Product Documents

By: Johnny Cheng In my role at Marketo over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of paging through mounds of enticing Marketo data. I have seen some absolutely outstanding stats from some of Marketo’s top customers—stats covering everything from email sends to opportunities sourced. Now, I want to share these stats with you so you can see the potential of what happens when smart marketers, the right technology and great campaigns come together. These stats show us how far marketers can take their marketing programs and campaigns. So, get your hands warm and get ready to learn about and applaud these truly impressive (and inspiring!) accomplishments. Largest Email Campaign Wow, over 249 million email sends from one campaign! That’s equivalent to the total U.S. population back in the 1990s. Aside from the volume, imagine the anxiety that email marketer had clicking the “confirm send” button. And judging from the deliverability and performance stats of the campaign, that email marketer deserves a raise (just sayin’). Why It’s Impressive: The sheer email sends coming from this one campaign is remarkable. Compared to the average send size which is 8,900 per email campaign across all Marketo customers, this is absolutely massive. What’s even more extraordinary is that this particular marketing team runs multiple email campaigns in the millions, ALL of which have over 90% delivery rate! They’re surely doing something right! Highest Performing Email Campaign (over 5,000 send size) Whatever this email campaign was, kudos to the marketing team; not only did they get an extremely high open rate, they got a near perfect click rate. With results like that, I’m going to imagine the email subject was “Free Trip to Disneyland (not a scam)” and the call-to-action was “Claim Your Free Tickets NOW (not a scam)”…and then the whole thing truly wasn’t a scam. But really, they seem to have cracked the code on what yields near-perfect results. Bravo, team, bravo. Why It’s Impressive: Think of your typical email campaign—what percentage of open and click rate would you be happy to get? At my past few companies, we were ecstatic to get over 30% open rate for prospects and double that for customers. It’s hard to fathom an open rate of 90%, and even more impressive—a 89% click-to-open rate, especially for this email send size. To do this, their team must have attained the email trifecta: a squeaky clean list, extremely relevant content, and an irresistible call-to-action. Nice job! Widest Net Cast by a Campaign Over 525,000 opportunities were sourced from one single inbound asset. I have no idea what the content of that asset was, but it must have been pretty compelling to capture that many leads. Just imagine that company’s sales team swimming in that ocean of leads (seriously, imagine it). What a fantastic problem to have! Why It’s Impressive: This is every demand gen marketer’s dream: the golden goose—an asset soooo good it practically prints leads. This campaign towers over the average 180 opportunities generated per campaign (first-touch attribution) across all customers. When I looked up which company this was, I wasn’t surprised to find it was one of the most well-known respected brands in the world (which partly explains the golden goose content). But what we can learn from their massive success, is the potential and power of great content. Largest Pipeline Attributed to a Campaign OK, get ready for this one. $2.3 billion of pipeline was generated from a WEBINAR. I’m not making this up. And I know you’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking on this one—that’s more than what the Titanic movie made! OK, maybe that’s not what you were thinking, but in all honesty, this webinar is the Titanic of webinars, and probably a lot cheaper to produce. Actually, even if they hired Leonardo DiCaprio to host the webinar, the ROI would still be impressive! Why It’s Impressive: Webinars usually perform really well in terms of pipeline attribution, but this one is beyond an anomaly. I actually have to take this off my data set because when I graph this, it breaks my chart—literally, it’s off the charts. I was only half joking earlier in that this might actually be a mainstream film that a media company classified as a “webinar”…that would explain a lot. If it’s not, they probably have developed a mean set of webinar best practices. What’s your company’s most impressive stat? Please share in the comments section below!

This article was written by Jignesh Shah Whether you’re trying to close Q4 deals or set the stage for 2016, you should start planning a holiday marketing campaign now. More than 80% of business in Q4 can occur during the last two weeks of December. Holiday campaigns are a great way to nurture the deals in the pipeline that you want to close. Holiday marketing can also help grow your pipeline into 2016 as it sets a solid foundation for sales and marketing plans as they head into the New Year. This is a perfect time to do something unique and fun to gain visibility and create engagement. This is also an effective way to spend any funds left over from your 2015 budget! In this blog I’ll walk you through how to determine the right type of holiday marketing for your audience and share 5 tips to make you stand out to your customers this holiday season. Focus Your Holiday Marketing Targeting the right people is key to an effective holiday campaign. To accomplish this, think through who you should target and what you want to accomplish with them. Start with the following categories: Bottom-of-the-funnel prospects: The goal with this segment should be to keep their attention on your business as they work through the purchase. Effective campaigns should create goodwill and engagement opportunities that sales needs to stay in touch and get the deals closed. Middle-of the-funnel prospects: These are prospects who are actively evaluating your product. Holiday marketing should keep you on their radar and help put your product on their short-list for purchases in 2016. Existing customers who are up-sell and cross-sell targets: Holiday marketing should focus on making them feel valued and appreciated. Customers you want to nurture as advocates for references and recommendations: Reaching out to them during the holidays is a great way to thank them for their help and encourage them to continue to be your advocates. Partners you want to build stronger relationships with: The holidays are a great time to recognize and reward partners for being on your team. Top 5 Tactics to Make Your Business Stand Out During the Holidays The biggest holiday marketing challenge is finding a way to stand out among the flood of postcards and email greetings your customers will receive and duly ignore. Price promotions may work in the consumer world, but they usually don’t work well for most B2B businesses. Price promotions certainly do not work with existing customers and early prospects who are not ready to purchase immediately. So, to be successful this holiday season, your campaign must show genuine appreciation for your customers and must engage with them in a memorable way. This should be the driving force behind your holiday marketing campaign. With that being said, we have compiled a list of 5 high-impact holiday marketing tactics that will make your business stand out among your competitors and delight your customers this holiday season: 1. Send gourmet food and wine Sending high quality food and wine to top customers and partners is a classic and effective holiday marketing tactic. For maximum impact, choose items that can be decorated with your logo and easily shared around the office. For example, send cupcakes with your logo as a topper. Your gift will be memorable, shared with other influencers and consumed over a period of time, leading to excellent exposure. Although this tactic is effective, it can be expensive and tricky to execute if you are targeting a large number of recipients. It also requires a lot of planning and lead time for large quantities: one to two months or more if you personalize the items. So, reserve these gifts for your top customers and partners. 2. Give the gift of relaxation As fun as holidays are, they often are accompanied by stress, and  your customers deserve to unwind after a busy year. Send them small, thoughtful gifts to help them relax during this hectic time of year. Entertain your customers with iTunes, Amazon, and RedBox, help them unwind with spa gift certificates, or send them to Starbucks and Panera to get their coffee and munchies fix. By presenting a small gift, you can instantly cut through the noise and create valuable engagement. These gifts can easily be sent to thousands of customers using digital gift cards and marketing automation. The relatively inexpensive nature of the gift also makes it suitable for middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel prospects (sending prospects expensive gifts can feel awkward). You can even have sales give the prospect a call when they claim their gift. To make the experience more engaging and memorable, use your own landing pages and send the gifts via your own email. You can extend the impact of these gifts by making it easy for your customers to share the moment on social media. 3. Mail personalized postcards with a digital gift This tactic combines the best of physical and digital gifting while remaining inexpensive. Use a printing service to print and mail customized postcards that include a link to a landing page where the recipient can request or claim a small gift card. Email gift cards using marketing automation as the requests roll in. Not only do you grab attention with a physical gift, you convert that attention into engagement by including a digital gift. You can also keep track of who received their gift and when. Campaigns like this are great for getting in front of prospective as well as existing customers, but may be more complex and expensive than purely online campaigns. To ensure success, be aware of printing and mailing lead times. 4. Make charitable donations of their choice It is important to show your customers that your company cares about more than just making money. This will set your company apart from the competition. Share your commitment to philanthropy by empowering your existing customers and partners to give to a cause they care about. Your philanthropy builds goodwill and shows care for the community, as well as sets you apart from your competition. Accomplish this by hosting a donations microsite where you create matching donations. Another similar option is to send charity gift cards to your customers, which allow them to donate money to a charity of their choice. Your customers will want others to see their selfless act, so be sure to make it easy for them to share the moment on social media, thus giving your company more visibility and brand awareness. Making a donation is a highly engaging experience and an excellent way to gain brand exposure while making a difference. 5. Supply valuable, evergreen content The most valuable gifts you can give your customers this holiday season are time and insight. Your customers will deeply appreciate time-saving tools, such as stock photos, specialized industry calendars, and how-to videos. Stock photos will give them a head start on their own marketing campaigns, while industry calendars will help them plan out 2016 in advance. How-to videos can provide fast and easily digestible tips and training to help your customers do their jobs better. Be sure to align the content with your brand and product value proposition, but do not let your campaign come across as promotional. Keep in mind that it usually takes time and money to create truly evergreen content. However, your customers will appreciate the creativity and effort you put into thinking about their needs. This tactic will set your company apart from the competition by showing your customers you genuinely appreciate and care about them. Final Tip… Don’t forget to integrate social media! Support all of your holiday marketing efforts by posting about them to your social networks—and get your customers to post about them, too! For example, if you send them gift baskets, encourage them to tag your company in a social post where they show it off. You can also start a mini-social media campaign around how your partners and top customers help others around the holidays. To easily track any activity around your social media campaign, create a memorable hashtag and strongly encourage your partners and customers to use it. Remember, your holiday marketing should serve as a strong ending to the year and as a springboard into the next. The relationships you build and strengthen now will serve you well into the New Year. Which of these tips resonates the most with you? Have you run a really successful customer holiday marketing campaign? Let us know in the comments below!

Welcome to our new 'beta' program: The Nation Talks​​​ Like the (original) Ted Talk​, the goal is to share and spread ideas in a short, but effective format (We prefer 5 minutes vs. Ted's 18 minutes). Topics will focus on Digital Marketing and Marketo related topics. At first, we will invite our Champions to provide content, but over time we hope to expand the program. So feel free to follow or bookmark this content. And if you are old school, all the Ted Talks pages are RSS enabled. Please visit The Nation Talks​​​ on a frequent basis because we will be adding content each week. Please provide feedback on topics you'd like to hear in future talks by commenting on this post. Thank you for visiting The Nation

By Emir Eliot-Lindo I’m not exaggerating when I say that the impact of digital and mobile technology has changed the agency’s traditional role—and value proposition—forever. From my ringside seat as Marketo’s VP of Alliances, I’ve watched in real time the rapid change in the constellation of marketing partnerships. The shifts are everywhere and they are profound, particularly in how technology is redefining decades-old agency relationships with marketers. To put this in context, think back a few years to when the agency was figuratively the CMO’s right arm. Anytime you had a meeting, at least one representative from the agency also sat in the room to help the CMO think through brand and creative decisions. But today, this paradigm has begun to change. Don Draper needs to get his geek on The agency-as-right-arm was typical in the `Mad Men’ era, but with the emergence of new digital and social channels of communication, people now expect brands to interact with them in the ways that they want to interact. This takes place as digital ad growth is exploding. It’s a pivotal moment with big opportunities. But as the relationship between consumers and marketers evolves, more than ever marketing executives need agencies to guide them through the digital landscape. It’s still a slog. A study by the Association of National Advertisers and McKinsey found that “systems, processes, budgets and metrics are still designed largely around mass campaigns and promotions” and “old-school methods of broadcasting to customers.” An overwhelming 96% of the executives polled said they wanted to make data-informed decisions a priority. But incredibly more than one-third said their companies still don’t use digital data. And nearly half reported that they don’t yet have the right analytics in place. The changes forced by digital can be daunting to CMOs who don’t have the skills to deal with this new world order. Here’s where agencies can step in. Many are fast expanding their traditional expertise in brand and creative to include expertise in data and technology. And they are increasingly in a position to help to pull together mobile and web data in coherent ways to enable CMOs to act on marketing insights. How am I doing? Wherever it starts, CMOs need to know how to understand the customer journey and to serve up the right piece of content at the right time. It could start with a mobile interaction or a video interaction, maybe from a laptop or tablet computer or a smart television. Eventually, this will expand to the world of IoT (Internet of Things) where everything from a fitness tracker to a refrigerator offering the potential to trigger marketing messages. That’s a big opportunity, but it also presents big challenges as day in, day out, the marketing landscape continues to explode, leaving the bewildered CMO wondering about the next step. `Oh gosh, I’m supposed to be the expert on all this advertising and marketing tech? I don’t know what to do about it, and my team doesn’t know either.Somebody needs to be the expert.’ That’s where agencies come in. Shifting role of agencies Is it any coincidence that more agencies are acquiring (or building) systems integrators to bolster their ability to draw insights out of digital data? Agencies have always been the experts on data and creative, not so much when it comes to technology or analytics. That’s why we’re seeing a blending take place with more agencies seeking to acquire or partner with technology shops. On this thread, we've seen Publicis paid $3.7 billion to buy Sapient last year. Other big companies, including the likes of WPP, Accenture, Deloitte, Google, and Facebook, have snapped up creative services shops. The rationale: create one-stop shops for marketers, offering everything from website design to ad buying to management of its e-commerce functionality—and more. No time to waste As Nissan's global marketing chief, Roel de Vries, pointed out on an earlier occasion, marketers now must make sense of an enormous amount of data that's complex and expanding. But they need to resist the temptation to bring this functionality in-house. This sort of expertise is scarce and expensive. Don’t risk watching someone else poach away your coveted talent after a year or two in the job. This job is best served by agencies who can reach deep inside their organizations for talent and serve as the connective tissue between creative and tech. Which sort of agency should you select as a partner? There’s no single answer—corporate culture and geographical proximity obviously factor in—but the best choice will be an agency that can demonstrate the kind of expertise that helps a CMO or marketing team reach their business goals. They ought to be able to detail precisely how they’ll help beyond mumbling clichés about getting `a whole bunch of eyeballs.’  CMOs don’t have time to waste as they grapple with the advent of mobile and social and cookie-based marketing, not to mention Facebook and Google. They will need partners who can help turn big data into business insights and help deliver measurable outcomes. It’s a new world out there.

Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint Partner LookBookHQ.

Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint Partner LookBookHQ.

Program Tokens (My Token) can be used in emails, landing pages, and smart campaigns within a Program. My Tokens make your life easier! There are 7 types of My Tokens: My Tokens will allow you to change specified parts of a program's: Landing Pages Emails Smart Campaigns Without having to dig into each individual asset. They also make things much easier when cloning entire programs Stay tuned to learn about A|B testing!

Now that you have created Interesting Moments and activated lead scoring, your sales team will be able to maximize their effectiveness using the Salesforce Sales Insight dashboard view you see below. Marketo Sales Insight allows your sales team to: Have relevant conversations with prospects and customers. Identify which leads are most likely to buy. Sales and marketing alignment will increase opportunity win rate. What do you want to learn more about next? Marketo Sales Insight Email Deliverability Marketo Social Management Customer Engagement Engine

Creating your first interesting moment campaign follows the same process you used for scoring. Once you have created the program: 1.) Create a Smart Campaign as a Local Asset: 2.) Choose the behavior you want to listen for in the Smart List: 3.) In the Flow determine what you want the Interesting Moment to be when leads complete the behavior you chose in the Smart List: 4.) Change the Smart Campaign Settings in the schedule tab to allow the lead to run through the campaign each time they meet the criteria set in the Smart List and ACTIVATE your campaign: That's all there is to it! Your interesting moments will show up to your Sales Team in Marketo Sales Insight in Salesforce.

Lets create an Email Performance report: 1.) Navigate to the analytics tab and click the Email Performance button: 2.) Navigate to the Setup tab and modify the Sent Date to a date range that suites your needs: 3.) While you are still in the Setup, choose Design Studio Emails if you want to report on emails that live in the Design Studio, or choose Marketing Activities Emails if you want to report on emails that live in Marketing Activities: 4.) Select the specific emails you want to report on by searching for them: 5.) Navigate the the Report tab to see your results: If you want to learn more about Email Performance Reports, click here!

Marketo's Engagement Programs make it easy to nurture customers and prospects. Once you have created your engagement program there are 3 things you need to do: 1.) Create a Smart Campaign using the Add to Engagement Program flow step to add people to the program: 2.) Activate the content in your program by navigating to the Streams tab, click the gear, and select Activate all content: 3.) Change the Program Status to on: Step 1: Step 2: Magic! You are done!

Creating your first simple scoring campaign is easy. Once you have created the program: 1.) Create a Smart Campaign as a Local Asset: 2.) Choose the behavior you want to listen for to score in the Smart List: 3.) In the Flow, determine the number you want to increase/decrease each lead's score by when they complete the behavior you chose in the Smart List: 4.) Change the Smart Campaign Settings in the Schedule tab to allow the lead to run through the campaign each time they meet the criteria set in the Smart List and ACTIVATE your campaign:

Programs are easy to create. 1.) In Marketing Activities, click New: 2.) Enter a Name, select Channel and click Create: Once you have created your program, you can create new Local Assets as part of the program, or clone assets from the Design Studio or other programs into the new program. When a program has Local Assets you can clone everything at once just by cloning the entire program!.

Program statuses are the steps people go through in a program (e.g. Invited, Registered, Attended, No Show). These steps are defined by the Channel. You can modify your channels in the Admin section of your instance: Remember to add Change Program Status flow steps to all of your local asset campaigns: Program Statuses are important for keeping track of peoples' progression through your programs and will give you insight into that program's influence on revenue

Programs are one of the most important elements in Marketo. You will be using them a lot! There are four different kinds of program types: 1.) Default Program: 2.) Email Program: 3.) Engagement Program: 4.) Event Program: Programs represent a single marketing initiative. You can think of it as a container with all the stuff that you ned to make the program work.

Building forms is easy! It is best practice to create your forms as local assets to your programs. When you are in Marketing Activities: 1.) Select the program you want to create a form for, click New, and choose New Local Asset: 2.) Select Form as a New Local Asset: 3.) Give your Form a Name and click CREATE: 4.) Add the necessary fields to the form and click FINISH: 5.) Click APPROVE AND CLOSE: You're done and your form is ready for use! All local assets can be created the same way. Stay tuned to learn how to create an email performance report!

Simple Set up (Before you start using product): Setup Checklist - Marketo Docs - Product Docs Detailed Steps to Set up (Before you start using product): Setup Steps - Marketo Docs - Product Docs Configuration Protocols: Configure Protocols for Marketo - Marketo Docs - Product Docs Smart Campaign Checklist: Smart Campaign Checklist - Marketo Docs - Product Docs Campaign Checklists (From one of our Champions): Campaign Checklists for MarketoMarketing Rockstar Guides  (from: www.rockstarguides.com) Understanding Batch and Trigger Campaigns   Understanding Batch and Trigger Smart Campaigns - Marketo Docs - Product Docs Checklist for Lead Scoring Rules: The Big List of Lead Scoring Rules – Marketo.com Certified Expert Checklist: Certified User Checklist Certification Tool Kit: Marketo Certified Expert Preparation Tools Marketing Automation Checklists: Marketing Automation Checklists (from: www.rockstarguides.com) Setting up Marketing Attribution: 12 Steps to Setting Up Your Marketing Attribution in Marketohttp://learnadmin.marketo.com/LearnerPage.aspx  (From www.ringleads.com)

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

Welcome to our second interview in the latest edition of Marketo’s Q&A Series with Mashable—“Ask the CMO: Lessons Learned.” I found this interview particularly compelling because it tackles an industry that people don’t historically think of as requiring a lot of marketing—education. If you have a great school name—like this edition’s interview subject, Chris M. Kormis, CMO of the Georgetown McDonough School of Business—students will always want to apply and attend, right? To an extent, but in an increasingly noisy digital world, everybody—including premier education institutions—has to compete for attention. What you’ll learn from Chris is that the education industry, and specifically higher education, has been inherently changed by the growth of digital. Like all other vertical markets, digital is now the central thing that education marketers need to use to ensure their institution stays relevant and continues to grow. As we heard in the interview with Charlie Metzger of the Detroit Pistons, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling tickets, products, or an education; everyone needs to think about ongoing engagement—it is the key to the new era of marketing. And as Chris reminds us, this digital era doesn’t give us permission to forget about the human element of what we do. Emotional engagement is still ever-present, especially in the world of marketing automation—no matter what your industry. How does digital become the thread that ties it all together? Read on to find out more. The following interview originally appeared on Mashable. Over the past two decades, higher education marketers have greatly transformed the methods they use to contact and inform potential students, parents and alumni. Whereas past higher ed. touch-points were based around direct mail and live events, today's higher professionals need to also incorporate email, mobile, webinars and social media into the marketing mix. While they build out multi-platform marketing strategies, university CMOs are also tasked with beating the competition. Today, the battle between schools to attract students is as competitive as the college admissions process. To get a feel for how drastically academic marketing has evolved, we spoke with Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business' CMO, Chris M. Kormis about what she's learned after two decades in higher ed. — and how she and Georgetown are communicating with an increasingly digitally savvy and globalized audience. Q&A with Chris M. Kormis, CMO of Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business 1. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self that pertains to your career in marketing, what would it be? If I could travel back in time, I would tell my younger self to speak up and share my ideas — even to those in higher roles. 2. What's the most unexpectedly important skill from your past that you've found plays into your success? Be nice. Be honest. Work hard. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Pinkie, taught me those three rules, and I live by them every day. 3. You spent nearly 20 years at George Washington University before decamping for Georgetown. How has higher education marketing changed since you started at GWU, and how has it changed while you've been at Georgetown? Technology changed marketing over the last 20 years. There are more engagement opportunities, and they call for operating at a substantially faster pace. At first, digital communications operated alongside traditional media outlets, like newspapers, radio and television. Media channels have redefined themselves over the years. We still have newspapers, but we also receive news online. We listen to local radio stations, but we also listen to Pandora and other online music providers. As the delivery of information has changed, we need to adapt to this changing environment. Now, we are able to better define our audiences and send them targeted and re-targeted messages. Plus, we have the tools to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns. News is immediate now. Two decades ago, we would publish school news once or twice a month in a newspaper. Today, our audiences want their news as it happens. Our websites now enable us to push out news immediately. We still need to gather, sort, and report, but we can report it faster. 4. What are the three biggest trends that you see in higher education marketing today? What’s unique about marketing for a post-graduate degree? Targeted newsletters are providing readers with the content they want to read. Re-marketing to prospective students who have clicked on our ads or visited our website helps maximize ad dollars. In-person information sessions are highly valuable. People still want to talk to other people — face-to-face. Technology will not replace personal interactions. When you market an undergraduate program, you basically have two really different audiences: 16- to 18-year-old high school students and their 40- to 50-year-old parents. Those two groups like to receive their information in very different ways. When you market for a post-graduate degree, you can better define your audience and develop targeted messages for them, enabling your program to attract and build a diverse global class. 5. Georgetown's McDonough School of Business is one of the top business schools in the country. Why do you still need a marketing strategy? What business problem are you trying to solve — won't MBA candidates apply to you regardless? All brands—both well-known and new—need marketing. This is especially true in higher education, where we add new audiences every year as students explore how they will achieve their career goals. Post-graduate education is a competitive marketplace, offering different types of programs and experiences. Prospective students are savvy about what they are seeking in a graduate program. It's important for Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business to tell its story about providing transformational experiences to educate and develop principled leadership — with a global mindset to be in service to business and society. If that's a match for what prospective students are seeking, then both the school and the student will be successful. 6. A lot of people don't always associate data, metrics and algorithms with academic marketing. Can you discuss why higher ed. CMOs need to leverage technology just as much as, say, retail CMOs do? What can higher ed. CMOs glean from technology-infused marketing? Higher education CMOs have a duty to responsibly use the university’s funds wisely. We don’t have the large budgets found in the for-profit world, yet we still need to target our audience and share our message to attract students. Technology can help us measure our results and quickly adjust our plans so we are not wasting dollars. 7. As you mentioned above, print is far from dead when it comes to higher ed. marketing. In fact, you said, it's one of the more effective ways to target students and their parents. How do you create a compelling print marketing strategy in 2015 and how does it tie into your digital strategy? We still print view books and an alumni magazine because people ask for them and read them. Our view books contain fewer pages than they did in the past because we post a lot of the detailed information online. When prospective students attend a college or graduate school fair, they want a takeaway that tells them about the school and its programs. Later, when they leave the fair and look through their stack of promotional materials, they want to see your school there and to have it stand out, or it could be forgotten. For our magazine, we print two issues a year and mail them to all of the school's alumni. This is a personal way of contacting each alumnus as they remove the magazine from their mailbox and set it aside to read later. When they pick it up again, the school has reached them again. This happens until they finish with the issue. This contact is important. People touch and use magazines and other printed materials. They're lasting, unlike emails, which are often deleted before they're ever opened. 8. One of the distinct aspects of B-school marketing, as you mentioned, is that you're not only talking to wide-eyed students — you're also talking to mid-career professionals who have very specific goals and requirements, as well as alumni and donors. What tools do you use to reach them, how do you engage each group and how do you keep the conversation going? We communicate through multiple channels: publications, advertising, digital communications, dynamic website content, social media and press outreach. One of the most effective ways to communicate, though, is still face-to-face discussion. Georgetown McDonough’s Office of Alumni and External Relations reports up to me. Our assistant dean for that area, Justine Schaffner, has developed deep connections with our alumni to engage them in our efforts to recruit students, bring in career opportunities and financially support the school's initiatives. This is a high-touch strategy that is critical in higher education. 9. How do you bring your social and digital initiatives to a live audience, and how does Georgetown University McDonough School of Business differentiate itself from other B-schools? Can you describe a particularly successful social or live initiative? I am active on Twitter, and social media is a big part of our engagement strategy. Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business is distinguishing itself as the premier destination for global business education through its classroom content, experiential learning, faculty experiences and interactions with alumni from around the world. We engage our students and alumni through social media every day through our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube content. One of our most successful campaigns is our Global Business Experience Photo Contest during which our students post photos from their consulting projects abroad on Instagram. We then publicize the contest and invite people to vote. The photos with the most votes win, and then we share the winners again via social media. It’s a great way to interact with people on social media and to share our students' global experiences. 10. How will higher ed. marketing change in the next decade? Will we see less live events and more mobile interactions? Less traditional ad placements and more targeted social campaigns? We will always need live events — at the school as well as around the world to reach our global audience. Nothing replaces human interactions. We also will continue to see increased mobile engagement through interactive social media, webinars and online chats. Advertising still plays a role, but it needs to appear where the audience is online and be creative to engage prospective students.