Product Documents

By Phil Fernandez, Marketo CEO In every corner of the marketing world these days you will find marketers of all stripes worshiping at the altar of the “Click.” The problem is that from the standpoint of real, bottom-line marketing results, the “Emperor of Clicks” has no clothes. The fact is, the click has become an end unto itself for too many marketers. Far from being the end-goal, the click is actually just the first step toward creating relevant engagement with a person, of course it can ultimately lead to a strong customer relationship.  Marketing was never meant to be “click it and forget it” and today’s marketer needs to realize that marketing is really about creating revenue and relationships. The click crisis Long after the click occurs, the real focus of marketing must be to establish and maintain ongoing relationships with customers built on mutual trust and shared benefits. However, in pursuit of ever more clicks, the digital advertising game has turned into an arms race that is leading brands and companies (and their marketers) pretty much to nowhere. Consequently, it’s not a surprise to me that ad buster apps have become best sellers lately. The relentless pursuit of clicks has turned off “clickees” (your customer and prospects) to the point where many of them will do anything to avoid intrusive digital ads, no matter the format or content. For brands and marketers pursuing more and more clicks, the Emperor’s “new clothes” are looking pretty shabby right now. And that’s a lose-lose for everyone. Customers not clicks Getting a click is a good start, but it is just one small step in the full process of marketing engagement. Once you’ve bagged that click, then what? In the rush to develop powerful new ways to generate more clicks (e.g., programmatic ad buying, mobile marketing, native advertising, etc.), I have not heard much dialogue about what happens once the click goes through. Here’s something to think about: What if marketers spent more money and effort on driving deep customer engagement and advocacy outcomes rather than launching yet another campaign to generate clicks? And what if that engagement was part of an integrated relationship-building approach that interacts with prospects in helpful and respectful ways across their entire journey with your brand? Do you believe that kind of authentic engagement marketing would net you more, and longer lasting, results than a bunch of clicks that have little relevance or follow through for your prospects? I believe today’s obsession with clicks has risen to near crisis proportions in the digital marketing space. Marketing needs to move away from meaningless clicks toward actions that actually move prospects to do something. Ideally, that something provides both value and a sense of delight to the prospect. In that spirit, the once-and-future virtuous cycle in marketing should include the following steps: Generate a click or some other form of engagement that ignites customer advocacy and action by your brand, delivers real value, nurtures a positive relationship, and then coverts to a revenue transaction.  The virtuous cycle does not end there. Once the revenue transaction has occurred an equally important cycle kicks in that triggers a vital feedback and loyalty loop. This loop is essential to creating a long term, profitable relationship with your brand. The true power of engagement marketing is not about a click to nowhere. Ultimately, clicks are about finding an “audience” rather than engaging prospects in a meaningful way. To be sure, attracting an audience is nice to have and a great starting point. But, relationships are what fuel growth and long term business success. Next time try focusing your real strategic and creative firepower on everything that needs to happen after the click.

By: Mike Stocker I’ve been at Marketo now three years, where I have managed the customer success team and, as a part of that role, personally managed several of our largest enterprise customers. In managing those customers I gained insights into what many CMOs were hoping to achieve in their Marketing efforts. Now, in my current role, as Director of Business Development, I’m helping to drive partnerships that provide additional solutions that help Marketo marketers be more successful in their marketing. In both roles, and through many conversations, it’s clear that many CMOs are struggling to get a clear picture of how their paid media acquisition channels perform when viewed through the entire customer lifecycle. My belief is that by connecting the worlds of paid media and acquisition and marketing technology and engagement, CMOs can get a complete view of the customer lifecycle. At that point, they can decide where to allocate their budgets to get the maximum return. But CMOs continue to face organizational obstacles that prevent that from happening. All too often, the groups inside companies responsible for customer acquisition and the groups who manage retention and engagement live in different silos, if not different worlds. And that’s not making the CMO’s life any easier. Lifetime customer value In the last decade, marketers have embraced engagement marketing as a way to cultivate high-value relationships with loyal and long-term customers. But many companies are still only focused on the cost of acquiring customers on a one-off basis. It’s almost a throwback to the era of transactional marketing when the goal was to generate revenue short-term, not forge long-term relationships between the business and its customers. Understanding customer lifetime value can be a difficult proposition. Remember that a lot of marketers are, well, marketers and not technologically inclined. Getting at this data often presents a technological hurdle, and marketers may not be adept at stitching together the new technology and big data systems needed to get a true picture of lifetime customer value. This has been a challenge for marketers long before the arrival of the Internet. But it’s a vital metric for CMOs who otherwise are forced to fly blind about what they spend and the true returns on their acquisition efforts. I was listening to a presentation by an e-commerce CMO whose division did about $100 million in revenue. When we spoke afterwards, I asked whether she knew who her best customers were. “What was the lifetime value of each of the company’s customers?” I asked. No idea. “It’s too hard to pull that data together,” she said. I scratched my head after hearing that. When you think about digital marketing and e-commerce, all that information is trackable. It’s just a matter of bringing systems together. Six months later, the parent company shuttered the division. It simply didn’t know who their best customers were and was marketing without understanding the ROI contributed by each of the company’s channels. Reach out and touch someone CMOs can’t get an accurate picture if these two camps—the folks responsible for acquisition on one side and the folks charged with retention and engagement on the other—don’t talk with each other. It’s only by breaking up the organizational silos and bridging those two worlds that you’ll have a clear idea of the customer journey as well as the broader customer life cycle. This is more than a call for “kumbaya.” By letting super-valuable customers slip away, the organization loses a tremendous opportunity to make money later on. I can demonstrate this with the example of an automotive marketing campaign where the company is only concerned with immediate returns. Assume that some customers who came in to buy a vehicle also planned to buy several more cars from the same manufacturer over their lifetimes. Even if we were only talking about a few customers, all are worth their weight in gold. But a transactional approach that valued only the single point of sale would shut down the campaign if it failed to meet expectations for immediate returns, especially if you didn’t know what the true lifetime value was over time. There is no room in that calculus for some of the best customers the company could hope to find. Take a page from Williams-Sonoma Pat Connolly, the great CMO at Williams-Sonoma, likes to joke that he’s held the title CMO longer than anyone ever. But tenure brings wisdom and after some 30 years in the post, he’s stored up valuable insights about what works and what doesn’t. And Pat’s a proponent of utilizing technologies that help his team understand the product preferences and lifetime customer value of the people who shop from Williams-Sonoma. The reason he’s so good at this is that he and Williams-Sonoma have a rich heritage of catalog based direct marketing background. Catalog and direct marketers were the first to recognize the benefits of measuring their costs of acquisition and understanding the metrics around lifetime customer value. Since Williams-Sonoma ships huge numbers of catalogs that cost a lot to print, the company needs to calculate what they expect to make from each of their customers over a period of time—or they risk wasting a lot of money. At the same time, if you make purchases from Williams-Sonoma, they keep your preferences and later will offer things that are complementary as they upsell and cross-sell effectively to their customers. Starbucks gets it right This is no secret to anyone who works with me, but I’m addicted to Starbucks. And the reason has to do as much with the company’s understanding of lifetime customer value as with the quality of its particular brew. The company rewards me with a free drink or food item each time that I accumulate 12 stars on their app. This loyalty program nicely demonstrates the concept of customer lifetime value in practice. Until I starting using their mobile app, I would rarely patronize Starbucks; now I go there every morning. In return, I receive the company’s gold card with numerous special offers, because Starbucks values me as an important customer who is going to spend a lot of money in their stores. Or at least they’ve succeeded in making me feel valued. Fast takeaways Those are just a couple of examples of the companies who get the importance of Customer Lifetime Value. Many companies are starting to think more about their customer lifetime value and customer lifecycle and the common theme of those that are doing it well is that they are leaders in their fields. It’s hardly coincidental that the companies that misunderstand lifetime customer value often turn out to be the laggards in their sectors. There are clear lessons here for marketers: If you only focus on acquisition and don't include the entire customer lifecycle, you’re simply shooting yourself in the foot. Lifetime customer value needs to be the main metric you are measuring on and not just immediate acquisition. Tear down those silos—All your teams should be collaborating productively so when the CMO says, `Show me the money,’ they know the true returns their paid media campaigns are driving and budget can be allocated for maximum results.  

By: Graham Gallivan Field marketers are significant assets to their organization (and I’m not just saying that because I am one!) Field marketing teams organize activities like tradeshows and networking events to drive brand awareness, attract prospects, and ultimately, help field sales teams cultivate pipeline. They get your company’s message outside the office walls and directly where it matters: in front of potential customers and industry heavy-weights. As a field team member, I can say that it’s crucial to keep sales teams on the same page so that they understand what’s in the pipeline and which activities are contributing. So it’s not only important that the teams understand their own roles, but they need to know how to work together, too. With that being said, here are three best practices I swear by to ensure just that: 1. Meet regularly with field team members It may sound fairly routine, but holding regularly recurring meetings with field teams can go a long way towards keeping everyone on the same page. Here at Marketo, field team members are mapped directly to regional and industry-focused teams and meet with them at a regular cadence, typically weekly. The purpose is twofold: To partner with them in an effort to brainstorm the best marketing tactics to implement to help them close more deals To keep them posted on upcoming events that they’re participating in The key here is to err on the side of over-communication. Field teams stay busy, and keeping them up-to-speed through multiple channels (regular emails and weekly calls, for example) will assure that they stay informed and in sync, too. 2. Arm team members with real-time account activity to help them prospect In addition to keeping field team members in-the-know about campaigns mapped to their territory, we also keep them armed with information to help streamline their outbound calling efforts. Through Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization tool, we’re able to capture anonymous account activity on our website. We do a weekly data send of this activity to field teams, specific either to their region or industry focus and pair it with any known activity occurring within the same territory (known, for example, through engagement with one of our campaigns), so that they can cross-reference and get a broader picture of account activity. Doing this offers substantial returns! It’s a fairly light lift to prepare the data, but it can go a long way towards helping teams prioritize their outbound efforts. 3. Communicate real-time information about campaign activity Giving field reps real-time information on how key players on their accounts are engaging with campaigns is incredibly helpful information as well. Through our instance of Marketo, we’re able to track how prospects interact with our campaigns, but we’re also able to push this information in real-time to our CRM, via Marketo Sales Insight, for teams to view and take action on (by phone or email, for example), in order to close more deals. This is an efficient and powerful way to share information that once again enables field teams to prospect quickly and nimbly. My advice here is simply to try implementing these tactics. They’ll go a long way towards improving alignment with your marketing and sales field teams so that everyone feels well-informed on all activities. Just remember—a stronger team will result in stronger events and stronger pipeline! Do you have any tips to add? I’d love to read them. Please share them in the comments section below. Related Resources

By: Nikita Ovtchinikov As salespeople, we know that the discovery call (the initial call between a sales rep and a prospect) can make or break a sales cycle. Done well, a discovery call will allow salespeople to gather the intel they need to run an efficient sales cycle (and frankly, even if you’re not in sales you probably can still apply some of these tips in your role). But during this process, salespeople often miss the warning signs—sometimes very small signs—that they may be starting an evaluation (the process of evaluating and purchasing a product) with a person that’s never going to lead to a sale. But, I’m sure we can all agree that there are obvious reasons these warning signs slip by us, whether it’s a lack of experience, or inattentiveness on our part, or only hearing what we want to hear. But if salespeople are able to recognize some of the warning signs early on, they would be able to: Win more deals: Identifying red flags and addressing them early gives you an advantage over your competitors in the deal. Save time and resources: Demos, follow-up calls, references—all of these activities take time, and if there is little to no chance of a signed contract at the end, then resources are being poured down the drain. It’s much better to focus on deals that have the potential to close. Forecast more accurately: Thorough questioning will make deals much more predictable and further the reputation for reliability of a sales professional. Also, it will spare them from having to explain why a deal they felt great about fell apart mid-flight. That’s why I’m writing this blog: to help other salespeople in the B2B SaaS sales space recognize the red flags and nip ‘em in the bud before it’s too late. Let’s make the most of our valuable time together!With that being said, I present to you five red flag responses you’ll hear from prospects followed by questions you should ask them in order to turn the call back around in your favor: 1. “Price is not an issue as long as we see value.” What this often means: “We are not worried about the price because we haven’t given any thought to actually investing in your solution. We are just doing research and would rather see a custom demo than a recording.”Questions you, the salesperson, can ask to further qualify the prospect: How are you going to be measuring the value of a solution? Which challenges or goals are you looking to solve for by exploring our solution? Company X (which is similar to you) achieved X, Y, and Z by using our solution. Is this in line with the type of value you are hoping to gain? 2. “We don’t have a set timeline, but we can move quickly.” What this often means: “This isn’t solving something immediate for us. There is no initiative to have this type of solution implemented.”Questions you can ask to further qualify the prospect: Why are you looking at something now, rather than next quarter/year? What happens if you do nothing? Do you have other initiatives that would potentially compete for the same resources? When I hear that there is no timeline, it’s often because there isn’t an immediate need. I’m not saying that’s the case here, so do you feel comfortable getting to a decision within (insert your average deal cycle)? 3. “No one else will need to be involved in a demo.” What this often means: “No one else knows that I’m currently doing this evaluation.”Questions you can ask to further qualify the prospect: If we proceed and do a product demo and you love what you see, what happens then? Who’s budget would this be coming from, and if it is yours, are you able to sign off on an agreement? If your boss is not going to be on the demo but will be the one signing, how will he/she make his evaluation? Have you ever run an evaluation like this at your current company? 4. “We are not going to share who else we are evaluating.” What this often means: “We do not trust you to provide valuable insight. We are only evaluating because we have to. We may have already made up our minds about the solution we are buying.”Questions you can ask to further qualify prospect: The reason I asked who else you are evaluating is because as we go through our product demonstration, I could highlight some of the differences between the solutions. Would you be interested in that? I know there are a lot of vendors in the space and it can be difficult to distinguish between them. On that note, I have some third-party resources I could send over to help you in the evaluation; I would just need your input into which vendors you would like more insight on. If that is the case, and it’s fine that it is, I will go ahead and assume it’s X and Z (pick your two top competitors) and lay out some differentiators between the platforms as we go along to help you distinguish our solutions. Does that sound fair? 5. “I’m going to run this until we hire someone.” What this often means: “I am a founder/CEO/executive who is extremely busy and realistically do not have the resources to onboard and succeed with most business grade SaaS solutions. I am likely shopping now to prepare for a later date when I have the right team members in place.”Questions you can ask to further qualify the prospect: Candidly speaking, most of our customers have a dedicated resource to onboard and successfully run our solution. Is it realistic to think that you would have the time to do that given your current responsibilities? Our enablement process requires (X) hours of dedicated time and most customers spend (Y) hours per week running our solution. Is that in line with your expectations? Have you begun the search for the person who will be dedicated to this down the road, and if so, have you found anyone you like yet? So, what happens when you inevitably come across one or more of these red flag responses during the discovery phase of the sales process? It’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as you are able to drill down and get the answers you need to either disqualify the prospect or gather the right information to execute a successful sales cycle. Having more information than your competition and spending less time chasing deals that will never close will lead to more wins. It’s that simple. So, to all my fellow salespeople out there, Happy Selling! And if any of you have other examples or stories please share them in the comments section below.

It's that time of year! Submit your best Halloween Costume and have a chance to win $200 Deadline November 1st Participating is easy! Follow these steps: Find a photo of your best Halloween costume (must be you) OR take a photo of yourself in this year’s costume Post the picture in Marketing Central You must tag it with mktohalloween15 in order for your submission to be counted Include a short description (not mandatory, but helps!) Completed entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. PST on Sunday, Nov. 1, 2015 What does the winner get? $200 Amazon Gift Card 100 points in Community Their submission will be shared on Marketo's Twitter! Featured in Marketing Central Street cred How is the winner chosen? Your peers vote by liking your posts, and the post with the most likes wins. In the event of a tie, the Marketo Community team will pick the winner. Click here to vote on the submissions!​​ Creativity Encouraged! Let your imagination run wild and we look forward to seeing what you come up with. Happy Halloween! Contest Terms and Conditions ​​

Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint partner Insightpool.

Posted on behalf of our LaunchPoint partner Insightpool.

From our friends at Informatica

Author: Yifat Mor According to Gartner, customer experience is the practice of designing for and reacting to customer interactions to meet and exceed customer expectations, to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. So, why, exactly, is customer service the ultimate marketing tool? Let’s explore just that. As technology evolves, the bar is being pushed higher for more intuitive user interactions and usability. Achieving a customer experience (CX) that exceeds the customers’ expectations is becoming increasingly challenging. But know that, in general, ease, speed, and accuracy are the 1-2-3 punch that will keep your customers loyal over the long haul. And that customer experience is more than just customer service or quickly answered queries. It encapsulates the entire lifecycle of your customers. So, Whose Responsibility Is Customer Experience? In the past, the responsibility of the customer experience has typically been divvied up between customer support, product, and other departments. Rarely has the responsibility rested squarely on one department, which means the authority to ensure top notch CX throughout every phase of the funnel or customer journey has been spread too thin. A top-level view on CX reveals that it best fits under the umbrella of your marketing department (which is why marketing typically controls the majority of the customer experience budget). A Shift in Importance So why the sudden focus on the customer experience? Offering great service has always been important, but is that what is really going to make a difference for your brand? Yes, the answer is an emphatic YES! Your competition is growing and gaining more accessibility to your customers, learning where they hang out and how to ease their pain points. Meanwhile, there has been a customer-facing shift—they are now self-empowered, educating themselves thoroughly before each purchase decision, engaging your brand via whichever channel they deem fit and expecting the kind of service that is always there. This has disarmed the product battlefield and opened up a new realm for you to conquer in order to win and keep customers—the customer experience. Branded, personalized moments at each and every point of customer engagement is what market leaders are seeking. The gap must be closed between customer demand and what brands are actually delivering. With that being said, here are five checkpoints that your company should focus on in order to get your customer experience strategy up to snuff: 1. Sport a User-Centered Design This is the first checkpoint you put your entire customer experience through. You can erase the need for other fixes along the journey by ensuring that your website/product/service is intuitively built to cater to your users’ expectations and needs. You definitely need to hire some talent to stay abreast on the ever-changing reality of user behavior—having a smart design is only one fraction of this equation. Perhaps even more importantly, you need to test like crazy, analyze, adapt, and then test again. A/B testing is a brilliant approach for configuring the best marketing strategies for your business and it is also an incredibly intuitive method for testing your CX. User-centered design is crucial for learning about your customers’ needs and wants, enabling you to cater to the consumer through marketing strategies and, of course, providing optimal customer experience. 2. Offer Personalized Engagements It’s true that sometimes, personalization isn’t crucial. Some engagements are general and don’t require the extra finesse of personalized content. However, when personalization matters, it really matters. This is important throughout the entire funnel or customer journey. If your visitors have to dig and search to find relevant information on your website, you are creating more effort and, in essence, driving a huge wedge of inconvenience between you and them. This is especially true if you consider the fact that your competition is likely investing in these top-funnel, personalized experiences. By the same token, once your prospects have become paying customers, any query they present to you must be personalized. Don’t neglect your valued customers by displaying information that is geographically and contextually irrelevant to their account, needs, or past experiences with you. Seek out an automated solution that easily enables you to create a personalized experience for your customers. 3. Provide Clear Paths to Resolution Not every customer engagement with your brand will be cut and dried. Sometimes technology cannot satisfy your customers and the human touch is required for more urgent issues. When the path to resolution is anything but a seamless straight line, it adds effort to the customer journey and puts a damper on the customer experience. Re-channeling should be intelligent and immediate. If the first engagement is with a dynamic contact center or other self-service platform, then escalation to phone, chat, or email should be easily accessible and targeted to the right agent, with the right skill set. Having a clear mind on your customer’s needs is a positive side effect of knowing your target audience. Naturally, the course of your customer intel will evolve as your company tests and grows. However, your initial target audience will tell a lot about the type of queries you may receive, and it’s wise to cater the design and CX accordingly. This is a customer’s dream—but it unfortunately does not occur often enough. Be the change! 4. Retain What Your Customer Says As I eluded to in point #3, if you want to knock your customers’ socks off, then make them tell their story only once. Throughout the escalation process, each point of contact, or agent, should have the full customer story from every previous customer engagement. They also must show a high regard for customers’ time by referencing this information to speed up resolution. (As a consumer myself, I’m thinking YESYESYES when I read this!). Remembering your customers is a process that harkens back to gathering and analyzing the details of your target audience through market research. Assuming that your company is not the first service they’ve used within your industry, learn the drawbacks of the previous companies they worked with and use these shortcomings to better your own service and hone your strengths in a highly saturated marketplace. By the time your customers engage with you because of a problem, question, wrong service, or faulty product, they are probably not in a particularly chipper mood. Having to revisit and explain the issue over and over can, and likely will, exacerbate any frustration they may feel. It also is proven to decrease confidence in your brand as it shows a lack of care and indicates antiquated technology where your CRM is concerned. Show up for your customers and know what they want before they have to ask…again. 5. Properly Sync Social Mobile customer service is in the spotlight lately and your customers often defer to social channels when seeking resolution via mobile devices. According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans spend an average of 37 minutes daily on social media, which is more time spent than on any other internet activity, including email. It’s almost impossible to offer the kind of always-by-your-side support, across all social media platforms, that is necessary in order to pacify and even delight your customers. If you have noticed unresolved questions, comments, and tweets on your social channels, or if your CRM is not syncing and recording these highly valuable customer engagements on social, it’s time to invest in a real solution. Social customer service platforms, like Conversocial, can help put your mind and customer experience at ease. It’s the era of the customer, and they’re calling the shots. When they pull the trigger on social, you need to be there with the answers they need. What Have We Learned? Your CX needs a health check to be sure that you are putting the necessary focus on this growing value. One winning ingredient to the never-ending challenge of keeping customers happy is knowing the ins and outs of your consumers’ behaviors. In customer service and, more importantly, in marketing, communicating with your customer means anticipating their wants, needs, and problems even before they arise. In 2016 and beyond, the battle will not be won on the price page or over product features, but rather on the entirety of your customer experience.

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

By: Andrew Field Andrew is: Andrew Field is founder and President of Printing for Less (PFL), a Marketing Technology company providing software solutions that improve marketing effectiveness, as well as printing, mailing, and fulfillment services. We’ve always known that Canada produces delicious food, from maple syrup to poutine, and hilarious comedians, from John Candy to Mike Myers. Now, our friends to the north have made another important contribution, this time to the world of modern marketing. A new study commissioned by Canada Post explored how direct mail factors into the lives of today’s consumers and its influence on the purchase journey. Their findings were summarized in a whitepaper titled “Breaking through the Noise,” available on the Canada Post website. In a world flooded with stimuli competing for the typical consumer’s 8-second attention span, they found that: Direct mail inspires. It’s so ingrained in life that consumers ritualize it. In the process, they imbue it with emotionally charged meaning, making them more susceptible to inspiration from their brands. Direct mail gets noticed. Consumers are far more likely to notice, open, read, and enjoy mail than digital forms of advertising. They consider it less intrusive, more memorable, and the best way to make them feel valued. Direct mail persists. Consumers keep mail, display it in highly visible areas of their homes, and even share it with others. This creates multiple opportunities for a brand to be seen and engaged with. Direct mail persuades. Whether it’s to drive a store visit or purchase, mail delivers a call-to-action that resonates. Direct Mail Is Ingrained Direct mail is a part of my “coming home” routine. And I’m sure it’s part of yours, too. Often, we will take a piece of mail that seems particularly interesting and important and read it at the mailbox, or on the walk back from it. We take the rest home and sort it in a two to five-minute routine that happens in the same place every day. It’s an ingrained, reflexive activity—and a great opportunity for you to make a personal, tangible connection with your customers.By contrast, digital mail management is less routine-oriented and more fluid. We check digital messages throughout the day in various environments. While the immediacy of digital communications has its advantages, the time-honored ritual associated with mail can be a powerful tool for brands. According to Canada Post, “every time [a brand] makes contact with a customer via mail, they embed themselves within it, tapping into the emotions involved, nestling within the intimate home setting, and taking advantage of the brand reinforcement that comes with its often prolonged shelf life.” Direct Mail Drives Behavior (and Revenue) Another interesting point that the study found is that we “notice, open, and read direct mail.” Even beyond that, many people actually like getting direct mail marketing: 74% always or sometimes notice advertising in direct mail 51% prefer companies to use a combination of mail and email when communicating with them 70% are curious to find out what’s in their mailbox Mailed pieces have a persistent presence in our homes, from the refrigerator door to the coffee table. Catalogues, menus, and other print items are often kept for a month or longer. Many of our customers see even more success with dimensional mail pieces that have staying power and drive reciprocity. One of our customers actually saw a 15x return on their investment in direct mail, and several findings from this study support the lasting impact of direct and tactile mail. In fact, Canada Post found that a notable 80% of their respondents remember seeing or reading some mail sent to them in the last four weeks, with 60% saying that really good advertising mail helped keep the sender’s brand top-of-mind. A third of respondents say that direct mail is the most effective way to get them to remember a product or service. Not Using Direct Mail? Two Words: You Should. Email, web personalization, and direct mail combine to form a marketing hat trick (had to sneak a hockey reference in…). All this adds up to the final key finding: used as part of a multi-touch engagement strategy, direct mail works.Pick your favorite KPI: Direct mail drives purchases. In nearly a quarter of cases, direct mail pieces prompt respondents to take action, and a third of all print catalogues received in the last six months triggered a purchase. Half of the respondents from the study said they purchased a product in-store over the past six months as a result of a direct mail ad, and 43% ordered a product online in reaction to direct mail. Next time, we’ll explore how using the rich behavioral data captured in your marketing automation platform can drive an even better, more personalized and engaging “tactile marketing” experience for your audience. Meanwhile, I’m going to check the mailbox, grab some maple syrup-flavored popcorn and watch an Austin Powers flick. Canadians call that a hat trick. Have you found any of the stats from The Canada Post study to be true for you? How are you using direct mail as an integrated part of your campaigns? I’d love to hear what’s working and not working in the comments section below. Related Resources

From Sanjay Dholaki, Marketo CMO. If you’ve been reading any of posts lately, you know I’ve been talking about this shift from an era of mass marketing to an era where marketing messages are actually personalized for each and every consumer. An Era of Engagement Marketing. Brands can’t get away with shouting the same messages over and over on the same old channels; the relationship with the customer must be meaningful and specific. To explore how some of today’s top CMOs are tackling this shift, Marketo teamed up with Mashable for the second installment of our “Ask the CMO” series, this time focusing on “Lessons Learned.” I thought there was no better way to kick off the series than exploring these topics with a Marketo customer, specifically with Charlie Metzger, CMO of the Detroit Pistons and Palace Sports & Entertainment. Charlie covers a lot of ground in his interview with Mashable, touching on everything from career advice to data-driven segmentation to the convergence of mass media and digital marketing to how you create loyal fans. Throughout it all, one thing’s for sure: the marketing world as we know it is undergoing a major transformation. One thing I’ll call out before Charlie and Mashable take it away is how fascinating it is that a mass marketing-focused, consumer brand like the Pistons is rotating deeply into digital content-driven interaction with fans. The thinking behind it, as you’ll see, is that the more personal you get, the stronger your relationship with the individuals in your audience will be….and the more they will invest in you. And that’s what this new era of marketing is all about. Read on—I guarantee you’ll learn something. The following interview originally appeared on Mashable. It's inarguable that Charlie Metzger, chief marketing and communications officer for the Detroit Pistons and parent company Palace Sports & Entertainment, has a pretty, pretty cool job. But, it's not all fun and games (and dunks and free-throws). There are more challenges than one might think when it comes to engaging an NBA team's devoted fan base, and at the same time, building it. And this is a challenge Metzger is conquering head-on: The past two seasons, the three-time NBA world championship-winning team has tapped marketing technology to help drive a 90% season-ticket renewal rate, the best ever in the history of Palace Sports & Entertainment. This 2015-2016 season also managed to achieve this figure, a testament to Metzger's emphasis on leveraging tech to drive more personalized relationships with fans, among other tactics. Mashable caught up with Metzger, delving into the intricacies of pro sports marketing, from devising data-driven strategies to using tech to amplify the live experience, along with his predictions for the future. We started, however, with a look back, namely asking Metzger his top advice to his younger self. Q&A with Charlie Metzger, CMO of the Detroit Pistons 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 say work internationally as early as possible. And why might that be? First of all, that you learn so much more. It's a global consumer world. And I think that if you can experience that when you're early on in your career, it's just going to set you up to be smarter, more well-rounded and more successful as you go forward. 2. What's the most unexpectedly important skill from your past that you’ve found plays into your success? Well, I'll give you three, but I know you only asked for one. The first one is to ask questions. Two: Learn about everybody and everything. And then three, stay calm and stay confident. And I think that most of that comes from playing sports, or even a road crew I worked on, believe it or not, in the summer. That was just a job that I needed to help make some money. You work with all sorts of different people from different walks of life, and, to be honest, it's been one of those experiences that's always kind of stuck with me. It was not what I wanted to do in my career, but when you ask questions, you learn. (This was in high school, by the way, so I didn't even know what a career was.) But, you know, if you just learn about people, about what they're doing, what motivates them and where they've been, it really sets anybody up for future success. So, it might sound pretty basic, but asking questions and then learning about people and everything that you can in any of those early jobs that you have, or teams that you play on, is really important. Staying calm and staying confident carries throughout. 3. What are the three biggest trends you’re seeing in sports marketing today? One: Customized content creation and distribution utilizing inside access (behind the scenes activities/stories with athletes and teams) to tell stories and build fan/brand communities Two: Gamification/fantasy/fan interactions — in arena, online and gaming — continuing to extend sports into new outlets Three: The continued convergence of broadcast and digital/mobile — live-streaming, inaudible beacons … all geared to bring fans live action on their terms. 4. Your background is in traditional advertising, and now you’re the head of marketing for a major sports and entertainment brand. How does the marketing you’re doing today differ from the marketing you did in your early days? I was on the marketing side of Miller Brewing Company. And then, yes, I did go to McCann for 12 years. Here's what I'd say to that: I think that ultimately, when you start to look at marketing there's still three basic components, and the first is strategy creation. Whether it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 20 years from now, there's still always going to have to be the creation of that strategy. Hopefully, it's always going to be based upon consumer/fan insights. So, for the most part, that's part one. And that hasn't changed. Parts two and three have changed 180°. Part two is that once you have that strategy; you've got to create a plan and a tactical execution to take that strategy and then deploy it and make it work. And then, part three is, obviously, measuring the results. 5. The Detroit metropolitan area is in Palace Sports and Entertainment’s DNA, but you also have fans around the country and world. How do you shape your marketing so it bridges hyperlocal and global fans, making everyone feel included? I would say we are fortunate here that when you talk about the Pistons and also all of our three concert venues — the Palace, D.T. and Meadowbrook — they’re known on national scale. The reason, obviously, that the Pistons are is because we've won three NBA world championships, and we had the "bad boys" and the back-to-back Wallaces. So, people are aware of us. For example, over 50% of our Facebook fans are outside of the U.S. We do have presence, certainly more presence here in Detroit, in Michigan, but we do because we've had success both on the sports and entertainment side. We have a global footprint. But the short answer to that is that we market to our local fans first. We very much believe that if you think of them as your advocates and if you can create a brand, you create an experience. The fans are the ones that are going to be hopefully your biggest advocates and loyalists, and if you start inside that, they will share those stories. They will share their positive feelings. And obviously, with the power of the web and the power of social media, you're able to share those stories more quickly. But you've got to find those advocates, and those advocates certainly do live close to home. 6. Speaking of fans, what would you say are your top three strategies for attracting new fans? That’s a great question. We spend a lot of time on it. First, would be segmentation based upon their lifestyles. We use as much data as we can to understand and then segment. So, it could be business-people. It could be those that are more up-and-coming. It could be millennials. But ultimately, we segment based upon their lifestyle. From there, we create products and packages that meet those lifestyle needs. So, we're going to market to you differently than we're going to market to maybe even one of your friends, or maybe somebody that’s a business associate of yours. The more that we can segment, the more we can create specific products and/or packages that meet those needs. Then, I think it's all about then building and developing those communities. Something hit me the other day when we were trying to simplify things: It's that social leads to search, which leads to sales. If you think about that, and if you're able to build your social community, you start to see people are searching about you. And eventually, that will lead to sales. It's an interesting thing — segmenting those people, understanding their lifestyles, creating products. And, a product could be even having them watch a video — it doesn't have to be complicated, or even in an area that's gonna necessarily create a transaction right now. But, if we understand you and what you're interested in, we can create content that you're interested in, whether you're here at a concert or at a game. If you're favorable to it, you forward that on. That leads to more people finding out about us — and then, eventually, that leads to sales. 7. From the 'Bad Boys' era to the more recent Wallace/Wallace championship run, the Pistons organization has a rich history. How do you ensure that fan enthusiasm transcends draft classes, trades and W-L records, which all affect your “product”? The simple answer is a lot of hard work. In the world of sports, your teams have ebbs and flows, and I think that's just the reality of it. But what you can do so that you don't go too low — you always want to go as high as you can — is build loyalty. And, the way you build loyalty is to give fans the best value for their dollar in and out of arena. So, a fan can come to a game. And, unfortunately, if the team doesn't win, they may not leave as happy as if the team did win, but we're building a game experience so that the two-and-a-half hours they're spending with us in the arena (or online or watching at home) is tremendous. And going back to segmentation, we also have a lot of people that are consistently here as business-to-business customers. They know that the value that they're placing in their, quote, "membership" or partnership with us is helping them their build their business. So, the last piece of that — and it might sound crazy, but it's what you can control, particularly in those lean years — is being very active in the community and making sure that within the community we're doing the right things with the right partners and giving back appropriately. When you're doing those things, we believe this builds that relationship with our fans. Some will fall off the bandwagon — that's natural. But if you're doing it genuinely and you're doing it consistently, we think that's the key to keeping that loyalty. 8. You touched on this when we were talking about attracting new fans: Data obviously drives marketing in a ton of ways. So, how do you take data and bring it together to inform your marketing, if you have anything else to add on that point? We have a very sophisticated data warehouse. For every marketer, every business now, this is the challenge, right. Like, okay, big data, you've got all sorts of stuff. But how do you make it actually what I call small data? How do you make that big data and turn it into actionable items? There's the technology side, which is making sure that all of your systems actually talk to each other. Then, step two is to make sure, in our case, that we have a data and analytics team that are constantly looking at all the data and looking for insights and trends so that we turn big data into small data and make it actionable. 9. In addition to marketing the team, you have to make sure the arena itself is an engaging – essentially retail – environment, via Wi-Fi, beacon tech, branding and more. How do you approach the management of both your conscious product (the team) and your subconscious product (the arena) and seamlessly weave marketing throughout? The hard part is that you could go down 500 different paths trying to do this. Start with an overall vision, and our vision is to come together and thrill. That’s what we have posted everywhere across our organization: We wanna bring our fans together and thrill them. So, once you start with an overall vision and work through that and get everybody connected internally, whether that's our part-time employees that are in guest services, whether that's the people that are operating our concessions stands — of they’re all on the same page about bringing people together and thrilling them, then it becomes more of an exercise in, "Okay, how are we doing it?" and measuring results. As far as technology goes, we are data testers. We try new things all the time. And some things work, some things don't. So, for example, we have beacons. We used beacons for an entire year, testing different messaging. The last thing that we wanna do when we bring our fans into an arena is bombard them with messages that they don't want, so while you have the ability to do that, you have to make sure that your technology isn't overriding the fan experience. And we have old-fashioned mystery shoppers. We constantly test ourselves to make sure that we're not over-engineering, but at the same time, we want to stay on the cutting edge. The only way to do that is to invest, and test it: Take it out of the board room or out of the conference room and put it live. Then, you’re able to understand, how it's working or how it's not working, and make decisions based upon real-time data and fan feedback. 10. How do you see it changing in the future, this relationship between marketing the team and the arena? I think it'll continue to converge. One of the things that we are seeing is customized content creation and distribution. I think you're going to see more gameification and fantasy. For example, we've got a partnership with FanDuel. I think you're going to see more and more convergence of activities where fans can feel almost as if they're participating right along with the players. But, I still think at the end of the day, one of the great things about sports and entertainment that will always be is that it's live action. And— you know, the challenge for sports and entertainment marketers is to make sure that the experience fans get can't be surpassed by being at home or somewhere else. I think a human element will always be there. And that's one thing that you can't forget: We could talk for a long time about the value in people getting away from their second screen and being communal with other people. So, we want to make sure that when you walk into a concert or into a game, you're feeling that energy. Then, obviously, that energy gets pushed through, whether it be via beacon, whether that be via your mobile device, whether that be something that you and I don't even know about, whether it be in-seat, you know, ordering for drinks or food. But that ultimately, you are communing with other people physically. Technology's not gonna slow down. That's for sure. But I think it's just about making sure that you — particularly if you get people to come to arenas or to sporting events or to concerts — that their experience cannot be replicated outside of that. I think that puts even more pressure on experiential events inside arenas and stadiums, et cetera.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Regardless of your company size or your role, as marketers, each of us wrestles with how to best set up our marketing organizations, and how we fit into the bigger picture. It is a challenge. Small, nimble teams? Scrums? You name it, we have researched or tried it. That is why Marketo has teamed up with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services to try and figure out this multi-headed monster. On Oct 20 th we will release a white paper that addresses the essential question we are all asking: “How do I create the marketing organization of the digital age?” I’ve seen some of the early findings, and while I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, I can share a few central themes. Through our collaboration, Harvard Business Review Analytic Services has talked to some of the brightest minds across management organizations, academia, and some leading CMOs to help design an answer. Recurring symptoms Marketing teams live side-by-side, but in separate silos. Case in point, not long ago my insurance company offered me some information over the phone about their credit card product. I declined, but two days later I received a piece of direct mail from the same company trying to sell me on the credit card again. What gives? I already told them no! This is a prime example of what happens if there’s no communication between teams. There is a guarantee of needless duplication, which jeopardizes a company’s relationship with the customer. The white paper will address this and answer, “How do marketing leaders at all levels work to solve this issue?” Vertical vertigo We all got here incrementally. Marketing departments originally organized themselves around traditional channels like TV and print. If you can think back that far, you’ll remember that the limited number of channels in the pre-internet world made it a non-issue for different parts of the marketing org to talk with each other. However, when the internet showed up and consumer behavior changed dramatically, the number of channels exploded. Maybe you’ve fallen victim to this, becoming a specialist in email, social networking, website, SEO, and mobile… but regardless of the specialty, all marketers have the same target: the consumer. And that poor consumer is being hit with disconnected messages across various channels, even though the consumer is “channel-less.” Imagining a new org structure While we got to vertical silos incrementally, we may need to get out more dramatically. I met recently with the CMO of one company who tore down all the silos in her entire organization, replacing them with people who could think about messaging across multiple channels—from television to digital to social to email and beyond. This is the “hub and spoke” model, which features centers of excellence or service bureaus that all of the company’s marketers can turn to when they need help. Imagine operating on a team that has removed layers of inefficiency. That’s the smart approach. When you think about your products and solutions across channels, you reduce the risk of “silo-ization” and overall frustration. S.O.S. for the new DaVincis Ripping up the old org is just the start. We all need to become DaVinci’s—marketers that can flourish in this new world. This will involve mastering renaissance-esque talents–becoming generalists—that let us span multiple channels and multiple modalities. Now that’s easier said than done. Up-and-comers with the right skills have amazing options in this new labor market. But they are in short supply. And that is why we as today’s marketers must flex our broad muscles. As leaders tear down the silos, we will ideally have the space to tap into our full range of talents. They are there, trust me. Change or be changed This change is inevitable. A study that we did with the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that 80% of marketing leaders think they will need to restructure their organization to meet future business needs. Any marketer who realizes the need for organizational change has an opportunity to help steer their company into this digital era. It may be painful to drive that evolution internally, but it’s even more painful to have your entire business and company disrupted by another company. So find a way, and begin to invent your new org of the future.

By: Ed King Let’s face it—your lead database is dirty and full of holes. It contains duplicate records, incomplete addresses, and limited segmentation. This poor data makes it difficult to create targeted campaigns and engage your users, which ultimately limits what you can achieve with your marketing automation tool. Many marketers think the only way to make their database better is to invest in getting it cleaned by a data vendor. While getting your data enriched and validated by a data vendor is always a good thing, you can make significant and rapid improvements to your data and keep it clean with inexpensive data automation solutions. Here are 6 tips to improve your data by investing just a few hours of your time with data automation technologywhich can automate the laborious tasks of data cleansing and enrichment: 1. De-duplicate records Marketers often hesitate to automate de-duplication (the process of removing duplicate leads) and prefer to eyeball duplicates and merge records manually due to fear of eliminating the wrong records. However, if the manual merge process applies a consistent logic–and it should–then that process can be automated. If the merge logic involves many arbitrary “judgment calls”, the result over a large database won’t be any better than automating a consistent logic. The shear effort required to perform manual de-duplication often results in the task never being done at all. 2. Fix bad emails Emails often fail to send because of typos, like john.doe@company,con. You can revive dead leads by fixing malformed email addresses in an automated way. Pop quiz! Question: Is this a valid email address: john.doe@company.com.ot? Answer: If you have to even put the time into researching whether “.com.ot” is a valid email domain, you need automation. Don’t waste your valuable time on tasks that can be automated. 3. Normalize geographical data Without complete and normalized geographical data, it is difficult to run regional campaigns, plan field-marketing events, and route leads. For example, trying to build a geographically segmented leads list is difficult when you have to search for every possible variation and typos for often-misspelled state names like Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Mississippi. At a minimum, normalize state/province and country data. Instead of “Massachusetts”, “MA”, “Mass”, and endless other typos, standardize on a single value like “Massachusetts”. 4. Infer missing geographical data Some data fields have known relationships among them, so having one piece of data allows you to infer missing data. Instead of struggling with incomplete address data, have the system automatically fill in the blanks so that you can leverage these known relationships. For example: If ZIP code = 94065, then infer city = Redwood City and state = California If country code = 353, then infer country = Ireland 5. Normalize company names Another common problem with lead database is non-standardized company names. Leads from the same company can have names like “Toyota USA Inc.,” “Toyota Motor Sales USA,” and “Toyota Motors” Normalizing all company names in your leads database is difficult. Instead, focus your efforts on just customer and target account lists. Cleaning up these critical records will provide greater clarity on your pipeline report and marketing metrics overall. 6. Segment using job title data A well-segmented lead database is the foundation for personalized engagement and targeted campaigns. This includes segmentation by job function, job level, company size, industry, and location. Data services can enrich generic data, but to be effective, segmentation needs to reflect how you sell and whom you sell to. For one marketer, knowing a lead is in IT is good enough, but for another marketer, she needs to know if the lead is in networking, security, or engineering,One widely available source of segmentation data is job title. By mapping job title keywords, you can create segmentations based on job function and job level. For example: “Accounts Payable” indicates job function = Finance “CFO” and “Managing Director” indicates job level = Executive And that’s it. Six quick things you can do now to improve the quality of your leads database without spending a fortune. All you need is a few hours with a data automation tool and reference data such as state and country lists and job keyword mappings. Do you have any quick and efficient methods to add to my list? Let me know in the comments below!

By: Divya Dutt As the search engine marketing and social paid programs manager at Marketo, I have always loved the fact that my work involves both number crunching and creativity on a daily basis. On that note, the best part of my job is probably that I have the opportunity to find new ways to increase click-through and conversions rates on our site. This requires reviewing and assessing data and then drumming up new ways to craft digital ads based on what I have learned from that data. What is the process called? A/B testing! A/B testing is the strategic process of comparing two versions of creatives, ad copy, headlines, etc. to see which one performs better. Then, with that result, you know which aspects of your website to change in order to yield more clicks and conversions. Examples of A/B Testing in Digital Ads Even though I have worked in online marketing for nearly 10 years, I am still surprised by some of the results I see from A/B testing. Here is a good example of a recent ad copy test that thoroughly caught me off guard. Before reading further, see whether you can pinpoint the difference between these two ads: In most channels, the best practice is to keep your ad headline short ‘n sweet, however, one of my colleagues wanted to test a longer version of the ad headline and so we went for it (hey, you never know). To my absolute shock, the longer headline actually won the test—and by a good margin, too [.28% click-through rate (CTR) vs a .19% CTR]! Below is another example of A/B testing in digital ads. Here there was a profound difference in click-through rates, with the ad that contained the image of people garnering .64% CTR and the ad containing the image without people garnering a measly .11% CTR. What a difference a picture makes! So, what is the primary lesson we can all learn from this? A/B testing shows us that we cannot make decisions based on our instincts alone. We must back them up with evidence. And that evidence comes straight from testing. Therefore, I am a strong believer of testing pretty much anything I possibly can in my campaigns—if it’s testable, I’m all over it! In order to conduct a comprehensive assessment of your programs and campaigns, and be sure that you’re constructing them the best you could be, I hope you will get on board with this comprehensive approach, too. 7 Elements to Test in Your Digital Ads With that being said, I’m excited to share with you my list of the top seven items to test in your digital ad campaigns: 1. Ad headlines: The right headline really helps with click-through rates. You should come up with at least two—if not more—versions of your headlines to see which one better captures your audience’s attention. The target audience on most channels is different, too, so what works as a headline on LinkedIn might not work on Facebook, and so on. The take-away here? Test a few versions of a headline on each channel. 2. Ad copy: It is often difficult to fit your core message in your headlines, so your ad copy is the next best place where you can try and include some messaging. Don’t miss the opportunity to test the messaging here, too. 3. Creatives: Images, colors, and text all combine to make a great display creative. You can play with the colors and images to make your display ads stand out more. 4. Ad units: It is important to test the different ad units and sizes to see which one performs best for you. It is a best practice to start a campaign with as many units as possible and then based on the results, keep the best performing ones intact. 5. Time of day: Spend some time assessing what time of day during which your audience has the highest interaction with your social posts or searches for your keywords. This is important especially when you have limited budget to work with. 6. Days of the week: Depending on your business, certain days of the week might work better for you versus others. Again, knowing the days that you get most interest on your social posts or your Google search ads can be helpful so you can increase your budgets during those days and turn it off during the others. This will help maximize your budget and increase sales and conversions. 7. Call-to-actions: Testing your call-to-actions can be very powerful. Sometimes changing a simple “Download Now” button to “Submit” can increase your conversion rates by a few points, or changing the color of your download button can bring you more conversions, too. This is a simple thing to test, so don’t leave those additional conversions on the table. These are just a handful of the elements that I always like to test; this is not a complete list. There is a lot more you can test. You can start with some of these and build on them as new ideas pop up. Finally, I would just like to mention that testing is an ongoing process—there’s no end date, so don’t expect there to be! With that said, make sure you continue to add new tests into your campaigns. It is important to document the changes you make, analyze the results, implement those results, and then repeat the process again and again…and again. I hope you find these tips useful! If you would like to know more about testing as well as other topics regarding digital advertising, such as targeting, segmenting, measuring, and budgeting, please join us for our upcoming webinar “Tips to Evolve Your Digital Advertising” on October 13th. Register today!

What is Purple Select? Purple Select is Marketo’s new customer advocate program made specifically to recognize our rock star customers for personal achievement, company success or just sharing the purple love. Now you have the opportunity to engage with Marketo based on your schedule, and be rewarded for it! By completing advocacy activities within the Purple Select Platform, you can showcase your experience and knowledge to gain positive exposure across the Marketing Nation and beyond. Your engagement will provide you with access to exclusive opportunities to grow your personal brand and propel your career in the in this fast-paced marketing network. Purple Select vs. Community...what's the difference? Purple Select is a program to enhance, showcase and grow your advocacy for Marketo, whereas the Community is a place to connect and engage with your peers and learn Marketo and digital marketing best practices. The Purple Select Group on the community will be a private space for Purple Select advocates to network exclusively with each other. Engage. Influence. Stand-out. Grow. Regardless of where you are in your journey, we have created a program that enables you to get involved from day one. Think you have what it takes to be on team purple? Let’s get started! Fill out this form to join! Please note, the blank form will re-load once you submit. If you have questions about your application, email customermarketing@marketo.com. Loading... To learn more about the new and enhanced features of our new Community view ​

This article describes how to enable custom field groups for reporting in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area of Revenue Cycle Explorer via the Revenue Cycle Analytics tab in the Admin area of Marketo Lead Management. Before You Begin Before you can enable custom field groups for reporting in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area of Revenue Cycle Explorer, you must categorize standard or custom fields into groups for reporting via the Field Organizer in Marketo Lead Management. For details, see Create Custom Field Groups via the Field Organizer. Once these groups are created, applicable groups become available for selection from the Revenue Cycle Analytics tab in Marketo Lead Management. Here’s How It Works Custom Groups are enabled from the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) section of the Revenue Cycle Analytics tab in Marketo Lead Management. How to Access the Revenue Cycle Analytics Tab To access the Revenue Cycle Analytics tab: 1.       From Marketo Lead Management, navigate to the Admin section. 2.       Click Revenue Cycle Analytics in the Admin tree or canvas to launch the Revenue Cycle Analytics tab. 3.       Locate the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) section at the bottom of the Sync Summary tab. What Happens When You Enable a Custom Field Group? It is important to understand not only how to enable custom field groups in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area, which will be described in detail later in this article, but how this action potentially impacts the Lead Analysis, Campaign Analysis, and Opportunity Analysis Areas, which is described below. When You enable a custom field group, how does it display in the Revenue Cycle Analytics tab? When you enable a custom field group for a standard field, the enabled group displays in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) section of the Sync Summary tab and does not impact of change the field count for Lead, Campaign, or Opportunity Analysis. When you enable a custom field group for a custom lead or company field, the enabled group displays in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) section of the Sync Summary tab and the custom field count for Lead, Campaign, and Opportunity Analysis increase by one. The Custom Field Sync tab also provides a visual aid of enabled and disabled fields. Enabled fields display with a green check mark and the impacted Analysis Areas are listed in the Analysis Area column. You can only filter and view custom fields on this tab by the Lead, Campaign, or Opportunity Analysis Area. However, the tab will also note if the custom field is enabled as a custom field group in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area. Enable a Custom Field Group To enable a custom field group for reporting in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area of Revenue Cycle Explorer: 1.       From Marketo Lead Management, navigate to the Admin section. 2.       Click Revenue Cycle Analytics in the Admin tree or canvas to launch the Revenue Cycle Analytics tab. 3.       Locate the Model Performance Analysis (Lead) section at the bottom of the Sync Summary tab. 4.       You can enable up to three custom field groups. Click None next to an empty field group. Or, if you already have three field groups enabled and wish to modify a selection, click the name of the field group you wish to modify. The Model Performance Analysis (Leads) dialog box displays. 5.       Select the custom field group you wish to enable from the Field drop-down menu. Custom groups display under Lead or Company Attributes as Field Name > Field Name Group (example: Billing State > Region.) The dialog box updates and lists the Analysis Areas that this field will sync to once you click Save. 6.       Click Save. The Model Performance Analysis (Leads) section on the Sync Summary tab updates. The example shown above enabled a custom field group for a standard field (State). Therefore, only the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area was impacted. If a custom field group for a custom lead or company field had been enabled, the enabled group would display in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) section of the Sync Summary tab and the custom field count for Lead, Campaign, and Opportunity Analysis would increase by one. How does this translate to what you will see in Revenue Cycle Explorer? In the example above, a custom group for a standard field (State > Region) was created and enabled. In Revenue Cycle Explorer this custom field group will display as a custom dimension (State > Region) in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area. Since “State” is a standard field in Lead, Campaign, and Opportunity Analysis, it does impact those analysis areas in any way. However, if you were to enable a custom group for a custom lead or company field, the enabled group would display in the Model Performance Analysis (Leads) Area of Revenue Cycle Explorer as a custom dimension and the custom field itself would also display in the Lead, Campaign, and Opportunity Analysis Areas as a custom dimension.

Written by Phil Fernandez, Marketo CEO. He is a Silicon Valley veteran, with more than 30 years of experience building and leading breakout technology companies. Phil is a well-known writer and speaker on topics related to digital marketing, marketing automation, big data, and entrepreneurialism, and is the author of Revenue Disruption (Wiley, 2012), which delivers bold new strategies for any company to transform its sales and marketing to accelerate revenue. Who is the most important exec after the CEO of a company? In answering the above question you probably would have said the CFO, COO or the Chairman. For a hi-tech company you might have mentioned the CTO. And for B2B enterprises there likely would have been some votes for the head of sales being the next most important executive after the CEO. I’m guessing you would not have chosen the head of marketing. But that would be exactly the right answer today. Over the past five years, the Chief Marketing Officer has quietly emerged as having a major impact on revenue, growth, customer satisfaction, and overall company strategy.  Reflecting the growing clout of marketing leaders, some major corporations (McDonald’s, Campbell’s Soup and Audi USA) recently installed CMOs as their new CEOs. This relatively new reality has big implications for CMOs and the marketing function itself. What has been the catalyst driving this rise of the CMO in the past couple years? Technology. The new digital-centric business landscape has not only empowered today’s buyer to be in control of the buying process, but it has dramatically increased the number of ways that a brand can “touch” the customer during and after her buying journey. With a myriad channels and touch-points between a company and the buyer—the need for an integrated, holistic approach to managing the entire customer lifecycle is critical. The person responsible for coordinating all this into an “engagement marketing”strategy? The CMO. The new, strategic approach to marketing engagement is very bottom-line business oriented. It’s really focused on nurturing rich, mutually beneficial relationships with customers throughout their entire journey—including after the purchase when the real loyalty building has to happen. This new emphasis on end-to-end customer engagement means that the CMO is now assuming responsibilities that not long ago were owned by sales, service and even operations. Earlier this year my company, Marketo, contracted with the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey 500 marketers about a wide range of topics, including how they view engagement in marketing and the role of CMOs in driving this new marketing paradigm. The survey findings illustrated the new thinking that is transforming both the marketing profession and industry: 63% of marketers view engagement as customer renewals, repeat purchases and retention. 78% of respondents think engagement occurs in the middle or end stages of the marketing funnel. Only 20% of marketers defined engagement as a top of the funnel awareness or emotional brand building tool. 75% of CMOs and senior marketing executives expect to own, or at least play a major role in managing, the end-to-end customer engagement for their companies in the next 3-5 years. As CMOs gain more stature in the corporation by shouldering even more responsibility for driving and activating the entire customer lifecycle, they are also getting more credit for being revenue drivers. Of course, the department or executive who owns revenue growth (and can deliver it consistently with an upward trajectory), pretty much rules the game in business. To handle this new level of responsibility—CMOs today need to adapt. What it took to be a CMO 10 years go and what it takes to be a CMO today are two different things. Marketing has always been a blend of art and science, and it still is to a great degree. There is no question, though, that the science part has gained primacy in the new world of tech-powered, omni-channel marketing. From mastering the digital and social channels that customers use to educate themselves on your products, to understanding how advanced analytics can drive truly personalized communications and engagement, marketers must now possess a whole new set of tech oriented skills and capabilities.  “Test, learn, repeat and scale” have long been part of the marketing model, but in this new tech-centered environment these concepts are the daily lexicon of the CMO and her marketing team. All of this means that today’s CMO needs to combine the technical abilities of a project manager and data geek with the big picture strategic business capabilities that go beyond brand building and driving awareness and preference. This is not to say that CMOs must be tech engineers any more than CEOs or CFOs need to be. But, in addition to finding and leading the marketing talent that has the requisite technology skills required to thrive in the modern marketing world, the CMO needs to be comfortable with these new capabilities and tools as well. CMOs can’t just sit in the corner office and delegate. They need to be in the center of the action, driving the strategy and operations. And that includes getting their hands “dirty” with the technology, analytics and digital media that power customer engagement in the 21st Century. That’s probably going to be a challenge for some marketers. But, no one ever said stepping up to become the second most important person in the corporation was going to be easy! But those that can make the shift now find themselves joined at the hip with the CEO. The corporation’s growth and success really do depend on the close collaboration and productive relationship of its two most important executives.

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

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