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By: Jamie Lewis Did you know that there are over 300 million active Twitter users? That’s a HUGE market for your business. So it goes without saying that I am a (vocal) advocate of all companies (B2B and consumer-geared alike) using Twitter as a marketing channel. I myself have had some pretty compelling results with Twitter. For example, I recently tweeted a link to a faux movie trailer that was used to advertise a product that was retweeted 198 times (impressive, I know), netting me dozens of new followers (which I immediately think: potential leads?). With the median Twitter account having about 100 followers, this particular piece of content had the potential of being retweeted nearly 20,000 times! Over time, I have learned through careful, and not so careful, trial & error how to be relevant to my particular audience, and I am achieving better results because of it. Cultivating a strong presence on Twitter has many benefits: you support your organization’s marketing efforts, you can use it to sell socially, you can build your personal brand, or any combination of these things. With all these benefits, I have wondered, why do some of my fellow marketing and sales professionals still struggle to gain traction on such a promising channel? Based on my first-hand observations, marketers and sales-people don’t treat their personal brand enough like a real brand. Here are four common mistakes they make when using Twitter and how to correct them: 1. They don’t pick a specific target audience This often overlooked task is actually pretty easy—just pick one or more of the top target audiences from your other channels and start from there. If you fail to properly identify your audience, your messages will not resonate with the majority of people who see it. The right message may be very different for a business audience and a consumer audience, executives and practitioners, and so on. Selecting an audience is important, because once you have identified a target audience you can address what exactly they’re looking for. Some audiences will be interested in product discounts, others in entertainment, and others in exclusive content. Having a clear idea of the audience and their wants and needs is crucial for capturing their attention. 2. They don’t create a compelling account In order to harness the true power of Twitter, you need to have the right people listening to your messages. This means that you have to be strategic about creating a highly networked account—one where you are following the right people and the right people are following you. With that in mind, I recommend you start by simply searching on Twitter for people to follow for 5-10 minutes a day, every day. Set yourself up for success by finding interesting content and contacts. Pinpoint people your target audience would be interested in, such as industry thought leaders, cultural icons, contemporary movers & shakers, and brands themselves. Next, start listening to those people by reading and engaging in their conversations for at least a few minutes per day. Begin by sharing some witty comments or valuable links and see what happens! Here you’ll learn what type of content is captivating to your core audience. It’s important to remember that Twitter is a social network, but often marketers and salespeople forget to be social on it—so, make sure you participateand listen. 3. They don’t create a logical posting plan A posting plan should be based on your overall Twitter strategy with the goal of engaging your target audience. First, you need to have business outcomes in mind for why you are using the channel to begin with. It could be for personal branding, lead generation, or customer service, to name a few. Make sure you know what the goal is! Then, determine when the target audience is listening and schedule posts accordingly. This is very important, because, according to Quora, retweets peak between the hours of 2pm to 5pm EST. If the target audience is listening during the afternoon, then why post first thing in the morning? Lastly, you should aim to create a detailed editorial calendar for your Twitter messages. This will allow you to create a series of related messages that work together in a coherent, branded pattern which makes sense to your audience. You might think “That’s just for brands”, but really an editorial calendar is for anyone who wants to be successful; often brands are. One more tip—when you post, ask for a retweet. Be explicit and actually spell out this request: “Please Retweet.” According to Fastcompany.com, you are 23x more likely to get a retweet when you do! 4. They aren’t using promoted tweets Promoted tweets are ordinary tweets that get a boost by an advertiser who wants to reach a wider group of users or to spark engagement from their existing followers. Anyone can be an advertiser and most platforms (including Twitter) offer tutorials on how to get started. It is important to use promoted tweets regularly to ensure that messages are seen by the largest audience possible, especially your most important messages. While a regular tweet is only seen by a fraction of the target audience, promoted tweets stay at the top of the Twitter feed for an extended period of time, guaranteeing that more of your target audience (follower and non-follower) see them when they log in. This is vital for growing a Twitter account and finding new followers. Promoted tweets are also great for testing your content types, time of day, and target audience, because the advertising platform gives you data on the success of your tweets. Lastly, explore the different ad options. Once you’re familiar with the Twitter advertising platform, try out other products like promoted Twitter Cards. These types of posts allow you to embed graphics into the tweet for an eye-catching effect. So, by correcting these four mistakes, you can harness Twitter to grow your audience, reinforce your personal brand, and support your organization’s marketing efforts. And remember, always observe the activities that brands do to be successful on social media and apply them to yourself—you’ll be surprised by how often they translate. Happy tweeting! Do you have any other tips for mastering Twitter as a marketing channel? Let us know in the comments below! Jamie Lewis s a Senior Solution Consultant at Marketo and has been in the CRM and marketing automation space for over 15 years. He works closely with marketing agencies and MSPs who leverage Marketo to provide state of the art marketing services to their clients. His focus is consulting on engagement marketing strategies and best practices, in particular regarding top of funnel lead generation using social platforms.

Two docs about the Future of Marketing - High Lever overview of results (different doc in Marketing Central) - Detailed results Survey by Duke University and McKinsey and company.

Two docs about the Future of Marketing - High Lever overview of results - Detailed results (different doc in Marketing Central) Survey by Duke University and McKinsey and company.

By: Sesame Mish Posted: August 24, 2015 | Demand Generation Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Finding quality prospects is one of a marketer’s biggest challenges—how do you find leads that will convert into sales? In fact, 61% of B2B marketers cite generating high-quality leads as their No. 1 challenge. (I bet that even you consumer marketers out there experience this challenge, so stick with me, as I’m sure you’ll find value here, too). Part of the problem is that everywhere you look, someone is telling you about new-and-better ways to generate leads. But, I stress, don’t fall for every trendy new idea or lead gen hack out there. We’ve analyzed the data and have found that there are two strategies that consistently work well for generating leads: content marketing and in-person connections. Strategy #1: Content Marketing Content marketing has become a proven tool for consumer brands, but many marketers still hesitate, unsure if it will be effective for their business. But for the many B2B marketers that have taken the plunge, they’ve found that it’s an ideal vehicle for building relationships with B2B customers, especially with products and services with long sales cycles. According to Forbes: 71% of B2B marketers use content marketing to generate leads. 93% of B2B companies say content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies. 60% of B2B decision-makers say content provided by companies helps them make smarter buying decisions. Content marketing also generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing and costs 62% less.The data shows that content marketing works—even for B2B brands. But, where do you start? Content that generates qualified business leads typically lives in three places: your website’s landing pages, your company blog, and your brand’s social media channels. Let’s take a closer look… 1. Website Landing PagesDon’t assume that everyone who visits your site is starting on your home page. 68% of B2B businesses use strategic landing pages to garner new sales leads. A landing page might be your first opportunity to make a good impression and draw your visitor in.A content marketing strategy that attracts qualified leads creates evergreen content that will bring in top-of-the-funnel queries. Here are some elements that will showcase your expertise: Definition pages: Show you’re in the know by defining and explaining key terms in your industry. Create content that targets search queries for: “What is ___?” Shareable content: Use infographics, video, and other high-impact content that’s easy to digest and share. Gated content: Design engaging landing pages for each unique piece of gated content. 77% of buyers will provide their basic contact information for high value content, but a strategic landing page will get your content in front of them earlier. Create a unique landing page for each resource that addresses some of the entry-level questions about the topic so that users will easily find the resource. They might not download it the first time, but when they’re ready to learn more, they’ll know where to find it. 2. Company BlogBlogs are a proven resource for providing information, creating dialogue, and attaching a personality to your company. They work, too. B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those who don’t, and 81% of businesses have reported their blogsas “useful” or “critical” to B2B lead generation. But blog posts won’t be effective if they are just an afterthought. Spend time creating a plan and ensuring that top-of-the-funnel topics regularly recur in your content calendar. It can be tempting to write about the details and nuances of your industry or business to demonstrate the depth of your knowledge. While that’s a good practice occasionally, remember that your competition is not your audience. Top-of-the-funnel topics build awareness and answer questions that buyers are asking at the beginning of the cycle, so industry basics like “What is [insert your product or niche here]?” and FAQs are good places to start.Then make sure that each blog post is pulling its weight by learning to craft great titles and metas to make your posts rank high in Google search results and by using strong keywords to optimize each blog post. 3. Social MediaHaving a presence on social media can be another critical tool to establish your credibility and create a dialogue. In fact, 78% of small businesses now get at least a quarter of their new customers via social media, and two of the best channels for business are LinkedIn and Twitter.LinkedIn is not just a great tool for you as a professional; it’s also a key place for your company to establish its credibility. 44% of B2B marketers have generated leads via LinkedIn. Here’s how to use LinkedIn effectively to help generate quality leads: Rather than littering your profile with casual Facebook-style updates, post resourceful content and publish thought leadership pieces. Don’t spread yourself thin over every group related to your business model. Participate in just a few active groups where your target audience congregates and provide real value by sharing your insights, asking good questions, and stimulating relevant conversation. Twitter is a key source of content for professionals in many industries. People are more likely to visit a B2B tech company’s website, for example, after seeing a tweet from the company. Taking content marketing to a short form like Twitter means: Participating in industry Twitter chats. Including attractive images, strategic hashtags, and relevant links with each post. You can also use Google Alerts to monitor social for brand mentions and then participate in the conversations. Proven Strategy #2: In-Person Connections Clearly, content marketing is a proven way to put a face on your company by sharing information about who you are and what you do. Another way to put a “face” on your company is to get out there and meet people in-person. In study after study, marketers continue to report that some of the best leads come from in-person interactions: The most effective B2B lead generation tactics are inside sales, executive events, telemarketing, tradeshows, and conferences. The highest-quality leads come from tradeshows and events. Referrals are often cited as the most effective B2B lead generation tactics worldwide. For many people, generating leads “in-person” translates to one thing: networking events. But there are a number of other ways to get to know potential customers and collaborators.1. TradeshowsYour customers are already at tradeshows—and ready to make improvements or at least explore new solutions—so take advantage of the proximity. The graph below reveals that tradeshows have the highest quality of leads per any one channel: So, in your effort to make the most of tradeshows, be sure to take the following actions: Networking during the tradeshow: Focus on quality of interaction, rather than quantity. Speaking as part of the program: Contact show organizers early to get on the speaking panel. Demonstrations at the booth: Train show personnel to engage, not just display. 2. Networking EventsNetworking events are great places to make connections, but here’s the key: you want to fish where the fish are. If you’re a graphic designer, don’t just go to meetings with other graphic designers. Industry groups are important for best practices, but if you specialize in graphic design for real estate agents, attend real estate networking events. 3. Local Small Business Association MeetingsSmall Business Association meetings are fertile ground for generating leads because you’re able to meet professionals in all lines of business in one place. Local professionals are usually eager to support fellow small business owners, so it’s a great place to make connections and offer complementary services. Check into sponsoring a meeting—the expense is nominal for many local groups, you’ll have the opportunity to introduce yourself and your company, and you can follow up with a mailing or article on the organization’s website. Bonus Sidenote: Referrals This blog wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that referrals are the best type of lead and customer. Period. They come with credibility built-in from someone that your prospective buyer already knows and trusts. Check out this graph showing the most effective B2B lead gen tactics according to B2B marketers themselves (HINT: referrals is at the top!): T he takeaway here is to treat referrals like gold and to never forget to thank the person who referred you. With this in mind, here are some ways to elicit referrals from your satisfied customers: Ask at every close: Most people would be happy to refer, but they are never asked! Every time you close a sale or deliver the final product, ask if the customer knows someone else who might benefit from your product or service. Help them think of someone: If you feel that the question “Do you know anyone?” is too broad, consider including a suggestion. For example, ask if a manager in another department might benefit from your services. Thank the referrer in-person: Did their referral result in a sale? Take the time to visit their office and thank them in-person with a small gift (company-branded swag, anyone?). Hearing sincere appreciation can really cement the relationship. Until it becomes a habit, asking for referrals in-person may feel awkward, but those first dozen asks will be more comfortable if you have developed a relationship with the client you are asking. It can be difficult, however, to maintain ongoing relationships with every client. Here are a few things you can do online to make the in-person more natural and effective: Provide an email template: Sometimes your clients don’t know how to send you a referral, or it gets lost on a long to-do list. Send a follow-up email template that they can copy-and-paste to friends and colleagues they want to refer. Build an integrated social referral campaign: Social is just a modern expression of word-of-mouth, so make it easy for your “fans” to help you generate leads on the social channels they already use. Institute a marketing automation campaign: Automation can help you maintain great relationships with current clients and prospects so you can feel more comfortable when it comes time to ask for a referral. Whether you’re at a live event, or signing paperwork in an office, one of the best and time-tested ways to get qualified leads is talking to people face-to-face. Look for opportunities, and be prepared to make the most of them. Generate Better B2B Leads We marketers know that qualified leads are the fuel that keeps our company’s engine running. Going after leads both online and in-person will create a 1-2 punch lead gen strategy to keep that funnel full. Face-to-face relationships is how business has been done for centuries, and human nature still favors live interaction to build trust and nurture relationships. Content marketing takes the strengths of in-person interactions and translates them to the web—social media is the new word-of-mouth, and strategic content is a new metric for building trust. So start creating your top-of-the-funnel blog topics, and repurpose them in the small talk that can generate leads when you are meeting in-person. Want to dig in deeper? Check out our Definitive Guide to Lead Generation to learn more about these and other actionable lead gen tactics, or our Definitive Guide to Customer Nurturing for a more consumer-centric take on things. Sesame Mish is a part of the Content Marketing team at Marketo. She is also pursuing an M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. In her spare time, she loves to play volleyball, spend time with family, do volunteer work, and root for her favorite team, the San Francisco Giants!

Attention Marketo Customers! We have submitted our fearless leader and executives from two of our customers (Portland Trail Blazers and Palace Sports & Entertainment/Detroit Pistons) to speak on a panel at SXSW 2016. SXSW programming is determined in part by public voting – that’s where you come in! We need you to log in and vote for “Pro Sports & MarTech: Converting Fans to FANATICS!” to be on the 2016 agenda. Here's what we need you to do! If you attended SXSW last year, you already have an account. Following the link below and log in order to give our panel a “thumbs up.” http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/52786 If you did not attend SXSW, follow this link to create one, then click our panel link to vote: https://auth.sxsw.com/users/sign_up If you have any questions, please feel free to comment here and we'll get back to you. Happy voting!

By: Johnny Cheng  I hear this question from email marketers all the time: Does the size of my email send affect the performance? To answer this question, we’re going to play MythBusters! Email Myth #1 “The larger your email sends, the higher your unsubscribe rate”. Hypothesis: This one seems reasonable. I feel like if you’re doing huge email size sends, your messaging is probably going to seem “spammy”, and so a larger percentage of recipients will unsubscribe due to irrelevance. Data and Analysis: Here, you’ll see email send size against unsubscribe rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case. There is no significant correlation here. In fact, you can see there’s actually a slightly negative correlation. Larger email sends actually have lower unsubscribe rates. This could be a result of companies with larger databases having more well-known brand names so they are more careful with their email campaigns. But, I think the opposite is true in that there are many “experimental” small email sends that are sent to “unknown” contacts. Results: Myth busted! Email send size does not affect unsubscribe rate. Wow, this one wasn’t that intuitive. I assumed large email sends mimicked spam email which would warrant higher unsubscribes. But the data shows that email volume size doesn’t affect unsubscribe rate. However, it’s important to note that several other factors such as frequency, content, and relevance do. Take a moment and think about your every-day email behavior: if could be seen as annoying or irrelevant, you’re probably going to take the extra effort to unsubscribe. Email Myth #2 “The larger your email sends, the lower your click-to-open rate”. Hypothesis: Just like the first myth, this one looks plausible. Huge email sends dilute the messaging so I would imagine email performance would suffer. It’s hard to imagine one email would be relevant to millions of people, at least not relevant enough for them to click through. Data and Analysis: Here, you’ll see email send size against click-to-open rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case. There’s a very strong correlation here. If I were to sketch out the natural curves, it would look like a sideways funnel with a huge drop-off at around 20,000 to 50,000. Email sizes above that rarely reach higher than 20% click-t0-open. This makes a lot of sense if you think of content relevance. More segmented email sends, with more targeted messaging, get more clicks. And for all you inquisitive minds out there, if you’re wondering about just click rate, yes, the exact same phenomenon as click-to-open rate occurs. Results: Myth confirmed! Email send size is directly tied to performance. I love science! We proved an industry-old myth with data! But if you really think about this one, it makes a lot of sense. Open rate is tied to your subject line and sender info. Click rate is tied to your content and offering, which equals relevance. The larger your email sizes, the harder it is to stay relevant and have a compelling call-to-action that appeals to that audience. Especially after the email send size exceeds 20,000—where the average click-to-open band narrows to 3-18%. It’s very rare to escape that band. What We’ve Learned The main takeaway here is to find a good balance between the granularity of your segments and the relevance of your content or offering. If you have the resources, segment your email campaigns based on the audience persona (industry, demographic, geography, etc.) and behavior (e.g. looked at your product webpages). As a general “guideline,” the email size sweet spot is around 5,000. However, as long as your message is relevant and resonates with the recipients, you’ll get good email performance. It’s just very difficult to stay relevant beyond a certain audience size. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Leave your comments below.

By: David Myers Posted: August 10, 2015 | Targeting and Personalization http://blog.marketo.com/category/targeting-and-personalizationRemember the first time you visited a website as a returning customer and saw your first name “magically” appear on the login page? Back then, personalization in the consumer market involved little more than inserting a first name into a login page or email. But with the advent of big data and real-time technologies, personalization has transitioned from static elements to contextual engagement. Consumers feel increasingly comfortable making considered purchases online, and, as a result, marketers must seize any opportunity to personalize cross-channel content. Today’s personalization technology makes this possible, delivering customized web, email, mobile, and ad experiences to new and existing customers to help reinforce their loyalty. The New Personalization Is All About Providing Value In the past, personalization was mainly used to identify visitors by name or location and lacked a specific context or relevancy. Apart from not offering value, in the absence of real-time technology, marketing responses were often delayed and required waiting for visitors to return to the website or targeting them days later via email or ads. Fast forward to the present. Personalization tools now analyze user behavior in real-time and immediately deliver targeted content across multiple user channels. Let’s take a look at an example from the hospitality industry to see how this works in action. If you’re promoting travel packages, and you know the consumer’s age and income bracket, this data can easily be leveraged to customize the visuals and offers depending on the channel. For example, college students on spring break are looking for the best parties in town, whereas seniors are more likely to be interested in luxury vacations that are cruise or resort-based. Also, while seniors may prefer receiving an email with the latest holiday deals, young students are accustomed to receiving push notifications on their phones. Knowing these types of particular preferences is extremely valuable to marketers and can be used to select images, construct messaging, and offer packages that best fit an individual customer’s needs. Personalizing Content at Every Step of the Customer Journey Targeting an existing customer whose details you have is one thing, but what happens in the case of anonymous visitors? If we return to the hospitality example, personalization works based on the web visitor’s behavior. This might be a search term the moment that senior citizen searches for “golf package holidays” or actual behavior she shows on the website, like pages viewed and number of clicks. Based on behavior, real-time personalization tools can change the website’s content to be relevant for the visitor. Instead of showing the general picture of the hotel resort, marketers can personalize the webpage to show images of the resort’s golf courses that would appeal to this specific visitor based on their search term behavior. Left image: regular website Right image: personalized website for individual visitor who is searching for golf packages in particular Once an anonymous visitor turns into a known buyer, past purchasing history or any data that the known buyer has provided can be used for personalization which works great for cross-selling or up-selling opportunities. Where Personalization Meets Engagement Marketing Personalization is core to the concept of engagement marketing. This entails listening to, understanding, and responding to consumers, often over a long period of time, based on who they are and what they do. According to Janrain & Harris Interactive, 74% of online consumers get frustrated when a website’s content is irrelevant to their interests. In addition, using demographic and behavioral data to personalize experiences was found to increase conversion rates by 30%! Personalizing content improves your marketing metrics and bottom line. For instance, a hotel chain that used Marketo’s solutions saw the following results from their personalization efforts. Within one month! Over 3,300 online visitors click on personalized calls to actions. These visitors spent an average of 217% more time on the hotel’s website than before and viewed nearly 300% more pages per visit. Overall, visitors who engaged with personalization campaigns on the website showed a 10x lift in revenue conversion as compared to the average site visitor. Consumer Personalization Spans Many Industries The hospitality case study above was just one example of how personalization can be used to engage targeted consumers. Personalization is also effective in the considered purchase market ranging from luxury goods to finance, healthcare, and real estate.Here are several ways that personalization can be used in these markets: Luxury Goods: For jewelry sellers, if a consumer with a high income profile performs a Google search for “gemstones” and clicks on a search result that links to your website, the home page will be personalized, based on their profile and search term used, to a visual of a higher priced gemstone offer. Travel and Leisure: A tourism website can upsell or cross-sell returning visitors by featuring banners with exclusive VIP packages for loyal customers. Healthcare: Web visitors can be identified by location, enabling healthcare providers to limit website info strictly to policies for that specific location. High-End Retail: Brick-and-mortar locations can offer special discounts or offers to in-store shoppers and target them on their mobile devices. Give Your Consumers What They Truly Want Personalization in the digital world is about understanding who your customers are and which channels are most suitable for them to offer the most engaging content at every moment. Your consumers are constantly interacting with your brand, and you have to be ready, at any point in time, to react with the right messaging. Real-time technology has transformed personalization and makes it more relevant than ever to enable marketers to stay one step ahead of their target market and ensure they’re always met with the best, most personalized content. David is a product manager for Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization (RTP) platform. Prior to joining Marketo, David spearheaded the digital marketing for a leading global consumer goods company. When not dreaming about the next product feature, David can be spotted wasting hours on the cricket field.

By: Becky Hirsch Posted: August 11, 2015 | Email Marketing Do you hear that? It’s getting louder. It’s the sound of millions of emails, targeted ads, and personalized web experiences fighting for relevance. Despite the noise, B2B and B2C brands succeed at delivering relevant information to their target audiences. According to Direct Marketing Association, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return-on-investment is $40.56. But there’s a difference between threading the needle and really creating something. In many cases, data is being used to deliver personalized email campaigns with fantastic results. The Aberdeen Group says that personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. With results like these, the motivation to test, segment, and personalize email campaigns will no doubt increase. However, the success of these incremental improvements to email marketing depends largely on the next steps customers take after engaging with your email. Whether you’re sending them to a specific landing page or inviting them to take advantage of a personalized offer on-site, the work doesn’t end in your customer’s inbox. By looking at how you use data to improve email marketing from the broader perspective of your web or mobile experience, you can multiply the impact of your targeting. And it’s worth it. According to Steelhouse, using correct targeting and testing methods can increase conversion rates up to 300%. Break Down the Barriers Closing the data loop and breaking down the organizational divisions between email marketing and website optimization is increasingly common. Marketers are adopting this strategy, particularly as facts about open-rates on mobile come to light and digital teams unite forces. But any brand making a significant investment in email marketing will soon be throwing good money after bad without an optimized, personalized mobile experience. Eisenberg Holdings says that companies typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site, but only $1 to convert them. Instead, make your money count twice by investing in a strategy that combines data from email marketing with on-site behavior for a comprehensive approach to optimization. According to EConsultancy, 64% of companies would like to improve their personalization, 64%, their marketing automation, and 62%, their segmentation. The key is to unify these three key areas for a strategy that will keep your communications relevant and your audience engaged. Here, I’m going to share four ways your website’s optimization strategy can enhance your email marketing efforts, and vice versa! Let’s get started… 1. Use Website Data to Validate Email Segmentation Segmenting your audience for email marketing is not an uncommon practice. However, the segmentation of your website traffic is often treated as a mutually exclusive effort. Try This: Use your website data to validate predefined segments for email marketing campaigns with a URL parameter. By doing so, you can find out whether your segments behave how you expected them to with metrics that look at their behavior from first click to exit. 2. Use Email Marketing Attributes to Create a Better On-Site Experience The data from email and websites can interact in either direction. One leading travel brand worked with Maxymiser, a website and app optimization solution, on an email campaign designed to bring users to the site by converting email prospects with a featured destination that best reflected their preferences (either collected or expressed.) Using Maxymiser’s optimization solution, the brand selected 36 destinations to offer and used each one as a specific variant of the test. Try This: Segment visitors who came from email and determine which predictive attributes will make their visit the best possible experience. In the above instance, the brand took the attributes generated by an email campaign and used them to test and target on their site—and you can too. 3. Map Email Engagement and CRM With the right tools, you can map the unique identifier to a CRM file and target specific individualized content to that visitor. Try This: The data-driven marketer (you!) could place an individualized identifier in the URL of an email campaign. You can also match up an individual from the aforementioned unique URL to segments or visitor groups defined in the CRM file. 4. Test and Target from Email to Landing Page (Mobile or Desktop) Using your optimization solution, you can test custom content on your predefined email segments by redirecting them from email to a specific landing page. Try This: Optimize both your emails and landing pages in a single test and combine your analytics for a clear perspective on your user’s behavior. This might be a particularly interesting test to run on a mobile landing page. In Q1 2014, more email was opened on iPhones (38%) than all desktops combined (34%). You can be sure that these percentages have only increased in the last 12 months. With that being said, if you’re hoping to convert a visitor with email, you have to optimize your mobile landing pages. A website optimization solution like Maxymiser can run the aforementioned desktop landing page test on mobile as well. A unified optimization and email marketing team could easily work together to generate a rich tapestry of insights by segmenting email audiences and testing the optimal experience on desktop or mobile, depending on where the user comes from. So, don’t just think about the connection between email marketing and optimization; plan for success by aligning your strategy with a multi-channel approach like the one I have described above. On the road to becoming a holistic digital marketing organization, the marriage between email marketing and website optimization is one of the most valuable steps. Becky Hirsch is a content writer and editor at Maxymiser. She works closely with consultants and analysts to turn their optimization expertise into accessible content for the modern marketer.

Great Excel Spreadsheet to help you organize your Marketo

Great PDF File to help you organize Marketo.

By: Marcus Taylor Posted: August 13, 2015 | Marketing Automation The marketing automation industry has snowballed over the past few years, and yet it’s only just getting started. According to Marketing Automation Insider, in the past five years alone, we’ve seen over $5.5B worth of acquisitions made, and an aggregate vendor revenues increase from $225M to $1.65B! At the current rate of adoption and innovation, you may be wondering where marketing automation is headed, which trends are emerging, and how it will all benefit your business. Well, my friend, you’ve come to the right place! Here, we’ll explore three major shifts in the marketing automation industry and how they’ll impact your businesses on both a macro and micro-level. Let’s get started… 1. Predictive analytics is making guessing a game of the past One of the major trends emerging in the marketing automation industry is the use of predictive analytics and machine learning to power sales and marketing decisions. Predictive analytics uses clever statistical models to identify what your customers will likely do next and then automatically uses those insights to trigger certain actions. In 2012, Amazon filed a patent for a predictive analytics system that would allow them to begin shipping productsbefore a customer even ordered them. (Crazy thought, right?!) But by predicting the probability of someone buying a product based on their behavior on the website and previous history, Amazon could reduce its shipping times and move product faster. There are countless uses for this type of technology, but in the context of marketing automation, it provides the opportunity to eliminate guess work. How long should you wait between sending two emails in a lead nurturing sequence? Which content (blogs, ebooks, etc) should you send to a certain type of lead? How should you score a lead from a particular marketing channel? While experience tends to provide good answers to these questions, predictive analytics can provide dynamic answers that, like a good bottle of wine, become better over time, ultimately surpassing that of an experienced marketer’s hunch. As a result of this, marketing and sales will become less of a guessing game. The most important consequence of this is that companies using predictive analytics will have the competitive advantage. Predictive analytics adoption is still in its infancy, providing the innovative early birds with a great opportunity to get a head start. The question is, will it be you or your competitors that gain this competitive advantage? 2. Intelligent multi-channel marketing is becoming the norm Tests have shown that when you target a customer both in their inbox with an email and on Facebook with a matching ad, the customer is 22% more likely to purchase, as opposed to if you had only sent the email. In multi-channel marketing, the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts. This is especially true when you add a layer of personalization into the mix, which is of course possible with marketing automation. Let’s look at time for an example. Let’s imagine that you’re the marketing director of a company that sells kitchen appliances online. A prospect named Molly visits your website and adds a fridge to her shopping cart (obviously a very large shopping cart.) Molly enters her details to check out but never completes the transaction. In this situation your multi-channel strategy could look something like this: After 30 minutes, an automated email is triggered encouraging Molly to complete her order (in case she got distracted by a phone call…or Game of Thrones). Using retargeting through a sync with your marketing automation platform and Facebook, Molly sees an ad saying “Molly, are you refurbishing your kitchen?” and linking to a separate landing page. If this landing page is engaged with, Molly would be entered into a whole new sequence with upsells and offers incentivizing her to buy more items. If after one day Molly still hasn’t bought the fridge, a text message could be sent asking if there’s anything your support team could answer or help her with. If after several days later there’s still no purchase, a separate email and Facebook ad campaign could be triggered targeting Molly with different fridges and freezers relating to her original search criteria. This type of multi-channel nurturing is immensely effective for a number of reasons: It’s underused. Despite being very effective, few companies are running such hyper-personalized campaigns. This will likely change over the next few years, as more and more companies realize its effectiveness. With more channels, you can capture more data from your customers, leading to more relevant targeting. The more relevant your targeting, the more likely a conversion will be. It makes it virtually impossible to lose a customer due to distraction, as you’re able to communicate with the buyer across devices and platforms and at different times. We’re likely to see a lot more multi-channel marketing over the next year or two. As marketing automation tools improve their offerings and features, and as more case studies emerge, more and more businesses will begin to use this powerful tactic. Could this sort of multi-channel marketing help your business convert more leads into customers? 3. Marketing automation is becoming widely adopted There are two colliding waves in the marketing automation industry that are converging to form a tsunami-like surge of businesses interested in marketing automation. These waves are 1) the increased awareness of the value of marketing automation and 2) the increasing impact and capabilities of marketing automation software. Since 2012, the amount of case studies, articles, webinars, and events covering marketing automation has exploded, resulting in a heightened awareness of the impact of adopting a marketing automation solution. Simultaneously, marketing automation software is becoming more and more powerful. With new features and functionality, such as real-time personalization and adtech-geared tools, as well as an increasing pool of experts readily sharing best practices, the scope of what marketing automation software can achieve is continuing to expand. Word—and excitement—is spreading like wildfire. These two converging waves have an obvious result: more and more businesses (your competitors included) are implementing a marketing automation solution. As such, it pays to get ahead of the game and start building your marketing automation campaigns early. That way, by the time your competitors are building out their first campaigns, your business could have hundreds of active, fine-tuned campaigns already working on leads. Get to it! Conclusion As far as we can tell from the data, marketing automation is becoming smarter, more tailored, and more accessible. The combination of these trends explains why the industry has grown so rapidly over the past five years and why it does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon. For business owners, the lesson here is simple and Darwinian: evolve now (aka get automating), or risk losing your market share to your competitors. Marcus Taylor is the founder of Venture Harbour, a company that owns a portfolio of online ventures including Marketing Automation Insider.

By: David Lizerbram Originally posted on Marketo.com on August 12, 2015 | Modern Marketing Podcasting has become big business. For those of you who aren’t up on the medium, a podcast is simply a recorded audio show that you can download or stream and play any time you like. Top podcasters like John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Businesses are jumping into the podcast world as a hot new marketing channel—and as a new source of direct revenue. Many companies are embracing podcasts as a fresh component of their content marketingstrategy. With that being said, you may want to monetize a podcast directly through advertisements, paid expert testimonials, and endorsements. As with any other type of advertising, there are a few laws that apply to podcast ads. But don’t worry—they’re very straightforward and easy to follow. In this post, I’m going to share five simple rules to follow to help you avoid legal issues while you’re monetizing your podcast, based on two documents put out by our friends at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising and .com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising. At the end of this post, we’ll talk about the financial penalties for not following these rules. Trust me, you’re going to want to know the laws. To keep it simple, I’m going to use the word “endorsement” to include any type of endorsement, testimonial, or affiliate arrangement. Also, you might be asking, “Which kinds of products do these rules apply to?” The answer is that if you’re endorsing or advertising just about anything, these rules apply. When in doubt, disclose! …And Now For the 5 Simple Rules: Rule #1: Be Honest The Guides states, “Endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser”. What This Means: If you listen to some popular podcasts, you’ll hear that the host often promotes a product or service. Ford has been advertising cars on the wildly successful podcast Startup, while many podcasters have been known to talk to their listeners about web services like Squarespace. The rule here is pretty simple: be honest. If you haven’t used the product or service that you’re advertising, don’t say “We use this software every day!” Rule #2: If You Claim to Be an Expert, Actually Be an Expert The Guides state: “Whenever an advertisement represents, directly or by implication, that the endorser is an expert with respect to the endorsement message, then the endorser’s qualifications must in fact give the endorser the expertise that he or she is represented as possessing with respect to the endorsement”. What This Means: Let’s say your company is paid to state on your podcast, “We’ve tried every product on the market, and Social-Ad-O-Rama can get you the highest converting social ads”. This statement suggests that you’re an expert. Don’t make this kind of statement on the podcast if your company doesn’t know the first thing about social ads. Let’s be clear: it’s fine to run a pre-recorded advertisement for a product that you’ve never used and don’t know much about. That’s happened on every TV show and every radio show since those media were invented. It’s called “advertising”! However, you personally shouldn’t endorse or testify, on behalf of your company, about the quality of a product that you’re not familiar with. Rule #3: It’s About the Relationship The Guides are just that—indications of how to go about making the proper disclosures. Ultimately, the key is to communicate the nature of the relationship so that your audience understands what’s going on. The FTC states: “The issue is—and always has been—whether the audience understands the reviewer’s relationship to the company whose products are being reviewed”. Here’s what the Guides say on this topic: “When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement…, such connection must be fully disclosed”. What This Means: Advertising law is based on the assumption, right or wrong, that people want to know that a host has been paid or received something for free in exchange for an endorsement (or even a potential endorsement). So if your endorsement fits into that category, you need to disclose that information. Keep reading to the end of this post to find out the financial penalties for not doing so. Rule #4: You Can’t Hide or Bury the Disclosure The .com Disclosures says, in bold letters: Don’t be subtle. Therefore, the disclosure must be clear and conspicuous. Say it upfront. It’s not enough to endorse something at the beginning of the podcast and then reveal at the end of the show that the company was paid or otherwise compensated. If the endorsement is repeated in your show notes, blog post, or other medium, the disclosure must be repeated there as well. Rule #5: Fancy Legal Jargon Is Not Your Friend From the .com Disclosures: “For disclosures to be effective, consumers must be able to understand them. Advertisers should use clear language and syntax and avoid legalese or technical jargon. Disclosures should be as simple and straightforward as possible”. Easy enough. Use the same type of language to explain the relationship between your company and the product that you’d use in explaining anything else to your audience. Thus… Don’t Say: “This statement is here to comply with the requirements of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission”. —Who knows what that means?! Do Say: “Just so you know, Amazon pays me a small commission every time you purchase the book through this link. That helps support this podcast and allows us to bring you this valuable content for free”.—That type of language is clear, simple, and provides your listener with an opportunity to feel good about supporting your show. OK, But What If I Don’t Follow These 5 Simple Rules? The FTC states that failure to follow these rules can result in penalties of up to $11,000 per violation. Let’s say your company has a podcast that runs three times per week, and in each podcast you have three ads where you don’t follow the disclosure rules, and you’ve been doing so for three years. Well, multiply all that times $11,000 and you’ve got a nice fat check to write. Don’t worry—I’ve got a calculator handy—it’s $15,444,000! Most likely, the penalty would be adjusted according to the particular circumstances—but if I were you, I wouldn’t rely on asking a judge to give you a break on the fine. It’s much easier and less of a headache, not to mention less expensive, to follow the rules in the first place. To wrap this post up, there’s nothing wrong with monetizing your podcast. You just need to know the rules and disclose the details to your audience. As long as your audience is clear, you’re in the clear. For more information, take a look at the two aforementioned guides: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising and .com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising (which is available in ebook format.) Of course, since this post should not be taken as legal advice, I recommend you familiarize yourself with those documents before proceeding with your advertising program. Looking for more legal tips for business podcasters? Download my free ebook, Podcast Law, at PodcastLawGuide.com. David Lizerbram is an attorney and business law strategist in private practice in San Diego. When he is not assisting clients or working on his blog, David enjoys watching movies, listening to podcasts, and sipping craft beer. Check out his blog at http://LizerbramLaw.com/blog/

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

By: Johnny Cheng Posted: August 3, 2015 | Marketing Metrics I’m baaaack! It’s me, Johnny, with your next blog from the Marketo Institute! This time around, we’re going to take a look at conversion rate. Conversion rate is one of the most important marketing metrics. It’s a metric that lead generation marketers—from practitioners all the way up to CMOs—are measured on. And that’s because today marketing owns just as much of the pipeline as sales does, and conversion rate is a great indicator of pipeline health—starting from the marketing end of the funnel. Let’s start at the top of the funnel and look at conversion rate by acquisition channel. This will help answer the age-old question of channel performance. For every dollar, what percentage would you allocate to which acquisition channel? Easy! The one with the highest conversion rate, win rate, and velocity. What Is Conversion Rate? The conversion rate, in terms of demand generation, is the percent of “contacts” that successfully go from one stage of the funnel to the next. Conversion rate could identify with any activity such as clicking a call-to-action and going from a “name” to a “lead”, or reaching a certain lead score and going from a “marketing qualified lead” to a “sales qualified lead”. But the ultimate conversion rate every demand gen marketer is measured on is lead to opportunity. Converting an interested customer into a buyer is what marketing is all about. Now, let’s dive into the data! Channels That Convert The chart below represents average conversion rate (from lead to opportunity) by acquisition channel across all Marketo customers. The darker shade of green indicates where leads converted at a higher rate. The first column shows the acquisition channel where leads are sourced. The second column shows the average conversion rate percentage of each channel. The third column shows normalized conversion rate to highlight relative standings (e.g. Paid Marketing converts 2x Events). So what does this data tell us as marketers? Looking at the results, here’s what stood out to me: Referral: The power of “word of mouth”. Bah, I guess that old cliché saying was right. Referral is by far the highest acquisition channel for conversion rate (almost 4x the average.) In fact, some of the largest, fastest adoptions (Gmail, Dropbox, Zappos) can be credited directly to “word of mouth”. Takeaway? Build a great product, build a great experience, tell the world, ask your customers to tell the world (maybe even reward them)—and you’ll profit. Inbound: Content is king. As Bill Gates predicted in an article written in 1996: “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet”. Almost 20 years later, this couldn’t be more true, especially in the digital marketing era where choice of content is in the hands of the consumer. Imagine a popup ad (outbound) versus a funny infographic you chose to look at (inbound). Data clearly shows that people who choose to interact with your brand naturally convert higher (28% more than paid marketing). What are your doing to build content to support your customer’s journey? Not sure? Well, for one, it’s time to take a cue from me and start writing those awesome blogs! Prospecting: Mining for leads. This one is a bit surprising. Leads sourced from prospecting convert at a third of overall average. But this goes to show you how old-fashioned prospecting such as door-to-door or cold calling just doesn’t work well compared to other sources. It isn’t uncommon these days for me to hear about companies with 60-80% of their leads sourced from marketing. It’s much more efficient to have sales do what they do best: selling, not cold calling. Email and Nurture: Emails have the lowest conversion rate. Wait…what?! Don’t fire your email marketing team. This is showing conversion by acquisition channel, which means if your lead source came from emails and nurture, you’re doing something wrong, or you’re just desperate, or…you’re a spammer (which also explains the bad conversion rate). And as we’ll see in an upcoming Marketo Institute blog, emails and nurture both have amazing ROI for multi-touch attribution after you’ve acquired the lead. Now, It’s Your Turn Let’s use this analysis as a comparative exercise. Take a look at your conversion rate, broken down by acquisition channel (or first touch attribution, if you prefer.) How does it stack up against the Marketo average? Are there channels that are much higher or lower by comparison? Here’s what you could possibly see: “All my conversion rates are way higher than average”. Congratulations! You’re doing a great job! Take the day off. Well, unless it’s high because you have no lead scoring in place, in which case—get back to work. “My conversion rates are all over the place”. This could be due to several factors, first and foremost is the industry. When I sliced and diced the data by industry I saw some interesting things. I saw that the real estate industry’s highest conversion channel is events, which makes sense if you think about open houses being the main source of leads. Or that the non-profit industry’s highest channel is prospecting, which also makes sense if you think of all of the donation calling. Another reason your conversion rates could vary is resources and timeframe (urgency.) Certain channels are just more resource intensive (dollars or people) and can greatly differ in time-to-value. An example would be if you have a sizeable budget but need to meet an immediate spike in leads this quarter, you’re probably not going to rely on inbound content marketing. Another example would be if you have an incredibly strong partner ecosystem or reseller program, you’re going to focus more resources on those channels. “All my conversion rates are much lower than average”. Conversion rate alone isn’t a good indicator of marketing success. This is where you’ll need to look at other data sets. Align your conversion rate with win rate and velocity by channel. Hopefully you’ll start seeing some positive patterns in the data. If, for example, your conversion rate is low, but your win rate is phenomenal, it could just mean you have a very conservative marketing handoff or stringent lead scoring system, which is OK. Another scenario could be that your leads have extremely low velocity so they are sluggishly moving through the funnel, taking years to convert and realize value. But if all of the data indicates poor performance then you should take a look at your funnel. Be extra careful of this common pitfall: casting too wide of a net top-of-funnel, hoping to play a numbers game, but lacking focused programs, activities and content to drive the leads through the funnel. This is doubly dangerous because you end up wasting extra resources pulling in bad leads (ones that would never convert), while leaking out potentially good leads due to the lack of attention and touch points. Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Let me know in the comments below.

Originally published in Forbes How Technology Is Transforming The Structure Of The Marketing Organization This article is by Phil Fernandez, chairman and CEO of Marketo, a marketing-automation company. Technology is no longer the tail that wags the marketing dog – it is the entire dog, nose to tail. There was a time in the not too distant past when digital was an add-on function in the marketing equation. Today, digital is at the core of everything we do in marketing. And that has profound ramifications for the business of marketing, the people who practice it, and the companies that rely on it to grow and succeed. Just as technology has transformed how companies market themselves and their brands, it is having a similarly momentous impact on corporate marketing organizations and the people who staff and manage them. For corporations to fully capitalize on the technology-fueled marketing revolution– or just avoid being left behind – they will need to completely rethink and restructure their marketing departments. Companies large and small are already starting to align their marketing departments with the new technology-driven business environment, but these changes are happening with less urgency than is warranted. Marketing should be a leading indicator in business (and technology), not a lagging one. So what does the tech-empowered marketing organization of the future look like, and what do you need to do to build one today? In my mind there are two big areas of focus: A Customer Mindset A study we commissioned earlier this year that found that 75% of CMOs and senior marketing executives expect to own the end-to-end customer relationship in the next three to five years.  Assuming even more responsibility for managing the entire customer lifecycle, the CMO is now organizing the marketing function around the customer rather than around channels, internal processes and tools (e.g., no more separate email and social marketing teams). We’re also seeing centers of excellence emerging to connect common, horizontal functions and drive coordination around engaging the customer. This includes breaking down the old barriers between customer acquisition and loyalty.  Suffice it to say that if you still have a separate digital group in your marketing department, you are probably headed in the wrong direction. A New Team For years the key players in the marketing department were the VPs of brand marketing, corporate marketing and product marketing. Who are the leaders in this new digital age? The term “content marketing” barely existed five years ago. Today most marketing departments have at least one executive whose sole job is to oversee the development and distribution of content to attract and engage customers. The modern marketing organization is increasingly being powered by an engine that is process-driven. This has given rise to a new role, the head of marketing operations,who isr esponsible for driving that engine with the right blend of technology and data. I also believe we need to designate a head of listening. This individual would listen to what the customer really says and understand how she behaves via the web, mobile, social and the “real” world, too. Always advocating for the customer’s needs and wants, the head of listening would use these insights to empower the marketing team to respond in real-time, customer-by-customer, thus helping to build the long-term relationships that produce outsized revenue growth. Notwithstanding all of this progress, too many companies are not evolving fast enough. To paraphrase the great poet Chaucer, time and tide wait for no company. Forward-thinking corporations are moving aggressively to build customer-centric, technology-driven marketing organizations that are competing more effectively and poised to win the future. Is your company ready?

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By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: December 2, 2014 | Engagement Marketing “What a long, strange trip it has been…” For those of you that are as old as me, you’ll instantly know that quote is from the Grateful Dead’s famous song “Truckin”. When I think of that lyric – I am not thinking about my high school days. Well, maybe a little. Mostly, I’m reflecting on just how much the science, the art, the profession of marketing has changed in recent years. Pause if you will for just a moment and think about the marketing landscape just 10 years ago. Google had only just gone public and only a small percentage of marketers knew what the acronyms ‘SEM’ and ‘SEO’ meant. The iPhone was in its infancy. Facebook had only just left the college campus and was still being thought of as a place to tell people what you were having for lunch. Now, we can’t imagine a world without them. I’ll often say that marketing has changed more in the last 5 years than the last 500…and, it’s likely to change even more in the next 5. If you pull the lens back, it used to be that we all lived in an era of mass marketing – one where it was ‘one message for everybody’. And, it was all about how good that single message was – how clever we were as marketers. Then, the internet showed up, and we moved into an era of transactional marketing – where it was all about the ‘click’ point of interaction. But, now in this pervasive mobile, social, digital world, we’re graduating to this new era – an era where that click, that interaction, is just the beginning of a lifelong relationship and journey with a customer. Let’s call this the era of engagement marketing. A long, strange trip indeed. This new era of engagement marketing is one that is just starting to unfold and will hinge on the ability of organizations to engage people on a personal level, continuously over time, across all channels, and across all of their experiences. This will be the new basis of competition – organizations with deeper engagement will emerge as the winners. And, all of this puts the marketing function in the driver’s seat even more as organizations increasingly turn to marketing to shepherd this customer journey. A “marketing first” world, if you will. But let’s be honest here. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know exactly how this is going to play out. But, I do know that this wild ride we are all about to take is one that will fundamentally change the way brands and organizations interact with customers and people. To help provide a few guideposts, Marketo commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit to explore  how marketers everywhere navigate this new era. The EIU spoke to some of the brightest minds in marketing around the globe, surveying marketers at companies of all sizes and shapes. Together with the Economist, we have synthesized this data into a series of insights about how to chart a course through this new era of engagement marketing.  Starting next week, I will kick off a 26-week long series sharing these insights. I look forward to sharing this long, strange trip together.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: December 9, 2014 | Engagement Marketing Welcome back… and for those that are new — welcome! As I discussed last week, this series of posts aims to chart a course for us marketers as we move into this new era of marketing: the era of engagement marketing. We are on a crazy, wild ride as marketers, with dramatic changes in how we market and connect with people coming at us at an unprecedented pace. In an effort to try and map out the future, Marketo comissioned The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to offer some insights and advice by talking with some of the best marketing minds out there. The results of which, we’ll bring you in future posts—the EIU held in-depth conversations with a varied field of marketing experts. From marketing luminary Seth Godin, to Bain Capital executive Aditya Joshi, to former P&G CMO Jim Stengel, the EIU gathered rich insights about the future of marketing. What follows is a great dialogue we had with Seth Godin. For those of you that don’t know Seth he is a renowned thought leader who writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. He is the founder of squidoo.com, and his blog is one of the most popular in the world. He was hired by Yahoo! as Vice-President of Direct Marketing after selling them the start-up, Yoyodyne. In 2013, Mr. Godin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, one of three chosen for this honor. His latest book, “The Icarus Deception”, argues that we have been brainwashed by industrial propaganda, pushing us to stand out, not to fit in. There are a bunch of great points and stories in this discussion, so I encourage you to give it a read. There were a few key takeaways for me: 1. The shift to the era of engagement marketing and away from transactional and mass marketing is well underway. Seth notes this fact when he says “For 100 years, marketing and advertising was the same thing…” and that “…we have seen marketing change from spending money to interrupt people with advertising”. Interestingly, he also says that “the problem is that a lot of marketers didn’t get that memo…” and that those marketers “…want it to go back to the way it was”. It’s clear that’s not going to happen and that marketers need to move towards a model of engagement that is centered on building personalized, lifelong relationships. 2. Marketers need to step up and drive the change toward an engagement model across the organization. As I mentioned in my last post, this new era puts the marketer squarely in the driver’s seat within an organization — I called it a ‘marketing first’ world. I was struck when Seth pointed out that “marketing has completely transformed”, and that “the marketer now needs to be in charge of everything a company does… they need to be the first step”. Wow! And…here, here! 3. In order to be truly engaging, marketers need to create a continuous, authentic relationship. Seth talks about how the explosion of channels has created a problematic land-grab effect for marketers who look to ‘own’ a channel. I agree with him when he says that this is a mistake and that you shouldn’t focus on “owning a channel”. True engagement comes from authentic, consistent participation across the channels your audience uses. Instead, use these channels — in Seth’s words — as a “new way to communicate… the truth about who you are”, and deliver “…an experience that people can’t help talking about”. Enjoy the interview…. Economist Intelligence Unit: Marketing has changed so much in the past 
five years. What do you think will happen in the next five? What will the marketer’s mission look like in 2020? Seth Godin: If we were talking about what is going to be the future of 
the dried plum, we would have a straightforward conversation. Everyone can agree on what a dried plum is. Not everyone agrees on what marketing is. So before I talk about where it’s going, we have to talk for at least a minute about where it’s been so we understand that we’re starting from the same place. For 100 years, marketing and advertising was the same thing. The CMO didn’t decide on the product line or pricing or what the toxic waste policy should be. Instead, the measure of marketing has traditionally been, “How much money are you spending on advertising?” Only in the last 20 years have we seen marketing change from spending money to interrupt people with advertising to market everything you make and everything you say. That involves making a promise to people about what they should expect when they do business with you. The problem is that a lot of marketers didn’t get that memo. And a lot of marketers — mostly those who work for companies built on advertising mass products to mass audiences — want marketing to go back to what it was. And so when they see YouTube or Twitter come along, they think “This is just like a magazine except the ads are free. This is just like television except the ads are free”. And those people have been pretty generally disappointed with everything that’s happened recently because they’re still working as if marketing equals advertising. Here’s the answer to your question: I think the next five years of marketing are going to be just like the last five years of marketing but more so. We’ll see the end of almost every newspaper. We’ll see the crumbling of the TV-industrial complex in which TV ads are always sold out. And we’re going to see even more reliance
by consumers on peer-to-peer connections and less on the message they hear directly from the marketer. EIU: So what are the most effective marketers going to be doing five years from now? What do they need to
do now to make sure they don’t get passed by as marketing changes? Seth Godin: The short answer is
 five words long: “Make things worth talking about”. The longer answer is that the marketer now needs to be in charge of everything the company does. And the ad agency isn’t the last step of the process anymore;
 it needs to be the first step. You know the people who used to spend all their time spinning products when they’re released? They need
 to spend their time at the beginning. They need to be saying, “What should we make? How do we make it in such a way that the story of our product is true?” Look at Nike. Nike is not afraid to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the products they make, and not on the billboards that they rent. EIU: So it sounds like there are two kinds of marketers. There are marketers who cling to pushing products with advertising and there are marketers who are embedded in what the company makes and are pushing it towards what the consumer wants. Seth Godin: That’s exactly right. Most marketers have come from
an environment where everyone is selling exactly the same product. The way you won was with a clever tag line. That is the world of “Mad Men”. Modern marketers say, “Well, of course Apple people are waiting in line to hear Apple’s announcement because they’re actually doing something new. They’re not just spinning the old”. It’s a huge shift. Changes like this haven’t happened elsewhere in the company. Accounting hasn’t changed. Product development hasn’t changed much. Sales isn’t so different, but  marketing has been completely transformed. EIU: I’m interested to hear what you think about the multiplication and fragmentation of channels. Ten years ago Facebook had under a million users. Now it has over a billion, Twitter has half a billion, even Pinterest is approaching 100 million. And all of them are generating big data, enabling predictive analytics, feeding into marketing automation with a lot of personalization. People call them channels, but broadcast media like billboards or TV ads were channels. These seem like much more. How are they going to be affecting marketers? Seth Godin: Think about someone who goes to a new high school, think of all the channels there are at the new high school. There are the yearbook, the daily announcements, the school newspaper, people talking to each other at lunch. We can make a list of 1,000 ways the people at school are finding things out. But the new kid at school isn’t a brand manager. The new kid at school isn’t saying, “How do I own this channel, and how do I own that channel?” The new kid at school is saying, “Who do I want to be? Because if I act like the person I want to be, the word will get out”. And so you can’t really think of a channel as a choke point, where if you spend some money you can own that choke point. Instead, go in the opposite direction. All of these new ways of communicating mean that the more you act a certain way, the more likely it is that the truth will get out about who you are. EIU: Isn’t the job of marketers to push out their self-definition through all of the channels? Seth Godin: They can try, but it’s not working. Just call up the people at Procter & Gamble or the people in
the Republican or the Democratic Party and say, “How are you doing on pushing out the message you want everyone to be saying?” And what they brag about is, “Oh, look how great that Oreo thing was”. One Tweet got seen by everyone during the Super Bowl. But one tweet about Oreos doesn’t sell a single extra Oreo. What marketers have to understand is that mass marketing was a brilliant and important way of supporting mass manufacturing. It was one of the key elements of the growth of the UK and US economies. For 100 years mass marketing sat right next to mass manufacturing. But now it’s over. It is just over. Mass manufacturing is over and mass marketing is over. And you can do all sorts of things to try to get it to come back, but it’s not going to come back. EIU: So if the marketer isn’t pushing
out a message through those channels, what is marketing doing with them? You say that word will get out. What’s the marketer’s role in getting the word out? Seth Godin: Their role is coming up with an experience, an environment, a service, a product, that people can’t help talking about, and then consistently delivering on that. Say you start a real boutique hotel. Then you make sure the right people are staying there in the first few weeks. Word gets out among their circle of friends, who talk to the next circle
and the next, and the hotel is sold
out. Or you can start a fake boutique hotel, which Hyatt Hotel is trying to do. You skip all those steps and make it look like a boutique hotel. And
then you’re puzzled and surprised when there isn’t a line out the door. The reason there isn’t a line out the door is that the people you were hoping to connect with can tell that it’s not a real boutique hotel. EIU: What’s engagement marketing? How does it differ from other
ways of relating to customers? Seth Godin: Here’s an experience that we’ve all had. You call a big company. You hear a recording that says, “Your call is very important to us, but due to unusually heavy call volume, we don’t have anyone to answer your call”, and they put you on hold for ten minutes. Then the person who answers the phone is measured on how fast they get you to hang up. That’s the opposite of customer engagement. This company spent a lot of time and money to set up a phone queuing system. Then when you talk to them, they don’t care enough to talk back, or if they do talk back, they put someone in your face who has been programmed to be a cog in a machine. If you’re serious about engaging the customer, you realize that the most valuable moments you have are when the customer is using your product, on the phone with you, actually engaged with you. If we over invest in that, or do what feels like over investing, we are far more likely to lead to the other sorts of interactions that we can’t buy, that we can’t control, but that we need desperately to happen. EIU: Marketers have responsibility for every part of the company with which the customer comes into contact.
 Yet they don’t have the authority to determine what happens there. They’re influencers. In fact, in some companies that are dominated by engineering or operations, they struggle for influence. Seth Godin: I don’t buy that. Your premise is wrong. If you start listing successful companies, almost all of them are run by people who do what I call marketing. EIU: But all the parts of the company that engage with the customer or that have customer-facing responsibilities don’t report to the marketer. How 
do marketers orchestrate those customer touch points while they’re not in charge of all those people? Seth Godin: Nobody’s in charge of everyone. Even the CEO. Influence is way more important than authority. The first half of the answer is that you need to build influence. You gain influence as you give up more credit and take on more responsibility. The second half is that marketers need to make an effort to not sell out so cheap. What marketers usually do is accept the budget, accept the product and promise the world. That’s why they get fired so much. On average, the CMO gets fired every year and a half, because they make big promises and can’t keep them. They’re unable to keep them because they think advertising can save the day, and it can’t. What I propose they do instead is refuse to market products that they don’t believe in. The CMO needs to refuse to have their team push work out the door for stuff that doesn’t keep the story consistent and worth telling. Toyota let a worker stop the whole assembly line because the quality of a spark plug was off. That’s what marketers need to do. They need to hit the button and say, “No, we’re not going do this anymore because the customer service people are letting us down when they answer the phone” or “We’re not going to do this anymore because I’ve seen the waste going into the river and I don’t want to be responsible for marketing that brand”. Spinning for the wrong 
cause is beneath you.
 Once the CMO does this, everything upstream will improve. And to the marketer who says to me, “But
 I can’t do that cause they won’t listen,” I say, “Go work somewhere else. Because if you’ve got talent, doing good spin for a company that doesn’t get it is beneath you”. EIU: How can you tell when a customer is engaged? What kinds of tangible metrics can show the impact of customer engagement? Seth Godin: I don’t have a glib answer. Any mass metric is going to be false. I’ll give you an example: Six weeks ago I fired the New York Times. I said, “I don’t want to be on the New York Times Best Seller List anymore because it’s a false metric that’s usually gamed and doesn’t represent the post-mass-marketing world. Rather than ask for rating points or share of mind, I would ask questions like “Who would miss me if I was gone? With whom do I actually have permission to follow up? How many people call us on the phone asking when our new thing is going to be ready?” Those questions show depth of feeling and concern. If you want to be meaningful, you can’t be too general. EIU: So you’ve got this asset called customer engagement. You’ve invested in it and built it up and
you can measure it in various ways. How would you talk to a CFO about that? When he asks for the ROI, do you think you could tell him? Seth Godin: When I invented email marketing in 1990, I went to every big company you can think of and tried to sell them on what we had built. And they would say, “What’s the ROI?” Well, my first answer was “What’s the ROI on that TV ad you ran last night? You don’t know. And you’ve been running TV for years because it feels safe. And you like the fact that you can’t measure how well it works because then you don’t have to take the blame for it not working”. If you’re a really good direct marketer, you make money for a while. But I think we’re moving into a post-direct marketing world where we can’t measure ROI. But we can measure whether you are gaining market share and profit because you’re making great stuff. When everything is driven by metrics you often end up in a race to the bottom, and the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. Instead, some people decide to race to the top — not just in pricing, but in terms of the usefulness of what they make and how much fun it is to talk about it. Those people are doing great. I think that’s the challenge of the CMO. Put the spreadsheet away and do some serious work to make stories worth telling. EIU: Do you think the group that’s racing to the top through customer engagement is growing compared with those who are racing to the bottom? Seth Godin: CEOs care a lot about stock price, and what they’re seeing again and again is that Sears is cratering because Sears was focused 100% on spreadsheets, whereas a brand like Apple, which is a mass brand in the sense that they have big market share, is hiring people from the larger consumer goods industry. They understand that in a retail environment engagement matters more than giving people a coupon. I hope you enjoyed the perspective Seth Godin shared in this interview. You can check out more on our page dedicated to the Next Era of Marketing site and follow my blog series each week. Do you have a question that you’d like to add to this interview? I’d love to hear what you think, please share it in the comments below. Related Resources