or perhaps, as Steve Jobs pointed out in his epic Stanford commencement address, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” In any event, I’ve run entrepreneurial sales businesses while back-packing in Australia, written songs and played guitar in a spectacularly unsuccessful London rock ’n’ roll band, helped start the first international web agency Online Magic — later Agency.com, which went public in 1999 — co-founded an environmental non-profit Do The Green Thing, and most recently my IoT software company EVRYTHNG (with a bunch of other stuff in-between). The inspiration for EVRYTHNG was meeting a friend Niall Murphy, now fellow Founder and CEO, in a coffee shop several years ago. After co-founding European Wi-Fi network The Cloud, Niall had been wrestling with the idea of every object having an addressable, real-time presence on the Web. Why couldn’t the physical world be online and referenceable, searchable, mashable just like other forms of digital information? We both felt strongly that the Web will inevitably include billions of objects sharing dynamic information about themselves in real-time. And it seemed clear that some kind of transactional economy would emerge around this exchange of object information and that there needed to be a new kind of software infrastructure to manage the digital identity of physical things and make it easy for apps to access this data flow and provide new kinds of services and experiences. At the time it didn’t seem possible to realise this vision, but fast-forward a couple of years and mobile and web 2.0 technologies had become sufficiently widespread and cost-effective to make this scale of information exchange and dynamic service creation possible. And object connectivity tech like NFC, Wi-Fi chips, RFID and printable sensor tags had started to pass key tipping points in terms of cost. EVRYTHNG was incorporated in 2011. By 2012 all co-founders were assembled — which includes Dom Guinard, CTO and Vlad Triffa, EVP R&D, recruited from ETH and MIT — initial funding was raised and the early team was operational. EVRYTHNG is based in London and New York, with offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Minsk. 2. How real is the Internet of Things (IoT) for marketing today? A recent Economist Intelligence Unit survey reported that senior marketers globally believe IoT will make the biggest impact on marketing in the next five years, ahead of other related technology trends like big data, real-time mobile personalized transactions, and customer experience. Meanwhile, CTOs and CIOs are working on IoT strategies from the perspective of technology infrastructure and platforms to support the enterprise. And the range of products that can become part of the IoT is exploding based on the falling costs of connectivity technologies like printed electronics on smart packaging. Smart home devices with native, embedded connectivity are only the tip of the iceberg. Over three trillion consumer products are made and sold each year (some calculations put this as high as ten trillion). Of these, the most obvious IoT candidates like consumer electronics devices, home appliances, and cars represent 0.2% in volume. The wider IoT opportunity for marketers is the “Internet of Everything,” which includes everyday non-electronic ‘dumb’ household products that can also be given real-time, social web intelligence via smart packaging, smart software and smartphones. By our calculations, close to a trillion products shipped annually will be digitally-capable in some form by the end of this decade. By our calculations, close to a trillion products shipped annually will be digitally-capable in some form — from image recognition or RFID to printed sensor tags and embedded chips — by the end of this decade. 3. Can you give a couple of examples of great IoT-enabled marketing? Maybe one for B2C, one for B2B? We believe that there are three main consumer use cases for smart products powered by an IoT platform like EVRYTHNG. Firstly: Products-As-Media. Once activated, products become a data-driven, owned media platform to launch digital experiences and content, and acquire ongoing 1:2:1 consumer relationships. Diageo use EVRYTHNG’s IoT platform to let consumers interact with bottles using smart tags and smartphones. For example, letting consumers personalize a gift by adding a unique video gift message to their bottle, or rewarding consumers with loyalty points for interacting with products in “on-trade” bar locations. Additionally, tracking these items in the supply chain to make logistics and product operations smarter. Secondly: Products-as-a-Service. Physical goods that are packaged and delivered with a digital layer of personalized services can adapt themselves to user preferences and get better over time as they learn and new digital upgrades are made. Like Tesla cars that can upgrade performance and fix product defects while you sleep. Smart products are easier to differentiate and charge premium prices for, harder to switch from, and create new revenue opportunities from subscription or usage-based services. Smart products are easier to differentiate and charge premium prices for, harder to switch from, and create new revenue opportunities from subscription or usage-based services. Our customer Gooee, which puts chips and sensors into bulbs to disrupt the industry by selling “lighting-as-a-service.” Running on the EVRYTHNG IoT platform, these connected bulbs lower electricity and maintenance costs, but also contain motion sensors to track retail footfall analytics or trigger security alerts, plus CO2 sensors for smoke detection. So a lighting company is now also in the business of security services, fire alarms, inventory management, and energy efficiency. Another example is Diageo Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Adding a printed sensor tag from EVRYTHNG partner Thinfilm, powered by our IoT smart products platform, lets Diageo know if the bottle has been opened or not. The ability of the printed electronics label to send a different signal based on a “sealed” or “broken” state, in combination with real-time cloud data analytics and alerts, tackles the issue of counterfeiters re-filling bottles with poor quality alcohol. It also means that when consumers tap the tags with NFC-enabled smartphones, the bottles can switch messaging from pre-purchase incentives to post-purchase cocktail recipes. Thirdly: Ecosystem-Connected Products. Products can unlock additional user and business value by making more connections with partner products, apps, and data services in the digital ecosystem. For example, your premium Spotify account can now stream playlists in your Uber rides, the new Jawbone fitness tracker offers contactless NFC terminal payment in combination with Amex, and Visa partnered with BMW and Pizza Hut to enable in-car voice-activated ordering and payments. An example for EVRYTHNG would be how iHome’s smart products use our IoT platform APIs, based on open web standards, to integrate with other clouds so their products plug in to third-party service like Homekit and SmartThings or Wink and Nest. 4. What are some of the other things that are possible, that you expect we’ll see over the next year? We are moving into the Third Age of Marketing: Product Voice. The industrial media age of Brand Voice gave way to a social media-powered age of Consumer Voice, and now the product itself is having a say. Products are dynamic, web-connected intelligent objects and can play an active, functional part in how they are made, sold and used. The industrial media age of Brand Voice gave way to a social media-powered age of Consumer Voice, and now the product itself is having a say. We are fascinated about how shipping and operating physical products with real-time marketing experiences and digital services creates new business value and transforms consumer relationships and product operations for brands. And we haven’t scratched the surface of what’s possible with manufacturer brands using an IoT smart products platform like EVRYTHNG to connect their products to the web and manage a combination of hardware, software, and real-time data to transform the product journey from factory floor to high street to living room and recycling back into component materials. We expect to see a greater use of streaming analytics and complex event processing software, as well as machine learning systems, in combination with IoT data streams. For example, triggering alerts of a poor user experience so brands can offer customer service prompts. If, say, a consumer who presses a button five times in a row on a new device, it’s a fair bet they’re having difficulty getting their new product to work. To avoid poor negative reviews on social media or expensive product returns, the brand could send a “how-to” video link or the offer of real-time chat support to the user’s smartphone. For example, triggering alerts of a poor user experience so brands can offer customer service prompts. Devices will be increasingly valued not just for their stand-alone functionality, but for how well they work within the digital ecosystem. Considering that simply switching on the washing machine will lead to communication with the appliance app, the home hub network, the clothes and washing powder that go in it, as well as other smart home digital service experiences, it becomes clear that silo operations don’t make sense for businesses or consumers. Success will depend on the ability to connect with an interdependent network of devices, apps, and services, which means that data is no longer to be collected and coveted, but shared. We also think that native apps will overload consumers and fade away as web apps provide users with everything they need in one place — their browser — transforming products into interfaces that are used to access one simple, unified platform — the Web. Finally, we expect more product engagement data to be combined with first-party data to offer more effective and joined up segmentation and re-targeting in the real-time advertising markets. So traditional and digital media use data-driven decisions to drive consumers to engage with products, and those product interactions are in turn fed back into the calculations about what messages to serve the next time. It clearly makes sense for, say, a shampoo manufacturer to understand that a consumer has digitally engaged with a sample in the last week, and make smarter decisions about where they are in the purchase journey when re-targeting them with an offer to convert to purchase. 5. What does EVRYTHNG do to facilitate all this? To explain what EVRYTHNG does, lets recap why its Internet of Things platform-as-a-service is needed in the first place. Consumer product manufacturers need to digitize their products at scale and connect them to the Web to get value from the Internet of Things. The kinds of things companies want to do include: Let customers digitally connect to products for a better user experience (e.g. your garage door alerts you if you left it open so you can close it remotely, or a designer bag you’re thinking of buying confirms that it’s the genuine article and not a fake). Make supply chain operations more efficient with real-time product tracking intelligence (e.g. know if parts of a shipment go missing, or products end up in the wrong place, or are being counterfeited, etc.). Acquire customer and product information they wouldn’t otherwise have had — e.g. who is using their products and where they are, what they are engaging with, and how content drives interaction and sales. EVRYTHNG exists to help manufacturers of consumer products do exactly these kinds of things with its IoT smart products platform. Manufacturers can connect their products to the EVRYTHNG cloud and access data management and analytics services to make them smart, interactive, programmable, and trackable. Our specific role in all this is to manage the digital identities of these products as active data entities on the Web — what we call “Active Digital Identities” — with associated real-time data to drive applications for end consumers and business users (e.g. supply chain tracking). The EVRYTHNG platform allows brands to digitize their physical goods using a range of connectivity technologies — from image recognition, QR codes, BLE, NFC, and RFID to printed electronics and sensor tags to embedded chips — and manages the real-time IoT data to run applications in real-time on the Web that unlock business and customer value. EVRYTHNG operates as a B2B cloud platform-as-a-service, so brands own all the data and control their digital consumer and supply chain stakeholder relationships directly. 6. What capabilities — not just technical, but organizational — do companies need to implement successful IoT-enabled marketing programs? People expect brands to play a useful, relevant, and meaningful role in their lives, and the media they consume is increasingly mobile, social, and powered by real-time data. However, marketers default to delivering advertising messages in a regular sequence of campaigns, instead of “on-demand” personalized services and experiences. Marketers default to delivering advertising messages in a regular sequence of campaigns, instead of “on-demand” personalized services and experiences. The more broadly IoT technology is used, the greater value it delivers. As an enterprise platform, for example, EVRYTHNG’s smart products software powers “always-on” content and digital experiences, and transactional services like e-commerce or supply-chain tracking to prevent piracy. Real-time purchasing and behavioral data create opportunities for cross/upsell and efficiencies in inventory and supply chain management. Marketers need to see IoT as an innovation and growth opportunity and not another ad tech campaign tool. Marketers need to see IoT as an innovation and growth opportunity and not another ad tech campaign tool. Additionally, we believe that the Internet of Things sits at the intersection of a convergence between the worlds of enterprise technology systems and marketing. The CMO has increasing responsibility for leveraging enterprise platforms to generate and capture demand and build brands, while CIO/CTOs are charged with implementing real-time technology systems that connect with customers and business partners to go-to-market more effectively. By activating products as data-driven interactive media and operating them as real-time digital information services, EVRYTHNG’s IoT platform enables a suite of applications across the enterprise — from consumer engagement, to supply chain operations, to connected product services — where these two domains meet. We believe that the Internet of Things sits at the intersection of a convergence between the worlds of enterprise technology systems and marketing. 7. How should marketers address privacy concerns associated with these new capabilities? You can’t really talk about data privacy without also raising the issue of security, since one protects the other. A lack of consumer trust in IoT security and privacy was recently cited in the FTC’s “Privacy & Security in a Connected World” report as the biggest blocker to widespread adoption. As FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez noted: “The only way for the Internet of Things to reach its full potential for innovation is with the trust of American consumers.” A separate report by Business Insider in the UK came to the same conclusion: data security and privacy concerns are the biggest barrier to IoT becoming mainstream quickly. As EVRYTHNG’s CTO Dominique Guinard points out, “Private data, inevitably, will be exchanged, exposed and leveraged — there’s no going back from where the Web, social-media networks, and smartphones have already taken us.” The point is to make sure that these exchanges now happen inside certain frameworks. There’s no going back from where the Web, social-media networks, and smartphones have already taken us. The point is to make sure that these exchanges now happen inside certain frameworks. The question is partly about technology and partly about consumer perceptions and social norms: do people think it’s worth trading personal information for personalization? Technically, the IoT can respect consumers’ privacy and protect their data, but consumers may decide that the exchange of personal information is justified by the value of personalized services they get from their products in return. Manufacturer brands also need to decide where to draw the line and strike a balance between IoT data management and privacy. BMW deciding not to share any of the real-time data they collect from their vehicles with third parties is a good example. Yes, we want our connected cars to understand where we want to go and use information about environmental conditions and our personal preferences to get us there more intelligently, but we don’t want this digital data trail used by anyone else without our consent. From a technology point of view, the Internet of Things creates a multifaceted mesh of network connections, devices, data systems, and individual users — and this data is also transported or stored in different places. So it’s vital that multi-level security and privacy controls and policies are built into the core architecture of any IoT system managing this data flow. In other words, each part of the system should only access, manage, or share data that it’s allowed to. The EVRYTHNG IoT platform, for instance, regulates every step and exchange in this process. Each product layer in the ecosystem uses encrypted keys (or passwords) to identify itself, and fine-grained, customizable policies define the data that each specific component can access or influence. This lets a customer of ours, like iHome, program customizable granular rules into their smart products defining precisely who can do what in every part of the connected system. So if your neighbour comes over to borrow some milk, she won’t be able to discover your smart products on her smartphone, as she doesn’t have the required permissions or secure keys. Thank you, Andy. I’m looking forward to hearing your presentation at MarTech Europe in October!