Product Documents

At Marketo, we are celebrating a week of love through Feb 12 as we prepare for Valentine’s Day! Here's how it works: Not registered for Summit yet!? To show our love to you and the Marketing Nation, we're offering $100 off of a full pass to Summit. Use the code GETTHELOVE to get your discount - but hurry the code expires on 2/15!  And the best part is, if you register for the marketing conference of the year during the week of love, we’ll donate an additional $100 to help support tomorrow’s marketer. Already registered!? Since you'll be attending the marketing conference of the year, we want to help you spread the love to your friends by giving them $100 off of a full pass to Summit. Send the code SHARETHELOVE to your friends now (but hurry - the code expires on 2/15)!  If your friend registers for Summit, we’ll donate an additional $100 to help support tomorrow’s marketer. We’ve partnered with Junior Achievement and College Track and are excited to donate to empowering students. Celebrate Valentine's Day by participating in Purple Select! Whether you celebrate Singles Awareness or Valentine's Day, join us in Purple Select this week to celebrate the holiday together. There will be a little extra love, fun, and prizes so you won't want to miss out! Marketo created the Purple Select advocate program specifically for standout members of the Marketing Nation. We want to reward our customers and partners for their personal achievements, company successes, and spreading the Purple love! JOIN PURPLE SELECT​

Author: Koustubha Deshpande These are exciting times in the mobile app industry. Marketers have never had such an abundance of data and insights available to them–mountains of information to help support strategy and deliver success. But, in spite of this, one of the most common mistakes mobile app marketers make is that they treat their users as numbers or installs, rather than people. Increasingly, we’re hearing marketing experts talk about the importance of having a 360-degree view of your user base. What does this mean, and why is it important? What is a 360-degree view? Of course, the term takes its name from the number of degrees in a circle, and, in essence, refers to utilizing a broad, complete, and “all-around” view. It’s a panoramic view as opposed to the traditional narrow approach of sampling select data, such as downloads and uninstalls. In mobile marketing terms, a 360-degree view is all about understanding the people using your app. How do they use it? When are they most active? Why do they use it or, in other words, what value are they looking for from your app? How often do they use it? And, when users delete your app, what is the trigger? By gaining a nuanced view of your user base, you can effectively tailor your efforts throughout every stage of your relationship with them for maximum success in user acquisition, engagement, and retention. This helps you stay away from guesswork and pursue the tactics that work best for your specific user base. To channel the spirit of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for a moment, a 360-degree view can help you manage each phase of your app’s performance–the past, the present, and the future: Past: Understand historical trends By better understanding the journey your users undertook when they first found your app, you can establish which techniques really work and adjust your user acquisition strategy accordingly. For example, if a high number of users found out about your app via social media, you could allocate more funds to run paid campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, scaling back on other tactics that don’t quite work as well. Equally, if you can ascertain what keywords those top-of-funnel app users are searching for and what visuals capture their attention, you can optimize your App Store presence by incorporating high-performing keywords and switching out your creatives. Try out different icons, preview modes, videos, and screenshots of your app. Understanding your users’ pain points, motivations, and their unique journey gives you power to replicate the stuff that works and, ultimately, acquire new, highly-engaged users. Present: Build a relationship first Once users have downloaded your app, don’t market to them immediately. Build your cohorts to understand how they really use it. For instance, for an e-commerce app, are they comparing products found via the direct catalog or search feature? Profile your users and their usage patterns. Once you understand your users’ habits and usage patterns, you can incentivize them to share your app, rate it, or upgrade their membership. Some apps have a free version with limited capabilities and a paid version with the full set. These types of questions are the nuts and bolts of your app’s engagement metrics, but, without scratching the surface first, you’ll always be relying on guesswork. You need to first understand your users and their behaviors, thenmarket to them. Future: Predict and personalize Crucially, taking an interest in the behavioral patterns of users who churn gives you the power to intervene beforehand and stop other users from doing the same. Take a look at metrics like the drop-off rate from app install to sign-up, time spent in the mobile application, push notification opt-in rate, and the number of new vs returning users per day. If users are churning on the second or third day after you send an onboarding push notification, you may need to revise your messaging or delivery time, or fine-tune your targeting. Whether it’s through push notifications or personalized emails, you can reach out andengage these users as soon as you identify when they’re at risk of leaving. Take it full circle As in any industry, the better you understand your customers, the better you can anticipate and respond to their needs. A 360-degree view of your mobile app users gives you the best possible chance of delivering what they want, when they want it and, ultimately, will drive your app to be as profitable and successful as it can be. What other tips do you have for incorporating a 360-degree view of your mobile app users? I’d love to hear them in the comments below!

By: Jamie Lewis Posted: February 2, 2016 | Marketing Metrics While it may seem like there is a new marketing channel available almost every day (I’m devising my smart fridge strategy as we speak), email marketing, when done right, is still one of the most profitable acquisition and lead retention channels available. To clarify, by “done right” I mean permission-based email marketing with content that is personalized, relevant, timely, and highly optimized. And if you don’t have a great email program like this already, then you’re leaving tremendous value on the table. Be data-cated So how can you craft a slammin’ email channel to drive value to your stakeholders? The answer is actually quite mundane: you need to have the right set of metrics to analyze your email marketing channel and optimize it to stardom. This set of metrics is called your key performance indicators (KPIs) and should be very closely tied to your organization’s primary business goals. In fact, they will be a direct measure of how well you are achieving those goals. Traditionally, email analytics has been hard because all of your demographic data, open rates, etc. resided in your email service provider (ESP) database, while all of your web traffic and conversion data was being tracked by your content management system (CMS) and/or Google Analytics. This was a problem because unifying your end-to-end data is really hard, not to mention time consuming. Nowadays, this problem is being solved by the adoption of marketing automation platforms that unify email and conversion data in an end-to-end fashion. Now let’s talk data. When choosing KPIs that help measure your business goals, it is important that you follow these three rules: keep them very simple, produce them in a timely manner, and make sure they are useful. In other words, make it so that people can view your KPIs, quickly understand what they mean, and then take action on them immediately. This is critical because in today’s world we all need to act fast! There are three categories of data you will analyze when it comes to optimizing your email marketing channel. When creating your KPIs, you need to always be thinking about these things: 1. Engagement Engagement is a category that encompasses email campaign metrics and reveals how your emails are resonating with your target list. It measures things such as: how many emails were sent, who you sent them to, and what the result was. Here are some great KPIs that help measure the business goal of driving deeper engagement within my list: Delivery rate: (# of emails – bounce backs)/ (# of emails) – measures the quality of your lead list. Open rate: (# opened/# emails delivered) – represents the success of your “from” field and subject line. Subscriber retention rate: (# subscribers – # bounces – # unsubscribes)/# subscribers) – measures how well you are targeting your database and if you are delighting them. Click to delivery rate: # of clicks/# of emails delivered – helps you understand the mailing list quality and email content relevance. 2. Behavior Behavior is a measure of what happens after the viewer clicks a link on the email. It answers: what do they do on my site, how well they engage, and do they buy? Here are some great KPIs to measure the business goals of deeper engagement on my website, elevated content consumption, and an increase in Sales Qualified Leads : Bounce rate: (# of clicks to the website with a single page view / # visits) – a great measure of the alignment between email and landing page. Depth of visit: (% of email campaign visits that last longer than xx pages) – especially important for non-ecommerce. Actions completed: (% of visits that took the call-to-action on the landing page) 3. Outcome Outcome is a measure of the goals, conversions, and revenue you drove through your email channel. Tracking all of these conversions and attributing it back to your email programs is critically important. Here is my list of outcome KPIs that measure the business goal of increasing total revenue: Macro conversion rate: (revenue producing conversions / visits) – How successful are you at targeting your audience with the right message at the right time. Avg. revenue per email sent: (total revenue / # of emails sent) – Use this to measure how clean your list is. Profitability: (rev generated – cost – cost of goods sold) / # emails sent) – the “Holy Grail” of KPIs One last thing to note is that there is no one size fits all when it comes to email KPIs, you must be willing to experiment with your campaigns and how you analyze them and change your approach accordingly. Nor is it always possible to track all of these metrics all the time. I find that choosing one from each group may be sufficient. For example, if I wanted to keep it simple I would choose “click to delivery rate” for engagement, “bounce rate” for behavior, and “profitability” for outcome as my top three and go from there. Metrics are critical for building success and identifying what works and what doesn’t. With the right ones in place, you can realize the full potential of your email channel. What KPIs are you currently tracking for your email programs? Share them in the comments below!

MARKETO IN THE NEWS The 7 best marketing automation features in Marketo CIO This very positive article includes a few paragraphs providing an overview of Marketo, including a mention of our 10-year anniversary, before highlighting our ‘mobile tools,’ the Marketing Nation, and other features.  The section on ‘Marketing Nation’, #5, is a great summary and key differentiator. The story features comments from Marketo customers including our friend Jennifer Clegg at CA Technologies and partner Justin Gray at LeadMD. ·       The article was also syndicated in MIS Asia. 4 key marketing automation features Marketo lacks CIO The second article focused on features that customers would like to see Marketo improve. Unfortunately, the title was written by an editor and not the journalist who had written the article. One of the improvements has actually been nullified as we have since added that feature in a new release. Expect all of our competitors to receive the same dual-article coverage. ·       The article was also syndicated in ComputerWorld Singapore. Ten Years of Marketo CMS Critic This piece states that with clients like Intel and Acquia, Marketo has grown into one of the most trusted marketing automation systems on the market. The 4 marketing (r) evolutions expected in 2016 gpomag.fr (France) We’ve had some more coverage on our ‘predictions for 2016’ piece, making this 16 pieces of coverage on this in France in total. The most recent piece has been published in, the online version of GPO (Gérer, Prévoir, Optimiser), which is an enterprise publication focused on management, HR, marketing, finance, etc. Snackable Content: Shorter content for smaller attention spans Online Marketing (Germany) Infographic What Your Desk Says About You Grazia (France) Additional infographic pick-up in a well-known French fashion magazine, as well as rhperformances.fr.Rhperformances.fr is a French consulting and recruitment agency specialized in HR. CUSTOMERS & PARTNERS IN THE NEWS Marketing, Change and Higher Ed Inside Higher Ed The head of content strategy from Marketo partner Fathom calls out our recent Mashable “Ask the CMO” series in his byline in this top education trade. As he points out, the industry trends that the CMO of Georgetown Business School highlighted in her interview all have to do with personalization. Do People Actually Watch Marketing Videos? Canadian Startup Vidyard Can Tell Fortune On Tuesday, Vidyard disclosed another $35 million in venture funding led by Battery Ventures to drive adoption. So far, the six-year-old Kitchener, Ontario, company has signed close to 1,000 businesses as customers—including companies like Citibank, LinkedIn, and TD Ameritrade—said co-founder and CEO Michael Litt. The New Reach Of Beacons: Broadway, Rite-Aid, Sales Terminals MediaPost This piece talks about our beacon partner Gimbal and upcoming beacon partner Footmarks. Theaters are being outfitted with Gimbal beacons and other location-based technology with Urban Airship’s mobile engagement platform. Audiences can receive messages when they are in the theater, before the show, during intermission and after the show ends. How to Get the Most Out of Summit 2016 MudTime Marketing Joe Reitz, Marketo Champion, wrote this great blog for newbies wondering how to get the most out of Summit. Survey Finds Extremely Poor Sales Lead Follow Up Across Nine Industries Press Release Conversica compared best-practice research with real-world execution and found that in many cases even direct website inquiries-presumably the hottest of prospects-were being ignored. The good news is that several companies showed outstanding lead follow-up practices and earned the top A grade, including Salesforce,Marketo, Zend Technologies, Anderson Subaru of Pensacola, Florida and Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa. Microsoft adds new capabilities on Office 365 to tap enterprises Financial Express Microsoft is rolling out new technology that applies machine learning to the way people work to empower individual to work more effectively. The new Microsoft Office 365 comes with, Skype for Business that enables communication-powered productivity. With Power BI content packs for popular services such as Salesforce, QuickBooks Online, Marketo employees can begin visualizing the data in just minutes. 5 Ways B2B Sales and Marketing will evolve in 2016 MarTech Advisor Sean Zinsmeister, Senior Director of Product Marketing at partner Infer, points out the key changes he expects – from ABM becoming ubiquitous to predictive getting smarter and some others. Talking DoubleDutch about event marketing Diginomica Lawrence Coburn, CEO DoubleDutch says that to date, DoubleDutch is recording 68% adoption which means that a person signs up and does something with the app. Coburn thinks there’s much more that can be done that in turn will drive further adoption but, more important, value back to event attendees and organizers. INDUSTRY NEWS Collaboration to be Key As CMOs Start to Outspend CIOs MarTech Advisor According to a report, digital marketing budgets are set to increase by eight percent during 2015. This shows that marketing has a growing influence on technology spending, with Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) slated to outspend Chief Information Officers (CIOs) by 2017. Marcoms and ad tech merger activity: 2015 round-up MediaIntel Last year's ad tech mergers and acquisitions trends suggest that the market is unlikely to slow down in 2016. New Report: Marketing Automation Held Back By Budget, Data Management, And Lack of Time Marketing Land Based on survey responses from 400 U.S.-based marketing and sales professionals, the report from India-based IT/data management shop Openprise indicates that ease-of-use and quality of tools aren't the biggest obstacles. Profitability in a time of diaspora Channelnomics Forrester discusses the challenges partners face when it comes to the ease of doing business with vendors. The Fourth Industrial Revolution Might Cost You Your Job MediaPost This very anti-automation piece blames this “fourth industrial revolution” for killing job growth in Art, Design, Sports and Media. IAB Launches Data Center of Excellence to Ensure ‘Big Data’ Meets Its Promise for Marketers and Commitments to Consumers Press Release The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced the launch of the IAB Data Center of Excellence, a new independently funded unit within IAB, founded to expand existing IAB resources and drive the “data agenda” for the digital media, marketing, and advertising industry. The Data Center’s mission will be to help advertisers and marketers operationalize their data assets while maintaining quality, transparency, accountability, and consumer protection. Why the ad industry will never win the war on ad blockers CIO The head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau came out swinging against ad blockers last week. Instead of even attempting to fairly distribute blame for the chaotic state of the ad industry, the executive pointed his finger everywhere else but at IAB members. Internet advertising industry chief: Adblock Plus is an 'unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes' Business Insider President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Randall Rothenberg used the opening keynote speech at the IAB summit to accuse Adblock Plus of being an "unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes" and an "old-fashioned extortion racket."

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

By: Kylie Ora Lobell Posted: February 1, 2016 | Content Marketing Great content should be at the core of your marketing initiatives, but to produce this content, you need to hire talented creators. If you own a small to medium-sized business, you may not have the budget to take on a staff of full-time writers, photographers, videographers, graphic designers, or developers. This is where freelance employees come into play. With freelancers, you can save money on operational costs since you don’t need to provide benefits or workspace. Plus, you can pick and choose whom you want on your content creation team from a pool of freelancers around the world. By not depending on local workers, you’re able to put together a diverse team from a variety of backgrounds and niches. However, if you’re going to be integrating a number of different freelancers into your company, you need the right tools to manage them efficiently. These are five types of tools that you can utilize to ensure that your content marketing campaigns stay organized and drive results: 1. Finding freelancers Doing a Google search or finding referrals for freelancers is a time-consuming process. Instead, you can look at job boards where top talent congregates. One example is the Upwork platform, which gives you the opportunity to find freelancers for every type of content creation. There are more than 10 million independent workers from over 180 countries on the site. Once hired, you can message back and forth with your freelancers, create milestones they have to meet, and pay them through the site. Another site for finding workers is MediaBistro, where you can either post jobs or browse through the talent on the site. All freelancers list their resumes, samples, and experience, which means you can vet them before making contact. To find freelance bloggers specifically, try ProBlogger, where you can list your jobs and gain access to bloggers who are actively looking to be hired. 2.Blogging Without a solid content management system in place, you’ll have a difficult time overseeing all your freelancers and their work. Going back and forth through emails and Google docs won’t cut it. Instead, you need to find a blogging platform that works for you and your team. WordPress is a classic choice for content creation. Aside from being free, it includes a variety of plugins that optimize your blog for SEO and promotional purposes. All your freelance writers have to do is log into your website’s WordPress account, copy and paste in their work, and fill in all the correct SEO information through the Yoast SEO plugin. Then, the post will show up in your queue. Once it’s submitted, you and your editors can go in, edit the piece, and hit publish. This way, your writers don’t need to email you their work, which ends up making more work for you because you have to manually load it in. Also, it’s much easier to organize all the work your freelancers have completed. An alternative to WordPress is Google’s Blogger, which is also a free and simple to use platform. It contains gadgets as opposed to WordPress’ widgets, and includes Google integrations like AdSense and Analytics, allowing you to easily monetize your company blog and monitor traffic. 3. Invoicing and tracking hours Working with so many freelancers can become complicated, and it’s important for you to evaluate how much money is being spent vs. how much is being generated through your efforts. Without a centralized platform, you’re going to be lost. One option is Due.com, which can assist you with the logistical side of overseeing your freelancers and their pay. This platform has time tracking and invoice tools that allow you to view how many hours your freelancers are working and what invoices you need to take care of. It also generates detailed reports so you know where you are in terms of your finances. Another platform for managing freelancers financially is Zenefits, which gives you peace of mind that your independent contractors are being paid on time. You can input how much time freelancers spent working and make sure they’re receiving their benefits (if you provide any for them). If you’re running a small operation, Zenefits eliminates the need for hiring HR talent. 4. Managing projects If you have multiple freelancers working on one project and there are many different elements to keep track of, you need a project management system. BaseCamp is a popular choice for project management. Through this tool, you and your team can upload files and store your collective to-do lists. It shows who worked on which project and when. Whenever a project is updated, those that are involved are sent emails so they can go in and complete their assigned tasks. You might also want to try Smartsheet, which is customizable project management software used by companies like Hilton, Groupon, and Netflix. It’s a great option if your business is utilizing spreadsheets in order to complete projects. Another option is Zoho Projects (pictured below), which comes with a timeline that’s similar to a social media feed. You can quickly scroll through it and see where you’re at with tasks. You can also integrate it with Dropbox and use it on your Android or iPhone. 5. Tracking blog posts and progress If a project management system is too complicated for what you want to do, you can work on a free or low cost tool that is strictly used to oversee your blog. Trello is a simple tool if you’re just getting started with freelancers. It’s also perfect for small teams. All you do is create boards for your freelancers and then make individual cards to ensure that each project is progressing. This platform lets you drag and drop files and include pictures and links, so it’s easy to use even for those who aren’t technologically savvy. You might also want to look into BamBam!, a platform that includes milestones and newsfeeds for your projects and is free for 10 users or less. If you’re a startup but you want project management that’s suitable for the corporate world, BamBam! may be the right choice for you. Of course, there are more robust content platforms that integrate with your marketing automation platform and offer two or more of these capabilities with one piece of software. These platforms often are an investment worth making because they will scale and grow with your business. Freelancers can greatly enhance your content creation campaigns. Once you have the best tools in your back pocket to manage them, you’ll be on your way to coming up with successful ideas that produce a huge ROI for your company. What other tools do you use to manage your freelance team of content creators? Let me know in the comments section below.

this is an example doc used in this post that shows how to create successful nurture programs Lead Nurture: Email Content (EXAMPLE) Drop Date: MM/DD/YYYY Reviewers: Final Approval: Overview Purpose: Audience: Hypothesis: Success Metric: Overall Messaging: General Information From Name Optimizely TEST From Email email@optimizelytest.com Reply Email email@optimizelytest.com Tracking Link ?utm_source=x&utm_medium=x&utm_campaign=x&utm_content=x http:// CTA link http:// Emails Email 1 subject_line preheader_text email_header_1 email_body_1 cta_text email_body_2 Email 2 subject_line preheader_text email_header_1 email_body_1 cta_text email_body_2 Email 3 subject_line preheader_text email_header_1 email_body_1 cta_text email_body_2 Email 4 subject_line preheader_text email_header_1 email_body_1 cta_text email_body_2

this is an example doc used in this post that shows how to create successful nurture programs Lead Nurture: Tradeshow Prospects (EXAMPLE) Overview 4 touch email campaign for new tradeshow leads, to encourage product adoption. Hypothesis By sending a 4 touch email nurture to our tradeshow leads, they will be more likely to create an account than if they weren’t sent it. By staying top of mind after the tradeshow is over, leads will be curious to explore what Optimizely can offer. Baseline Conversion Out of all tradeshow leads created last year (10,000), 20% of them created an account (2000). Goal Increase create account conversion by 15% (2300 leads for current year) Baseline conversion = 20% (2000 leads) Audience New leads coming from tradeshows. (target audience around 10k leads for this year). Content Cadence: 1x week over 30 days Email Content​ Notes

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MARKETO IN THE NEWS Mass marketing to engagement marketing is required (translated) Advertimes (Japan) This article resulted from an interview our Japan team secured for Phil. In the piece, Phil highlihgts that the expansion of digital has changed the relationship with customers and introduces the concept of "Engagement Marketing." Visa Inc. Appoints Lynne Biggar as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Press Release Marketo board member Lynne Biggar will join the company as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, effective February 1. She will also serve as a member of the company’s Executive Committee and Operating Committee. Ms. Biggar joins Visa from Time Inc. where she was the Executive Vice President, Consumer Marketing & Revenue. Digital Marketing’s New Future, According to Marketo’s CMO MSN Sanjay’s “Ask the CMO” Q&A was picked up by MSN video. What Does Your Desk Say About You? The State Of Your Workspace Might Reveal More Than You Think — INFOGRAPHIC Bustle Additional pick-up of the Marketo-generated infographic. CUSTOMERS & PARTNERS IN THE NEWS How a small design tweak got millions more people to use one of Facebook's products Business Insider Facebook has long been the social login leader, according to Gigya data, but the company recently made a small design tweak that hugely boosted its number of new logins. Facebook’s Deb Liu, VP of Platform, says that simplifying permissions, changing the look and feel of login dialogs, and advances on the review side led to a "significantly improved" click-through-rate for logins last year. Facebook gives brands more ways to convince you to sign up for news VentureBeat Facebook’s lead ads are getting an update. The company announced that several changes are coming to the ad format that lets people easily sign up for more information around a specific campaign. Starting today, advertisers can tweak their ads so that they’re more contextual, both with a new information card and images, thanks to the new carousel format. Marketo is listed as a key partner. How marketers are using Facebook's direct messaging apps Marketing Dive Even though Facebook Messenger and Facebook--owned WhatsApp don’t allow for third-party advertising, brands are making use of the direct-message apps for marketing. Interview with Alicianne Rand, VP Marketing - NewsCred MarTech Advisor This Marketo partner highlights Marketo as a key component of its news stack, saying that its connection with Salesforce CRM has given NewsCred the ability to understand exactly what content is influencing prospects, customer upsells, and revenue. The company’s end goal (today and going into 2016) is to produce more of the stuff that works -- not just the content that drives top-line growth, but also content that helps them close deals. #FlipMyFunnel #ABM Innovators: Featured Speaker Q&A with Adam New-Waterson Customer Think LeanData’s CMO – who spoke at RKO – spotlights Marketo as one of the primary tools that has helped the company implement and execute ABM. INDUSTRY NEWS 12 questions to ask marketing automation vendors (before you buy) CMO (AU) This widely syndicated piece (first appeared on CIO.com) recommends what you should ask vendors when building your marketing technology stack. CES 2016 Ends with Critical Takeaways for the Marketing and Ad Tech Sectors MarTech Advisor The Consumer Electronics Show, also known as CES, has offered some major insights about the future of marketing and advertising technology. With more than 170,000 attendees from various industries, the event brought forth some ground-breaking innovations in IoT, computing technologies, programmatic advertising, virtual reality, and more. Brave: New Ad Blocking Browser Promises More Privacy & Faster Page Loading Marketing Land Brave speeds up page loading by blocking ads and tracking technologies: cookies, pixels, fingerprinting and scripts.  It will have ads, just not those that “target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user ID or highly re-identifiable cookie.” In this way, Brave seeks to strike a balance between publishers, marketers and privacy. Predictive analytics drives almost 3 times B2B revenue growth: Study Marketing Dive In a new study,  78% of respondents reporting marketing's role has expanded from demand generation to also include deal acceleration. 10 trends in B2B marketing - In with the old, out with the new? The Drum The evolving B2B marketing trends reveal that tried and true strategies like email campaigns are back in vogue while the term ‘digital advertising’ is outdated. With content marketing, marketing automation, paid amplification and mobile optimization seen as emerging trends, ad blocking and BOT- fraud will increasingly pose challenges to B2B marketers. Here are ten B2B marketing trends to be on the look out for. Adware shunned from online advertisers’ leadership bash ITProPortal Adware, the online advertising blocking company, says that it has been uninvited from an advertising industry confab after the Interactive Advertising Bureau withdrew its approval for Adware to attend the Annual Leadership bash in California this weekend. Why Cross-Device Programmatic Advertising Is Ready to Take Off in 2016 Ad Week Consumers increasingly get their content across smartphones, laptops and desktops, so brands are eager to run campaigns that reach consumers on every one of those screens. With technology catching up to demand, marketers are predicting that 2016 will be cross-device programmatic's great leap forward. The era of targeting only to a particular device appears to be on the way out. Medical publishers eye new ad viewability rules Medical Marketing & Media A group of medical publishers will attempt to develop a new industry standard for digital advertising viewability, a much debated topic that has vexed the broader advertising industry. Viewability—how long is long enough for a user to have viewed a digital ad successfully—has cropped up in recent years as one of the more challenging media issues, and one that needs to be addressed as the business of digital advertising matures. In healthcare, experts say, it's no different. Building the marketing technology stack Diginomica This piece from Diginomica urges marketers to focus on the customer, use data effectively, and produce content that will actually move the needle. Ad tech M&A continues to rise as investors continue to pummel stock prices The Drum Ad tech acquisitions surged between Q3 and Q4 last year, with such providers accounting for almost a third of all M&A deals in all of the ad tech/martech sector during the final quarter of last year, according to a study from Results International. Intent-driven marketing: how hard is it really? AdNews Massive amounts of intent data are available to marketers, and now is the time to lean on this information to improve business outcomes. This piece explores type of experience can consumers can expect from intent-driven marketing. Which Brands Are Creating the Future of Digital Marketing? Content Standard At CES 2016 earlier this month, one of the big storylines among leading enterprises was the aggressive efforts to invest in artificial intelligence. Those efforts have been characterized as an innovative move, yet also something of a gamble, since the exact uses and value of AI remain unclear. But marketers are certain AI has a place in digital marketing‘s future, and those forward-thinking experts see plenty of value in the AI infrastructures those brands are looking to build. Deutsch Vets Open Creative Agency With Investment Arm Advertising Age Adland vets Mike Duda and Brent Vartan have opened an agency called Bullish Inc. and they want to have skin in the game with every client. Within the agency, which will focus on brand strategy and creative execution, each account will operate on a pay-for-performance compensation model. For some clients, that could mean a bonus based on meeting key performance indicators, such as sales, brand shift and advocacy. For others, it may mean a return on taking equity in the client's business. Snapchat's the most popular social platform for new ad campaigns: Study Marketing Dive According to eMarketer, a Cowen and Company survey of senior U.S. ad buyers on what social media platform they expected to begin advertising on in 2016 for the first time shows Snapchat led the list at 22%, trailed significantly by Instagram and Pinterest at 12%. In research from last September, RBC Capital Markets and Advertising Age found that Instagram was the leading social media platform for interest in allocating ad budgets this year at 72%. That survey had Snapchat in third place at 36%. MARKETING AUTOMATION HINDERED BY CLASSIC DATA ISSUES; OPENPRISE'S 2016 MARTECH DATA REPORT REVEALS Press Release Openprise, a data automation SaaS company, issued its inaugural 2016 MarTech Data Report today. Based on an online survey that gathered insights from more than 400 U.S. sales and marketing professionals, the report examines trends in data management and marketing automation, as well as 2016 MarTech priorities and challenges. How Data-Enhanced Storytelling Is Rapidly Reshaping Both Content and Advertising Ad Week In its inaugural gathering Thursday, Digital Storytelling, a newly sanctioned event of the Sundance Film Festival, ambitiously set out to better link brand marketers with digital content creators as well as discuss how return on investment on that content will grow and evolve beyond interruptive advertising models.

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

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

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

Here's a list of topic we would like to offered in the Nation Talks area. Feel free to add and suggest. Marketing (General Digital Marketing) Product (Marketo) Solutions (Marketo's) Lead Generation, Scoring and Nurturing Marketing Automation Marketing Operations Team (Needed) Data (Data Quality, Data Enrichment/Enhancement) Digital Advertising (Done, but could use more) Display Ads Analytics Mobile Social Email SEO and SEM A/B Testing (Completed) Content Events & Webinars Configuration: CRM Integration / List Importn Email Deliverability/Set Up Creative Templates First Email Sent Marketing Automation Strategy Design Migration from Existing Solutions Sales Insigh Configuration & Training Segmentation Reports Revenue Cycle Set Up Marketo Moments Calendar Email Marketing Lead Management (Scoring & Life Cycle, etc.) Content Design & Management Customer Base Marketing Mobile Marketing What topics are missing?​

MARKETO IN THE NEWS ‘Big four marketing cloud vendors top Gartner’s digital marketing hubs list’ CMO Australia Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and Marketo are leading the way for digital marketing platform capabilities, but there are plenty of challengers. Ad tech companies MediaMath, Krux, Turn, DataXu, Rocket Fuel, Neustar and IgnitionOne were pegged as visionaries, but as a whole were dinged because of their lack of execution channels beyond paid media. [if !supportLists]·       [endif]Additional coverage: AdExchanger, Cloud Tweaks, Which-50 Marketo's CMO on the new future of digital marketing Mashable The final installment of our “Ask the CMO” series features Sanjay’s take on the future of marketing and how lessons he learned growing up apply to his role today. User review-based report shows marketing automation favourites CMO Australia According to the new 2016 Marketing Automation Software Grid from US-based business software review platform, G2 Crowd, vendors leading the field for their strong customer satisfaction scores and market presence were HubSpot, Pardot (Salesforce), Marketo, Act-On, Oracle Eloqua and iContact Pro. Of these, HubSpot earned the highest overall satisfaction score as well as the highest overall market presence score. Demand Gen Report Releases Third Annual Marketing Automation Outlook Guide Press Release A special report produced by this B2B marketing publication queries 20 marketing automation and martech experts to uncover 2016 emerging trends and themes. Marketing’s Heidi Bullock is featured as one of the experts. 7 Marketing Trends for 2016 MediaMath Blog The partner team’s Mike Stocker blogged for MediaMath, sharing a few marketing predictions for the year ahead. The 4 (r)evolutions that will shape marketing in 2016 (Translated) ITRNews.com (France) Conor’s piece from last week was picked up in 10 additional online publications. [if !supportLists]·       [endif]itrmanager.com, itrmobiles.com, itrinnovation.com, itrgames.com, itrsoftware.com, infodsi.com, itchannel.info, tendancesit.com, lavienumerique.com What does your desk look like? MBA Channel Additional pick-up of our infographic on what your desk says about the type of worker you are. CUSTOMERS & PARTNERS IN THE NEWS Inside General Electric’s media machine Boston Globe In recent years, GE has moved swiftly and aggressively into emerging media platforms, pumping out gigabytes of original content intended to brush the dust off its 124-year-old brand and prime a new generation of customers and employees. Ironically, HubSpot’s head of content is quoted, lauding GE’s approach. Interview with Justin Gray, CEO - LeadMD MarTech Advisor The CEO of partner LeadMD gives an overview of his career path and how he created a company out of building technology stacks centered around Marketo. Justin likes to say he was our “first paying customer.” C3 Energy Releases Customer Analytics Applications TD World C3 Energy has released the next generation of its C3 Customer Analytics application suite with significant enhancements that advance interactions between utilities and energy retailers across residential, commercial, and large enterprise customers. This also features C3’s pre-built integration with Marketo, which puts messages, alerts, and notifications linked to predictive analytics in the hands of the end customer, as controlled by the utility or retailer. This makes it even easier to seamlessly deliver relevant information to the right customer on the right device at the right time. The Morning Download: Microsoft Cuts Azure Cloud Prices in Battle with Amazon WSJ Microsoft Corp. has cut prices for its Azure cloud services, keeping pace with reductions by Amazon Web Services, which it has pledged to match. The company announced price reductions up to 17% on the latest version of the popular Azure D-series virtual machines. Google Display Rebounds, Outpacing Facebook in Growth from Thanksgiving Through End-of-Year, U.S. Paid Search Impressions See Impressive Rebound EconoTimes IgnitionOne, a global marketing cloud leader, today released its Q4 2015 Digital Marketing Report, demonstrating continuing trends in digital advertising metrics. Of the findings. Google’s shift to shopping ads in a carousel format has led to an overall increase in impressions. INDUSTRY NEWS Forrester: Advocate Marketing Technology Key To Customer Engagement Customer Think Today’s leading B2B technology companies have one thing in common: they’re successfully engaging their customer advocates to build their brands and drive revenue (on both the retention and acquisition fronts). According to a new report from Forrester’s Vice President and Principal Analyst Laura Ramos, formal advocate marketing programs “have a measurable, positive effect on your business, and fostering advocates is essential to becoming customer-obsessed.” The report quotes Merissa Hamilton, formerly of our Customer Marketing team. Four Predictions for Email Marketing That Won’t Come True in 2016 EConsultancy The author predicts that automated campaigns will still miss the mark on not “annoying” consumers, that last-click email attribution will still be used as a metric, companies won’t take data security seriously, and that innovation will be limited. How the Obama Administration Uses Marketing Automation WishPond The author of this piece uncovers that Obama has been using marketing automation since he was elected. Based on voter activities, the President’s campaign is able to send targeted messages and calls-to-action. Malvertising: Three Things You Need To Know Forbes Brian O'Kelley, cofounder and CEO of adtech company AppNexus breaks down ad fraud. 3 CMO trends for 2016 show how ‘digital disruption’ is evolving IT Business CA This piece focuses on Google algorithms, omni-channel, and streamlined marketing automation as top marketing drivers for 2016. Bringing Data and Analytics to the Water Cooler: How the Workplace Is Far More Data Savvy Today The Drum With more organizations relying on employees understanding changes, trends and intelligence in data-driven marketing, a study produced by software company Tableau has predicted  sharing data that is centralized, clean, and fast as the best way to bring data intelligence into the everyday conversation. Where’s B2B Marketing Headed for This Year MarTech Advisor Dennis Syracuse, CMO & GM at Madison Logic, presents an infographic on what industry leaders foresee for B2B marketers in 2016 – rise of cross-channel approach and predictive data being just two key insights

By: Johnathan Dane Posted: January 18, 2016 | Digital Marketing Have you ever been so good at something that that everyone looked at you jealously while binging on Ben & Jerry’s? In this blog, I’ll share some effective AdWords Display tricks with you that not many people know about. These are the tricks that you can implement today. But before we get into how you can create your own AdWords Display Network plan, you need to understand the key difference between AdWords Search and AdWords Display. AdWords Search Network: You’re limited to bidding on keywords with a finite amount of ad spots. This means that your competition can make your ad clicks pretty expensive, pretty fast. AdWords Display Network: You have almost limitless ad space across various websites, along with the ability to advertise both image and text ads in different sizes. Now, we’re ready to jump in. These are the five AdWords Display hacks you won’t find outlined in user manuals: 1. The Competitor Email Subscriber Hack aka Gmail Sponsored Promotions Your competitor’s hard work can actually pay off for your company. In fact, you can advertise directly to their prospects when they open your competitor’s emails. With Gmail Sponsored Promotions (GSP), you can target competitor domains as keywords. By doing this, Gmail will look for emails from competitors you target, and if the email recipient is in their Gmail account, your ad will show up. Some people think that because GSP is an AdWords Display channel, the intent behind the GSP visitors would be the same as regular Display visitors—low time on site and high bounce rates—since people aren’t actively looking for what you’re offering, like on the Search Network. On the contrary, not only do the GSP visitors hang around longer than many Search visitors, but you’ll find that some stick around for 2-4x the average time on your site. Check out the average time on site from a GSP campaign within Google Analytics: GSP conversions can actually be the cheapest of all AdWords campaigns. Just take a look at the example below at the cost per converted click for GSP vs. other campaigns. So what makes GSP ads so powerful? You’re paying an AdWords Display style cost-per-click that has almost as high of an intent as an expensive Search click. Since your ad recipients are interested in what your competitors have to say, they’ll most likely be interested in you too. You’re stealing away market share from your competitors, one conversion at a time, since your competitors are hoping that their email leads to a conversion for themselves. You’re going to find that it works tremendously well for high-ticket industries that have longer sales cycles, but also great for small-ticket items too. This is because some high ticket industries pay over $50-$100 per click on the Search Network, but only $0.20 with GSP ads. 2. Supersize It, Please: Use Display Layers To Improve Your Display Targeting This next AdWords Display hack is as much a money maker as it is a mouth drooler. Consider for a second that all of your AdWords Display targeting options are one big, fat, juicy burger (if you’re vegan, please substitute for a veggie patty).Each layer of this ‘display burger’ is a different targeting option, and the more layers you add, the more specific your targeting burger gets. . Placements: Actual URLs you want to target. You can use a tool like WhatRunsWhere.com to see where your current competitors are having their Display ads show and target those directly as well.Contextual: This is just a fancy word for keyword targeting. Give Google the keywords, and it will find “relevant” placements for your ads (heavy air quotes on the relevant part).Interests: This is people-based targeting and is considered a stronger way to understand your audience’ browsing behaviors across different sites.There are two types of interest layers you can target: Affinity Audiences: People who have long-term interests, like gardening. In-Market Audiences: People whose browsing behavior shows that they’re ready to buy. Topics: This is a group of websites that relate to a similar topic.Demographics: This is where you get target age, gender, and parental status.Geo/Languages: This includes geographic targeting (country, state, city, radius, etc.) and the language of your targeted audience.You may find that the more layers you add to your burger, the lower the volume, but the better your performance is. Your layers will have different results, and sometimes, simply targeting a direct placement will yield the best results. 3. The Automatic Money Making Robot In the world of AdWords programmatic advertising, the Display Campaign Optimizer is one of my favorite tools when it comes to making money (and impressing people on the dance floor). Display Campaign Optimizer (DCO) takes the targeting criteria from your regular layer targeting (remember the burger earlier?) and uses that info to find new nooks and crannies based off your goal cost per acquisition (CPA) bid that you set.Let’s say you that you want conversions at $5. DCO would then go out and find placements and mobile apps that help you hit that goal. Some placements and mobile apps might be more expensive than others, and if that continues, the DCO would automatically exclude those placements and mobile apps and go after others.A few other things to consider when it comes to Do’s and Don’ts of DCO: Do gradually rotate in new creatives. Do change your CPA bid in small increments. Do use target CPA to control traffic volumes. Do create new ad groups for thematically different ad creatives. Don’t make full ad swaps. Don’t change the target CPA constantly. Don’t remove high performing placements. Don’t test a ton of radically different landing pages. The reason why you want to be careful with big changes is because the DCO uses your ad and landing page info, along with historical performance, to improve its baseline of performance. If you shake things up too often, then it won’t be able continually improve or backtrack to what worked before.Once you find automatic placements and apps that work for you, you can extract them into new campaigns and bid on those to get more volume. But there’s a catch. DCO operates off of browsing behavior signals where it can see the path a visitor has taken prior to the placement where they see your ad. This means that if you extract a specific placement and bid on it, then the performance might not be the same as it was in the DCO campaign. While there’s not much you can do about that, you can still use layer targeting on top of that specific placement to try to replicate the results. 4. The Smallest, But Most Powerful: Mobile App Ads Mobile apps are a huge deal these days. Just take a look at Snapchat and Uber. And then there’s things like the iPhone Blower, which isn’t worth much, but is full  of advertising potential. This is because most of the free apps have high usage rates. With high usage rates come high ad-click rates, and with high ad-click rates, come high conversion volume. And there are literally millions of apps out there that are part of the Google AdWords universe where you can buy ad placements directly in a specific app.You can use your own targeted demographics to find a pool of apps to target or if you use DCO to your advantage (which I hope you do), then targeting mobile apps by themselves will be insanely easy because the robot finds the apps that perform the best for you. Not to mention that it feels like Christmas every time you see the new mobile apps the DCO robot has found in theAutomatic Placements report!Here’s where your Automatic Placements report is located inside AdWord s: Once you find mobile apps that are performing well, you then want to find their unique package names so you can target them individually.Both iTunes and Google naming conventions.iTunes apps have numeric package names that can be found in their iTunes URLs  Play apps have different package : Google Play apps have alphabetic package names that can be found in their Google Play URLs: So now that you know where inside the AdWords Display world to go fish, let’s make sure you have the best bait possible to not just get the clicks, but the conversions too. 5. Your Army of Mini Conversion Baits If you know the big difference between the AdWords Display and Search Networks, then you know that your visitors are in different stages of the buying cycle.Display visitors might not even know they need your solution until you generate their awareness first, whereas Search visitors could be looking for exactly what you have to offer and buy something today. So how do you get your Display visitors to get their foot in your door?It’s relatively simple. All you have to do is test your bait. If a Display visitor sees your ad, but they’re not ready for a free consultation (or whatever other call-to-action you use on the Search Network), then you need to give them something that’s a different—a low threat offer.These mini baits/offers could be a lot of different things, and you’ve likely seen them before. Here are a few examples, all of which you can mix and match: Coupon Checklist/Cheasheet Quiz Video/Video Course Tools Calendar Podcast/Interview Consultation Tickets Live Demo Email Course Swipe File Infographic/Gifographic Free Quote White Paper eBook Industry Stats Case Study This almost goes without saying, but make sure your new Display visitors taken some kind of opt-in approach before they can get what you promised. If you don’t, then you can’t really nurture them to become paying customers in the future. Here’s What You Should Do Next Even though we only covered a small part of what’s possible with the AdWords Display Network, you now have five easy-to-use and actionable ways to expand and grow your conversion volume. Aside from continuously testing, be relentless in tracking everything directly to revenue. You may find odd nooks and crannies that you never thought would make sense to target, but once you have the complete revenue picture, you’ll be excited to continue fishing and expand your AdWords Display targeting portfolio. Happy fishing! What other AdWords Display hacks do you know of? Share them in the comments section below.

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

Setting up the right statuses is really important for reporting. It allows you to conduct better analysis and make the right decisions. It is important that you define the statuses for your program as well as what success means to you. In the example above we have an invitation for a boat event. The statuses are: invited, registered, no show and attended. For this particular case Success is based on attendance. Other businesses decide to chose registration as a success, specially those businesses who are in the lead generation game. If you have not defined the statuses of that particular program you can always do it at a later stage. You need to go to Admin / Tags / Channels. You also need to create the campaigns that will define the different program statuses. This as an example of the campaigns that I created for one of my customers. This is an example of one of the campaigns that defines a change in Program Status. We are defining REGISTERED as program status. When our form is filled (Smart List) the flow is change program status to registered. For event programs it is particularly important that you define Program Statuses.  This will also give you other options for setting up campaigns such as email reminders for people who were invited but they haven't registered yet.

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

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