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By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: January 6, 2015 | Engagement Marketing This is going to sound like a bit of a no brainer, but I love the holidays. Largely because I get an opportunity to spend time with my family and friends but also because it’s the perfect time to take a really deep breath, wipe the slate clean and collect all the learnings from the past year. And I have to say, I’m truly excited for 2015. For those of you just joining us (and perhaps still devising your New Year’s resolutions), welcome. I encourage you to check out my post kicking off this series. The posts are focused on conversations that The Economist Intelligence Unit has had with six marketing visionaries, folks like Seth Godin and Aditya Joshi, who discuss the next era of marketing. During a recent conversation with the EIU, John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, shared his “formula” for marketing success in the future. Here are some of his key points that resonated with me: “From Push to Pull”: Traditional marketing has typically focused on the three “I’s” – intercept, isolate and insulate. I don’t know about you, but none of those jump out to me as having a positive connotation or strike me as the ideal way to deal with our company’s most valuable resource – customers. Rather, John says, we should be looking to employ the power of the three “As” – attract, assist and affiliate.  If marketers don’t make this shift and engage customers, they will be displaced by entrants that will. “There is a new ROI metric”: According to John, the “I” stands for information. It’s about “return on information” versus investment. With so much data available, marketers must start to carefully track how much it costs to accumulate information about a customer and divide that by what they can earn by using that information more effectively. “Privacy is different under pull”: John notes that privacy is a core issue in collecting information – but, that in a ‘pull’ model, the marketer is serious about being more and more helpful to the customer.  And, that most people don’t care about disclosing information if they are confident it will be used to help them.  I often talk about this as the ‘relevancy’ factor.  If it’s used for relevant and useful purposes, you actually will find people wanting to give you *more* data. So much more on each of these points in the full interview below. Give a read and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear what you or your marketing teams are striving to do better, more of, or less of in 2015. And, for more great stuff, visit www.marketo.com/next-era. Economist Intelligence Unit: Marketing has changed pretty dramatically in the past five years. Where do you think it’s going to be five years from now? John Hagel: Oh [chuckles], it’s definitely heading for a major transformation. If you think it has changed over the past five years, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Part of it is the technology–the evolution of the Internet, digital, mobile and so on. But the more fundamental part is the fact that over time more and more people and companies are going to be competing for our attention. If you’re a marketer, you’re going to have to do some fundamental rethinking of your approach to marketing. The three I’s… One way to frame it is to say that we’re moving from push to pull. The traditional marketing model has been driven by what I call the “three I’s”: intercept, isolate and insulate. “Intercept” means getting people’s attention wherever they are and whenever you need them. My favorite example is video screens above the urinals in the men’s room. Talk about a captive audience. First you intercept. Then you “isolate”. It’s you and me and nobody else, I’ve got you and I can get my message to you without interference or distraction. Finally, you want to “insulate” people over time– create a walled garden where it’s just you and me forever. EIU:  But people won’t stand for that anymore. That’s going to annoy them and drive them away. …versus the three A’s John Hagel: That’s right. The three I’s are increasingly challenged. So let me pose an alternative. Instead of the three I’s, think about three A’s: attract, assist and affiliate. “Attract” means motivating people to seek you out, to find you. “Assist” means finding ways to help people, both before and after a purchase, to get more value and use from the product or service. Ultimately that leads to a third “A”, which is “affiliate”. Instead of one-to-one marketing, the affiliate idea suggests bringing in any and all participants that could be helpful to the prospective buyer at relevant points in time. It’s about creating a broader ecosystem of participants who can be more and more helpful to the customers you’re trying to reach.That’s a very different model that goes against the most basic assumptions of traditional push-based marketing. EIU: That’s a pretty radical change. How would it happen? John Hagel: The market will force us to change. The traditional approach of push-based marketing is not going to work as well as it has in the past when there are more and more things competing for our attention. It’s going to be a painful migration. Companies are going to have to walk away from a method that got them where they are today. Engage or die EIU: And if they don’t? John Hagel: They’ll be displaced by entrants who will come in and engage the attention of the people they’re trying to reach. EIU: What do you think the most effective marketers will be doing five years from now? What should marketers be doing now to make sure they’re in that group? John Hagel: Technology is a key catalyst for these changes, so marketers are going to have to become more and more focused on the Internet to connect and build relationships. The core of the marketing budget used to be traditional media; now that will migrate to the periphery. And what used to be on the periphery will become more and more central to how you pursue these pull-based models. Mobile phone technology will be very important. And we’ll have to figure out how to co-ordinate activity across a large number of participants to build relationships with the customer and ensure that they’re getting the value at the appropriate time. EIU: How will the way marketers use data change? John Hagel: The Internet allows you to collect rich records of interactions, which can lead to much more insight about customers and their needs in real time. That requires deep skills in terms of taking what is usually not very clean or comprehensive data and finding patterns that can be helpful. Waiting to be asked is not enough Assistance is not just waiting for the customer to ask you something; it’s being proactive and becoming in effect a trusted advisor to the customer who says, “You know, I have some information about you and based on that information I can give you some recommendations that are going to be really valuable to you and save you time and money.” That requires a different level of skill than waiting for the phone to ring and taking an order. It’s being thoughtful. The risk is that if you misuse the data and bombard the customers with unwanted recommendations, they’re gone. The challenge is how to be helpful in modest ways initially and use that as a basis to build trust, get permission to access more data and become even more helpful. One of the things that I recommend is using a different set of metrics. We all know traditional metrics like ROA and ROI. The new metrics measure what I call “return on attention” rather than return on assets. EIU: So the numerator is how much it costs to get the attention of a customer. What’s the denominator? John Hagel: It is the economic value of that attention, which is the value of the relationship that you can expect based on that attention. It may be a small number, but the cost of attracting that customer attention is also low under the pull-based model. The new ROI EIU: Are there any other new metrics that you recommend? John Hagel: The other measure is ROI, but it’s not return on investment. It’s return on information. It’s starting to track carefully how much it costs to accumulate information about a customer and divide that by what I can earn by using that information more effectively. Both metrics are central to pull-based marketing. Both help executives start to think about a pull-based versus a push-based approach. EIU: To make your initial recommendations, you need information about the customer. But the customer may not want to give it to you. How do you deal with privacy concerns? John Hagel: I think the privacy concerns are more of an issue with the push-based model. I have an incentive to generate revenue not just by selling you more products, but also by selling the data that I’ve accumulated about you, the customer, to as many third parties as I can. Privacy is different under pull Pull is different. With pull, you’re serious about being more and more helpful to the customer. Your focus is on, “How do I take this data that I have acquired through prior interactions with the customer or third parties and use that to be helpful?” Most people don’t care about disclosing information if they are confident it will be used to help them. Their concern is “Are you going to take advantage of this data to do something that’s not in my interest?” or “Are you going to give this data to somebody else who will misuse it?” That’s the privacy concern. You overcome this by taking action in small steps. You think, “What small steps using existing data can I take to demonstrate how helpful I can be to a set of customers?” That builds trust. They think, “They had information about me and were able to give me advice that I hadn’t thought of.” That’s ultimately going to be the key to addressing the privacy issue: demonstrating through action that the data you’re accumulating is for the benefit of the customer. EIU: How would you define the concept of engagement marketing or customer engagement? John Hagel: This idea of anticipating needs and getting permission to make recommendations is one level of pull-based marketing. A further dimension is inspiring people to act and motivating them to learn. That’s engagement. The power of narrative EIU: How do you get engagement? John Hagel: One way is to move from stories to narratives. We’re all familiar with the notion of stories as a powerful way to attract attention and create emotional engagement. But I make the case that there is an even more powerful approach, which is what I call “narratives”. Most people use these terms interchangeably. EIU: I certainly do. How are they different? John Hagel: Stories are self-contained: beginning, middle, resolution. Something happened, here’s how. A story is about me, the storyteller, or some other people over there. It’s not about you, the listener. EIU: You can certainly put yourself into the story. That’s a key to good storytelling: a character that the listener can identify with. It’s not about you John Hagel: You can use your imagination and figure out how you might have acted, but the story is not about you. In contrast, a narrative is open-ended, about some opportunity, and whether the listener gets the benefit depends on the listener’s choices. The resolution has not yet occurred. You’re talking about some opportunity that hasn’t yet materialized and the ability to embrace this opportunity hinges on the listener’s actions. A narrative is a call to action. It says, “How it ends is up to you. What are you going to do?” It’s a different approach. I don’t deny the power of stories, but millions of people have given their lives for narratives–religious narratives, revolutionary narratives, social narratives of various types–that are so powerful they move people to actually sacrifice the most precious thing, their life, in order to influence the ending. Very few companies have harnessed the power of narrative. Apple is one. The narrative of Apple’s early days was captured in a tight slogan: “Think different.” EIU: What is it that gives that slogan its power? John Hagel: The short form of the narrative was the idea that generations of technology had forced us to become cogs in the wheel, standardized units, numbers in a big machine. For the first time we now have technology that enables each of us to achieve our unique potential. But this is not a given. It is not going to happen automatically. It requires you to think differently. Are you going to think differently? The choice is yours. The narrative wasn’t about Apple. It was about the people that Apple was trying to speak to. It was a call to action: “Think different.” EIU: Apple is almost a religion. John Hagel: That’s how many people perceive it. Few companies have been able to create the inspiration, motivation and engagement that Apple has. A lot of it has to do with the narrative Apple communicated every day. EIU: So when you make your pitch about the power of narrative, how narratives are more motivating and inspirational than stories, how do businesspeople react? John Hagel: They say, “This is great. I’m going to call my PR department and my marketing people and get them to write me a narrative.” Narratives don’t come from PR But narratives don’t work that way. Your PR people may be able to come up with a good story. But with narratives you’ve got to demonstrate day-to-day your own commitment to that narrative. One of the things that made “Think different” so powerful was the examples of Wozniak and Jobs. Those two guys were the perfect examples of people thinking different and expressing their unique individuality. They lived the narrative. How is a big company going to live a narrative that will engage and motivate the audience they’re trying to reach? EIU: One of the other challenges that marketers always face is getting people in the company to keep the focus on the customer–the outside-in perspective. You said that the narrative is about the listener, not the speaker. That has to be difficult for executives whose first impulse is to tell customers how great their company is. John Hagel: I also see that when I speak to executives about narratives. They often have this reaction, “Oh, we have a narrative. We came from humble beginnings. We overcame incredible challenges. We did awesome things. And our story is open-ended, because who knows what kinds of awesome things are yet to come?” But the problem with that narrative, of course, is it’s not about the people you’re trying to reach. EIU: You’re asking the audience to sit there in wonder and awe at all the amazing things you’ve done. And of course buy your products, which is the unstated goal here. Do something extraordinary John Hagel: The narrative is a call to action that says, “You have an opportunity to do something extraordinary in your life, but you’ve got to make choices and take action that go far beyond the purchase of anyone’s products.” EIU: Let’s get back to nuts and bolts for a minute. How do you see marketing operations changing over the next five years? How the function is organized, the skills marketers are going to need, budgets, that kind of thing. John Hagel: From an operations viewpoint, I see three big changes. First, finding better ways to integrate technology with marketing initiatives. Second, learning how to identify relevant third parties–influencers or potential affiliates, for instance–and motivate them to get onboard your platform and find ways to help them become more helpful to customers. It’s a job of orchestration. Third, getting up to speed with the analytics around big data is going to become more and more critical. My experience is that most marketing departments have very limited capability on that front. EIU: How is the skill set of marketers going to change? Either the type of person who works in marketing or people who bridge marketing and other functions? If you have the passion, you’ll get the skills John Hagel: I think it’s less about skills and more about passion. Ultimately what we need in marketing departments are people who are really passionate about the customer and can cross the table and put themselves in the customer’s shoes and say, “What does the customer need and how can I help the customer get it, wherever it resides?” or “How can I motivate the customer through a narrative that identifies an opportunity that’s meaningful to the customer?” or “How can we act in ways that will again communicate and demonstrate that narrative?” At the end of the day passion trumps skills. If you have a passionate commitment to make an impact on the customer by being more and more helpful to them, you’ll either develop the skills yourself or you will find ways to connect to the skills wherever they reside. It may be in other functions within the organization. It may be in third parties. If you have the passion, you will find a way.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: January 13, 2015 | Engagement Marketing I’m now about halfway through a series of conversations the Economist Intelligence Unit had with six marketing pundits who have shared with us their thoughts on everything from the changing roles of marketers, new ROI metrics, and the power of authentic, continuous relationships. And I hope you’ve found these as insightful and helpful as I have. This week, I want to share a recent conversation with Marc Mathieu, SVP of Marketing at Unilever. He explains that while marketing used to be about creating a myth and selling, it’s now about finding a truth and sharing it. And to that I say amen. Technology, Marc explains (and as we all know), has changed the way people communicate, making it more open and real-time. Thus, the onus is on us to understand and embed it into our marketing strategies and approach. A few of other things that really resonated with me: Vast Changes: The pace of change in our world as marketers is moving at warp speed—Marc observes that his day is now filled with topics that were nowhere near his agenda just 3 short years ago. This feels self-evident because we all live this as marketers every day, but it is a staggering fact when you pause to reflect on it academically. NO other function is transforming at such a rate. A Marketing First World: The business needs the marketing function, and that need is growing. Marketing should be looking at trends in society and helping to evolve the organization’s vision, strategy and plans while at the same time staying true to the purpose of the brand and the company. Moreover, marketing should be the ones helping to define the purpose. Make the Inside Reflect the Outside: Marketers have a responsibility to ensure that the inside of the corporation reflects the changes that are happening outside the company. Especially when it comes to technology, the pace of change among consumers is often faster than the changes inside the organization. We need to modify our outreach based on how the outside world is changing. And at the same time we need to bring those external changes into the corporation. I encourage you to read the full interview with Marc as he discusses how they translated these beliefs into a new initiative for Unilever, Project Sunlight. And as always, for more great stuff, visit www.marketo.com/next-era. Economist Intelligence Unit: Marketing has changed a lot in the last five years. Let’s go out to 2020. Where is marketing heading? Marc Mathieu: I can answer the question by describing how I spent my time today. For perhaps a quarter of the day I spoke with people about data and data strategy. I spent a couple of hours talking about artificial intelligence. I also spent a couple of hours talking about start-ups and how they’re changing marketing. After we finish this conversation I’ll be talking to people about smartphones and how they’re changing business and marketing. That’s my day today. Three years ago none of these would have been on my radar screen. I would not have spent a lot of time on data or marketing platforms or artificial intelligence or start-ups. I think it says a lot about how vast the change is. To me it proves that marketing is changing at an incredible pace and the biggest driver is technology—how we connect with people, learn from people, connect with entrepreneurs and follow everyone. EIU: Three years ago we had mobile, we had social media and we had a tremendous amount of data, so I’m not sure how that’s a change. Marc Mathieu: The trends existed, but they didn’t permeate the everyday life of the marketer. And marketers were not necessarily looking at ways to embed them at the scale they are today. Three years ago those were pilot programs. And mobile existed, but now we use mobile to think about developing personal relationships with people at a scale that enables a company like Unilever to actually connect to a large group of consumers. The scale wasn’t there to be very useful to an organization like Unilever. Share the truth EIU: How is the shift from the creative side to data and platforms going to change the job of marketers like you? Marc Mathieu: Our strategy is around sustainability, transparency and trust. And that’s enabled by changes in how people communicate, which technology has made more open and real-time. Today, and even more so a few years in the future, we can build a direct relationship with people by having a conversation with them. There’s a quote I like: “Marketing used to be about creating a myth and selling; now it’s about finding a truth and sharing it.” We’re looking for ways to share a truth, to invite in the audience and let them take ownership and share it with others. You see that in our Project Sunlight campaign. We created a command center where for several weeks we had two or three people from each of 12 to 14 agencies, plus marketers who publish, analyze, listen and edit. The conversation is dynamic and in real time. The marketers can respond to the interests they see building. Admit you don’t have all the answers EIU: You can’t sell a myth in an age where everybody sees everything—where social media makes communication completely transparent. It sounds like Unilever sees transparency as an opportunity. Marc Mathieu: We have an initiative to double our business while reducing our environmental footprint in order to have a more positive social impact on society. We recognized that in some areas we knew exactly what we would do and in others we needed to figure it out along the way. We admitted that. We acknowledged that we were leading in some areas, but in others we had a long way to go. In Project Sunlight, we interviewed ordinary people in the form of a social experiment documentary. We sought people’s reactions to discover truths as opposed to creating advertising to promote a self-serving point of view. EIU: Do you think marketing is going to become more important as a source of differentiation outside of the consumer goods industry? Marc Mathieu: I don’t think marketing’s importance is specific to particular industries. People expect truth, transparency and real-time engagement and communication. That puts a huge responsibility on marketing to be able to understand those trends and embed them in the marketing strategy. But it also gets to the heart of the business strategy. The business needs the marketing function, and that need is growing. Marketing looks at trends in society and helps evolve the organization’s vision, strategy and plans while at the same time staying true to the purpose of the brand and the company. Marketing also helps the organization become more open to ways to deliver on the purpose outside the specific products you sell while at the same time being very clear about what is part of the purpose and what is outside the purpose. A lot of the work I’ve done at Unilever has been around ensuring that each brand has a clearly articulated purpose and connects to sustainable living practices. Make the inside reflect the outside Marketers also have a responsibility to ensure that the inside of the corporation reflects the changes that are happening outside the company. Especially when it comes to technology, the pace of change among consumers is often faster than the changes inside the organization. Think of how Facebook and Twitter and Google have changed our personal lives. EIU: It sounds like you’re saying marketing has a responsibility to ensure that the organization reflects the markets they are selling to. So if consumers are using Twitter, if they’re on Facebook, then those are also important trends to incorporate into the organization as well. You are bridging the gap between the lives of consumers and the lives of people in the organization. Marc Mathieu: We need to modify our outreach based on how the outside world is changing. And at the same time we need to bring those external changes into the corporation. Those are the two big trends. EIU: Could you take a crack at defining engagement marketing? What does it mean to you? Marc Mathieu: It means developing a personalized relationship with customers in a way that yields a high degree of utility at every moment, depending on their needs, moods and mindset at that moment. One of the reasons brands like Google and Apple are so relevant today is because we engage with them all the time. With Google, I’m on solid ground: search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth and so on. We engage with Google constantly, which results in a high degree of intimacy and makes it very relevant. With Apple, it’s through the phone, the apps, the computer and the music. The brand is in front of me many times a day, but it’s not in my face. Apple recently removed the “I” so that it’s no longer iPad but Apple Pad and no longer iWatch but Apple Watch. So they’ve started to put the Apple brand in the core of the product brands. That’s how I would define engagement: It’s the personalized, conceptualized interaction touch that is relevant to me multiple times a day. Define the product broadly EIU: I can see what you’re saying with Google. But there are a lot of companies that you may need, but don’t need to interact with very much. I’m thinking of my insurance company, for instance. Maybe I interact with them twice a year. How do you apply engagement to organizations where the nature of the product is such that there are very few touch points? Marc Mathieu: I would disagree with you about your insurance company. If it’s car insurance, you probably engage with your car twice a day if not more. Think about insurance in the context of your relationship with your car as opposed to the relationship with your insurer. EIU: If you define the product broadly enough, in the context of how it is actually used, engagement is possible across a much wider range of interactions. Marc Mathieu: Which is exactly why I spend a lot of time thinking about the role of platforms in the marketing of the future. Platforms can bring together the delivery of multiple products and services in ways that can help serve people’s needs. Think about the evolving business models of Google and Apple. Last year they were voted the number-one and -two brands in the world. Ask yourself the question, “What does that mean for my brands and marketing strategies?” We developed The Unilever Foundry as a platform to connect our brand with marketing start-ups. We used to work with start-ups one by one, but now we have a system that enables us to work with start-ups at the scale of Unilever. It’s not a consumer-facing platform, but it’s still external-facing. It’s an ecosystem that is integrated into a network of Unilever brand vice-presidents, who are the people start-ups want to develop pilots with.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: January 20, 2015 | Engagement Marketing How different would our world be if we judged brands the same way we judged our healthy personal relationships? Let’s say you compare your relationship with a brand to your relationship with a dear friend—would you look forward to seeing them? Would you care about what they had to say? Do you both share the same values? Do you praise them around others, even when they’re not around? It’s a thought-provoking analogy from Jim Stengel, CEO of the Jim Stengel Company and former Global Chief Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble. Jim sat with the Economist Intelligence Unit to discuss his vision of the next era of marketing, and what marketers need in order to drive engagement—the new currency in brand relationships. According to Jim, without measures on engagement and customer loyalty, businesses will not be sustainable. I couldn’t agree more. Here are some of the themes he shared that struck a chord with me: The rise of the ‘innernet’: Yes, you’re reading that correctly. At last year’s Cannes Lions Festival, people used the word innernet: the idea that things will be coming to you, rather than you seeking them. I thought this was interesting because of how closely it is tied to personalization and marketing automation; as we see the shift toward engagement marketing, a personal experience from brands is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Jim says as much when he notes, “The processes are going to be automated. The whole industry will go the way of Amazon.” Brands will embrace ambitious purpose: It’s not just about revenue any more. Companies will aspire to have a much bigger impact on their customers, consumers, and the world. As I’ve noted in the past, the entire mission of marketing is shifting—from an era of mass and transactional marketing to an era of engagement marketing. Engagement marketing is about building relationships—which is much bigger than just selling a product. Many leading brands that are launching initiatives are going in this direction, like Marc Mathieu’s Project Sunlight initiative for Unilever. Embracing your brand’s ambitious purpose is the antithesis to broadcast or mass marketing. It speaks to the human elements of your brand and acknowledges your customers as humans instead of targets or impressions. Flaunting your humanity: In the same vein as ambitious purpose, companies will see the importance of bringing a sense of humanity among employees and customers. Jim cites an example from Skype, whose goal was to show the human impact of people connecting through their technology. Skype created a heartwarming video of two girls living in different countries, each born with one arm, who formed a friendship on Skype. To my ear, this echoes another key aspect of this new era of engagement marketing—listening. Nothing demonstrates and highlights our humanity more than when we listen to our customers, to each other. The ability to then respond and interact thoughtfully, sincerely, and compassionately will separate the great marketers from the good marketers. This sort of humanity in marketing will come from enterprises and start-ups alike as consumers’ expectations of their brands change. In thinking about “what are the most effective marketers going to be doing five years from now?”, Jim’s themes were clear—personalization, automation, ambitious purpose, humanity, and the visual aspect of communication. I encourage you to read Jim’s full interview below and weigh in on the terrific insights. And add what you think about the rest of Jim’s 2020 predictions in the comments below. Do you think marketing will be stronger, more powerful, and more serious in the next five years? I sure do. That is what we mean here at Marketo when we describe this as a “Marketing First” world. And as always, for more of these great interviews with industry luminaries like Seth Godin,Aditya Joshi and John Hagel, visit www.marketo.com/next-era. Economist Intelligence Unit: Think about 2020. Five years out. What will the big trends in marketing be over the next five years? Jim Stengel: Personalization is a big one. At Cannes this year I actually heard the word “innernet”, I-N-N-E-R-N-E-T, how the Internet is becoming the innernet—the idea that things will be coming to you instead of you going out and searching. It’s already happening, but we’re only in the beginning. When things come to us in a personalized way, it will simplify things for us. Google knows where I’m about to go and what I might want to eat because I let Google have my personal data. Personalization is going to happen big time. A lot of innovation. And a lot of startups. The second theme is automation. There’s still a lot of human involvement in things like advertising. The processes are going to be automated. The whole industry will go the way of Amazon. If you believe in the drive for efficiency, automation is the way to get it. Google is well placed. AOL is well placed. Others are vying for a place. On the softer side, the idea of ambitious purpose is a huge theme. Companies aspire to have a much larger impact on customers, consumers, and the world. It’s where so many of the leading brands are going and have gone. And these are brands that have experienced sustained growth. Flaunt your humanity Jim Stengel: I guess it’s related to ambitious purpose, but there is also this idea of a strong sense of humanity among employees and also with customers. A lot of the start-ups are leading this. Skype is no longer a start-up, it’s owned by Microsoft, but it’s working to show the human impact of people connecting through their technology. They did a wonderful video of two girls in different countries, one each born with one arm, who became friends over Skype and got through life exchanging tips and hints. They finally ended up meeting in person. This sense of humanity is a really strong theme in marketing. The last one is the fact that everything is becoming more visual. The web is turning into a visual medium. That’s why Snapchat and video advertising are exploding. EIU: You already bridge to the second question, which is “What are the most effective marketers going to be doing five years from now?” The themes you listed are personalization, automation, ambitious purpose, humanity, and the visual aspect of communication. When you talk about automation, you’re talking about marketing automation obviously. But you’re also talking about an online marketplace for advertising that could displace ad agencies from their traditional function. Jim Stengel: That’s absolutely right. And it enables a tremendous amount of analytics to be done with that data because as pushing out ads and content becomes automated, datasets are created that are much easier to understand. That’s why you’re already seeing and explosion in predictive analytics. Marketers are getting much more specific information about where to put their resources. I work with a company called MarketShare out of Santa Monica. They were an early company in that field and they’re just growing exponentially. Cheap computing power, huge growth in data, marketers who need to understand their spending, and that’s why there’s a real explosion in start-ups in the space. Use the tools of marketing to get spectacular results EIU: So all these big trends have helped to elevate marketing into a more important function than it was in the past, when it was synonymous with advertising. Will marketing continue to grow in importance as a function in the next five years? Jim Stengel: I think so. Marketers are going to be executing against the themes we talked about, but they’ll increasingly come to be seen as people who can help companies with their growth strategies. Companies are growing earnings faster than they’re growing sales, and that can’t go on forever. The market places a huge value on growth. There are incredible companies with strong legacies that don’t have a growth culture. Those companies can use the tools of marketing to get spectacular results. They need to attract talent. They need to build the right capabilities for the future. That requires a strong marketing organization with an understanding of its role in the enterprise, of the consumer, of what about their product or their service is attractive and what that can lead to. Getting insights into the consumer is huge, and that’s marketing’s role. Marketing used to be seen as the communication department. But marketing is really at the center of strategy, and strategy means where the company is going and what choices it is making to get there–how it is going to win. When marketing takes a leadership role on those questions, there is a more robust and customer-centric strategy. The company has a clear direction. Pivot from your ambitious purpose EIU: The traditional idea of marketing is that it comes at the end. After the product is created, they ask marketers, “How do we sell this?” What you’re saying is marketing comes at the start. Jim Stengel: Absolutely. Marketing helps the organization clarify and articulate its ambitious purpose, and everything pivots around that. The CEO and the entire enterprise need to ensure that marketing is part of the team that brings the ambitious purpose to life. Marketers that do that well can really distinguish themselves. EIU: Let me go on a brief tangent. We hear more and more about the impact of privacy, especially in Europe. Google is now being asked to erase people’s pasts based on their requests. Will that interfere with personalization or the other trends you’ve talked about? Jim Stengel: It’s a big issue and I don’t want to minimize it. But if you look at consumers, especially the generation now in their 20s or late teens, they’ve grown up sharing everything and have no qualms about it. They see the value tradeoff to be very positive for them. Consumers want to share their information. They want things to be personalized. This is going to happen. View brands as relationships EIU: How would you define the concept of “engagement marketing”? How does it differ from traditional ways of relating to customers? Jim Stengel: If you think about the customer using the metaphor of a relationship, you can’t go wrong. At P&G we used to say that if we measured our brands the way we measure healthy relationships with other people, it would lead to a high market share. So think about your relationships. Do you look forward to seeing that person? Do you care about them? Do they share your values? DO you speak well of them to others? That metaphor is powerful. It works in every category. Ask those kinds of questions to a leadership team about their customer and you get a whole different way of approaching a customer. When you start getting to things that drive engagement, your relationships change. The specific ways you measure engagement change based on the product category, but it’s a good way to start. How to get the CFO’s attention EIU: Engaged customers are an asset that you’ve invested in and built up over time. How do you explain the value of that asset to a CFO who wants to know about ROI? Do CFOs care about softer metrics? Jim Stengel: CFOs do care. But a lot of marketing people don’t fully understand what drives engagement. If you can quantify engagement, any CFO in the world will pay attention. And not just pay attention, but say “How can I help?” But too many marketing people don’t understand what drives growth, what drives market share and what makes their company preferred over others. EIU: So that brings us back to the question of what capabilities does a company need in order to drive engagement. Is it customer centricity? Is it the focus on the customer experience? Is it consistency across channels and touch points? Are they all equally important? Jim Stengel: The most important is a culture of customer centricity. “Culture” is not just a soft word. You can break it down into how people work and what they do. It is rituals. It is processes. It is who is getting a raise and who is getting promoted. What are the measures on personal work plans? What are the measures on the business? And if there isn’t some measure of customer experience, customer engagement, customer loyalty in those measures, it will not be sustainable. One thing you can look at across categories is the experience. What’s happening when people go online to buy you? What happens when they search your name? What happens when they walk down the aisle? Are you easy to find? To distinguish from others? Are you priced about right? Are you easy to carry? Are you easy to use once you get home? Are you easy to recycle? When you get into a more personal sale, like Zappos or an automobile, this idea of the consumer experience can be rich. There are many interactions and touch points where the consumer can be engaged, annoyed or indifferent. But this idea of paying attention to the consumer experience crosses every category, and that’s often where I start with clients. The process is always rich with insights. Stronger, more powerful and taken more seriously EIU: Do you think marketers are getting better at engaging customers? Is the quest for engagement becoming more widely accepted, both inside and outside of the marketing profession? Jim Stengel: Yes, I do. Look at the books written now. Look at what start-ups are spending on marketing and what investors are paying for marketing start-ups. Look at the quality of the people in the jobs. Look at the number of brands that have broken away and differentiated themselves. Marketing is becoming a stronger, more powerful, more talented and more serious function of business. Everyone in the world wants to figure out what’s going on at brands like Red Bull and Nike. They are winning by being consumer-centric and driven by ambitious purpose.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: January 27, 2015 | Engagement Marketing As we reach our final interview in a series of conversations the EIU has held with six visionaries on the next era of marketing, I hope you’ve learned as much as I have along the way about the importance of finding a truth and sharing it, judging your brand as you would judge a healthy relationship and the power of narrative. This week, we sit down with Gavin Heaton, digital strategist for IBM, Fujitsu, and McDonalds, and now the founder of the Disruptor’s Handbook, a network that helps companies unlock the potential of disruptive business models. In this interview, Gavin mentions a conversation he has with a futurist friend on predicting trends. His friend says, “When change is accelerating, to look five years into the future, you have to look ten years into the past and that will give you a sense of how much things have changed.” So let’s flash back to 2005 for a moment. Wi-Fi came of age in 2005. Radio frequency identification (RFID), blogs, and hybrid cars were heralded as the “next big things.” Mass marketing ruled and marketing was heavily focused on brand awareness. Marketing’s come a long way, but where’s it heading next? The Power of PANDA: Gavin talks about the future of marketing along 5 dimensions guided by this acronym– (P)urpose, (A)nalytics, (N)etworks, (D)igital, and (A)rt. I encourage you to read the notes below—but, one thing that struck me was the notion of art—that the technical aspects of what we do will once again fade to the background and allow marketers to focus on the creative element of what we can do in the digital medium. This is an enticing vision—and, of course, only serves to raise the bar for marketers everywhere to rebuild and retool with digital skills and technologies so that they can indeed get to this new world. There is no question in my mind that the new world is a new mix of art and science—but, that today’s marketers are struggling with the new science. Conversation must have a purpose: As we have been talking about this new era of marketing—the era of engagement marketing—this topic was right on the money. One of the key principles of engagement marketing is that engagement must be ‘directed’—that we as brands have somewhere we want to go and that consumers also have somewhere they want to go. Gavin states, “The problem is often that businesses look at engagement as just having a conversation, rather than having a conversation for a reason.” A seat at the biggest table: A key element of Gavin’s acronym is Analytics Gavin states, “And the interesting thing is that thanks to the power of the analytics that we’ve been given, we can actually start to understand the impact marketing has on the business, rather than these fuzzy metrics like reach and frequency and so on. We’ve actually got a great deal of power that comes from understanding how marketing’s levers affect the bottom line, generate revenue, or deliver return on investment in marketing. That is hugely powerful.” I couldn’t agree more—it is a marketing first world I’d love to know how you feel about Gavin Heaton’s approach to digital marketing in the comments below. Do you think marketing deserves a seat in the boardroom? And to revisit these great interviews with industry luminaries like Aditya Joshi and Seth Godin, visit www.marketo.com/next-era. Economist Intelligence Unit: Your website is called “Servant of Chaos” and your URL is servantofchaos.com. How did you come up with that name? Gavin Heaton: I used to work for a consulting company and I headed up communications during a merger. Everything was changing every single day. We set up some Yahoo! accounts for instant messaging, and the account that I set up was serving the chaos and not really managing or controlling it. The name stuck. It became the name of my blog. And it still is. EIU: It’s a metaphor for how a lot of people, including marketers, feel about the world we’re in now, where we’re not guiding the future but trying to pick our way through it as it comes at us a little too fast. Gavin Heaton: That’s exactly how I think of it. EIU: Tell me a bit about your background. Gavin Heaton: I’ve worked on both the client side and the agency side of marketing, mostly for large enterprises, most recently big technology companies like SAP and IBM. I had a stint as the Head of Digital Strategy for the agency that looked after McDonald’s. We ran happymeal.com for four or five years and some digital strategies for McDonald’s globally. I spent about a year-and-a-half or two years working with a marketing analyst agency called Constellation Research. Digital marketing and digital transformation are my areas of specialty. EIU: That’s a diverse portfolio. You’ve got B2B IT services with SAP and IBM. You’ve got the agency side, the analyst side and pure consumer side in your work with McDonald’s. Gavin Heaton: Yes. And then over the last 12 to 18 months, I’ve been looking at start-ups and how they have started working in a more agile way. I’ve been running a couple of corporate start-ups for PwC as an internal venture project manager. EIU: Imagine you’re in 2020. Some marketers are firing on all cylinders and some are struggling. What’s the difference between the two groups? Gavin Heaton: I asked a futurist friend of mine how he guesses future trends. He said, “When change is accelerating, to look five years into the future you have to look ten years into the past, and that will give you a sense of how much things have changed.” So let’s look back to 2005. That’s our baseline. We’ll take what we’ve learned since then and use it to predict it out to 2020. The power of PANDA Gavin Heaton: I think we’re in a part of the cycle where what was old becomes new again and what we think is important now will become more transactional. I came up with an acronym, PANDA, to talk about how marketing is changing. The “P” is for “purpose”. There was a time when brands stood for something. That’s coming back. We need to give our customers a reason to engage with us. Purpose is going to be a driving force over the next five years. “A” is for “analytics”, which sounds obvious, except we need to apply the “A” to the “P”–the “analytics” to the “purpose”. We need to look beyond corporate social responsibility to analyze how the social impact plays out. Market protocols are creating shared values, shared space, and we need to understand where our brands fit within that space. And that’s going to have to be driven by analytics; you have to know most stuff that we don’t know right now. The “N” is for “networks”. Networks are powerful, as we’re seeing in the rise of the social web. And businesses are part of those networks. We need to understand what the networks are, which technologies join them together and where they overlap. The “D” is “digital”. I read a forecast the other day that 75% of marketing spend will be digital in the next two to three years. Digital doesn’t necessarily mean social; social has just been the DNA of how we do things. That digital connection, whether it is Internet of things, whether it is devices, whether it is a wearable, those digital networks are going to play a part in helping us understand who and where our customers are. The “A” is “art”. I think we’re going to start seeing less technical stuff. We’re going to see how our creative thoughts really handle digital in a creative way. It’s going to be more fun and more interesting, and the combination of the artistic and the technical will get us to a more emotional and engaging place. Earn a seat at the biggest table EIU: We hear a lot about the marketing-led future, about how marketing is becoming a more critical function because relationships with customers are what will differentiate companies in the future. But I don’t get the sense that marketing is currently considered any more critical than other functions. It’s all over the place. In some places it’s important, in some places it’s ignored. Do you agree with the notion that marketing is going to become more important across the board? Gavin Heaton: I do. We’ve heard for years that we need to have a seat at the table. That’s the table in the boardroom, not the one in the CFO’s office. And the interesting thing is that thanks to the power of analytics that we’ve been given, we can actually start to understand the impact marketing has on the business, rather than these fuzzy metrics like reach and frequency and so on. We’ve actually got a great deal of power that comes from understanding how marketing’s levers affect the bottom line, generate revenue, or deliver return on investment in marketing. That is hugely powerful. As we understand the “A”, we come to have a lot of leverage. The shift has been gradual. It’s starting to gain momentum. But it requires us to rethink things that we do and try to earn leads and revenues and profits rather than just sitting back and talking about creating brand value or reach or page views. Marketers need to earn a relationship that results in dollars reported back to the board. Analytics allows us to do that. Start small and simple to grasp the big and complex EIU: Marketing and sales often fight over revenue attribution. And that has its roots in a bigger idea that no single function is really responsible for revenue, for profitability, or for any of the big metrics that investors pay attention to. Everybody plays a role. How do you solve that puzzle? How do you get to some kind of shared understanding of marketing’s contribution? Or are we still going to be fighting in 2020? Gavin Heaton: In the start-up world you learn that you need to start small in order to understand and measure what’s happening. And only then do you think about how to apply those teachings to other disciplines within our business. For example, at SAP the community function was seen as outreach to developers. But it wasn’t really seen as a marketing-led function, and it wasn’t seen as anything that useful to our organization. It was a fairly small part of the company. There were 5,000 people and it was started by five or six. It grew fast. In five to ten years it went from having a few hundred members to having millions of members. And then they grasped the downstream impact. You could count the number of questions being answered through the community forums and see that those answers decrease the number of calls to the call center. You’ve got quantifiable value. It’s not revenue, but it does affect costs in a big way. The savings were in a completely different part of the company. Understanding the flows of the impact and value across an organization is really challenging. But if you do the hard work, you can get to the value. EIU: Could you talk a bit about how customer engagement differs from traditional ways of relating to customers? Gavin Heaton: How you measure engagement differs for audiences. If your business model is about selling stuff online, you need to get some circulation and velocity on the website. You could do that through social means; it could be interaction-based. It could be as simple as page views. Or it could be more complicated. It could be about how we drive an online connection to an in-store connection point or a purchase. Or you could use a membership-based strategy. The engagement number is a tricky one, because it does need to be understood in the context of your business and community. Easy to understand, hard to do EIU: There’s this idea that engagement is an asset that you invest in, and you can measure the ROI of your investment. We’re used to investing in physical assets, so some people are uncomfortable with it. Is it hard to get across the idea of investing in engagement and measuring the ROI of that investment? Gavin Heaton: It’s not difficult to grasp; it’s difficult to do. Think about the call center example. Here in Australia, we have a big telecommunications company called Telstra. Years ago they started doing outreach with Twitter, and they were getting into all sorts of trouble because they were looking for mentions of their brand on Twitter, and then they were responding by saying, “Here’s our phone number. Why don’t you give us a call?” And they were wondering why everyone hated them and why they were getting a lot of abuse on social networks. I was chatting with them and I said, “Look, to be honest, it’s because you don’t understand the dimensions of this channel, the resolution channel. The reason that they’re venting on Twitter is because they’re not getting through on the other channels. So you have to own that process, own that customer and own it through the resolution.” They ended up opening up a customer call center based entirely on Twitter. And things started to turn around for them. Last week I was speaking with a Telstra customer who said, “I rang the Telstra call center, and I was on hold for 50 minutes and got disconnected and had to call back.” And I said, “Why don’t you just tweet them, because they respond quickly there?” And sure enough, within 15 minutes, it was all sorted out. Conversation must have a purpose Gavin Heaton: The problem is often that businesses look at engagement as just having a conversation, rather than having a conversation for a reason. They often forget that customers expect a commercial discussion; it’s not like they want to be our friend after all. The conversation has to be about improving the customer experience or giving a demo or getting a discount. It’s a conversation for a commercial or transactional purpose. That doesn’t mean it can’t be engaging. In fact, if it could be a bit fun, that would be fantastic. Having a fun conversation for a commercial purpose makes the link between engagement and monetization. If you do those two things, then engagement can be measured and you will also have a downstream impact on your financials. That’s what we need to be able to do. EIU: Do you think marketers are getting better at engaging customers? Are companies getting better? Gavin Heaton: Yes, we’re getting better. Not in every case. Sometimes our conversations can be clunky and embarrassing, like hanging out with your uncle. But sometimes we discover that we’re having a good time. As we lose our fears of these digital channels, as we get better at using them, we start to understand how people like to be engaged. Get a license from your customers EIU: What other challenges are marketers going to be facing in 2020? Gavin Heaton: In Australia, in the mining industry, we have this concept of the license to operate. It’s granted by the government. But there’s also a license granted by consumers and the community. If the community doesn’t like what you’re doing, they will just walk away. We saw this three years ago when teenagers walked away from MSN en masse. There was a three-month period where teens started to move to Facebook, and the way Gen Y engaged online changed overnight. First they went to Facebook and they saw their parents join Facebook. Their grandparents. Very uncool. Then there was a little bit of Twitter, not much, and then there was a migration to SnapChat. I saw something today that said, “70% of Australian students are using SnapChat.” It’s massive and growing. That’s our challenge: to be in the spaces where our audiences are and understand that they will leave us if we don’t work with them and understand their needs, not just around transactions, but around our society as well. EIU: So you need to master all of these channels and be as agile and flexible as your audience is. When they move, you move. Gavin Heaton: Absolutely. Choose one but be ready to switch EIU: In terms of budgets, it sounds like you have to have a stake in all the channels and be able to move very quickly if necessary. You can’t overinvest in just one. Gavin Heaton: It comes down to analytics. We need to have a much stronger grasp of usage in all of these channels, because we can’t be everywhere all at once. We don’t need to be if our audiences aren’t there, and not every audience is going to be in every channel. But understanding where they are, their digital footprint, when the train is leaving the station and being able to move fairly quickly, that’s essential. And analytics gives us that power. Get your dashboards operating, watch the trends and get creative when things start to change.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: February 5, 2015 | Engagement Marketing Over the past six weeks, I have shared with you some insights about the future of marketing from some of the smartest minds in marketing today. Now, it’s your turn to tell us your insights. What do you think the future of marketing holds? We tapped the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey almost 500 high-level marketing executives from around the world to get a real sense of what’s on all of your minds. The results are insightful, encouraging, and exciting. Why? Because when you step back and look at the overall big picture, it tells me that, more than ever, marketing is in charge and the future is really, really bright for marketers everywhere. We are at the center of business and if we make the right investments we are going to find ourselves setting strategy, driving revenue, and shaping the future of our own organizations. A real “Marketing First” world. I would strongly recommend you read the report in its entirety. There is a ton of insight in here. But let me give you a few of my highlights: Over 80% of all marketers say that their organizations will need to undergo dramatic changes in order to keep up with increased technical and consumer demands 68% of marketers feel they are viewed as a cost center today; however that is going to shift dramatically. In fact, in three to five years, 80% of marketers say they will be seen as driving revenue for their companies While roughly a third of all marketers say they own the customer relationship and engagement today, that shifts dramatically in three to five years as nearly 75%(!) of marketers say that they will own end-to-end customer engagement Marketers’ #1 investment over the next 12 months is in making a shift to digital marketing and engagement; perhaps not surprisingly, they also say that the top 2 areas of skill development in their organizations are in the areas of Marketing operations/technology and digital engagement. The importance of data and technology to make these shifts can’t be understated with more than 80% of marketers saying they will use data and technology to connect with customers and engage them in a conversation to build advocacy and trust over the next three years. When I step back and look at the data–what I see are six major trends emerging: Marketing is shifting from a cost center to a revenue generator Marketing will become the Chief Customer Advocate in an organization Marketing is moving from an era of mass marketing and advertising to and era of engagement marketing Marketing needs to invest in new digital skills and operational expertise – marketing is shifting from an art form to art & science Marketing must leverage technology to succeed in this world of individual engagement at scale Key technologies like Internet-of-Things and real-time personalized mobile technologies will shape the future of marketing So what are we as marketers to do? To me, this says that for marketers to succeed we are going to need to make some major shifts in thinking and investment. We are going to need to invest in new skills to manage digital engagement, data, and technology. We are probably going to need to organize our teams differently. And, we will likely have whole new functions, such as Marketing Operations, emerge to make the rest of the organization more effective in this new world. Marketers need to embrace technology at a fundamentals level and leverage it to help them scale and talk to their customers with a singular purpose in mind: forming long-term, individualized, durable relationships. Over the next 15 weeks—I’ll spend time here sharing thoughts, suggestions, and insights around specific items from the research that will hopefully be useful to you as you navigate this transition and rethink your approach to marketing over the next 3-5 years. After you read the survey results and report, please weigh in below if you agree with the other marketers or have different views – discussion is always great! And, as always, if you’re just visiting this series of posts, you can start at the beginning of this journey here. I look forward to figuring out this new Marketing First world together!

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: February 19, 2015 | Engagement Marketing When we first started this series on the next era of marketing, we brought you the marketing pundit point of view through conversations with visionaries like Seth Godin and Aditya Joshi, but only recently did I discuss your opinions on the future of marketing. We asked the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey nearly 500 marketers and then shared the results on the many observations about marketing’s future, including organizational change and technology advancement. But to kick off our deep dive into all of the interesting data from the survey, I want to pause and talk more about one of the key concepts to emerge from the research—engagement. Every marketing team’s goals are to bring in new customers, grow their lifetime value and convert them into brand advocates who can influence their network to become new customers. But today’s constantly-connected world of digital, social and mobile has changed the way customers behave— and, consequently, how brands need to speak to their customers and prospects. As brands evolve, they’re learning that engagement is the critical next step. If they’ve not already started, brands are starting to shift from an era of mass marketing and advertising—where we talk at people for a single moment in time—to an era of engagement marketing where we begin to take time to learn more about our customers on a personal, individual level and engage with them over a lifetime. A New Definition of Engagement An interesting foundational fact that emerged from the survey, was the shifting definition of what it means to “engage” someone as a marketer going forward. Engagement used to be bandied about in terms of the emotional connection or quotient that a brand was creating with customers. How do they feel about you and your company? Did the Super Bowl ad with the puppy make them cry? Were they engaged? That all seems to be becoming the horse-and-buggy version of marketing (while of course still being incredibly cool). The new definition of engagement marketing seems to be broader, more strategic, and more oriented toward the bottom-line. Amongst marketers in the survey, the term engagement seems to have a decidedly action-oriented focus—asking questions like, “are we driving purchases, renewals, and revenue?”. Here are some interesting statistics: 63% of marketers view engagement as customer renewals, repeat purchases, and retention. 78% of respondents think engagement occurs in the middle or end stages of the marketing funnel. 22% of marketers consider customer engagement to be a brand awareness tool. Only about 20% of marketers seemed to define engagement as a top of the funnel awareness or emotional brand building tool. The reality, of course, is that if real engagement exists to drive purchases and renewals, there must be an emotional connection at some level. Engagement, it appears, has ascended from an emotional destination at disconnected moments in time to something that happens over a long period of time to drive business outcomes. The Shift Towards Engagement Marketing When we asked marketers what their top areas of investment were likely to be over the next 12 months, the #1 answer was “Shift to Digital Marketing and Engagement”. Engagement marketing is more than a series of transactions or click-through rates, it means building a real individual relationship, floor by floor, continuously over time, seamlessly across all of the channels and devices they use. It means paying attention to your customer and observing what they do, learning what they like, learning what they don’t like and guiding a journey that helps them get where they want to go (in a way that is consistent with your own business goals). Your approach and enthusiasm for your relationships with customers should channel the same approach and feelings you have when interacting with a friend in your personal life. Think about it: would you want to interact with a friend or person that is difficult to get a hold of, or never listens to you, is always talking about themselves, or is always stereotyping you based on just a few facts? Chances are, you wouldn’t want to keep giving business to a company that does those same things. On the other hand, when a company treats me the same way my friends seem to treat me, I can’t wait to give them more business. For example, emails from Amazon are relevant and helpful to me because they include smart recommendations based on my previous purchases—and because these products are clearly in line with what I’ve liked in the past, I look forward to hearing from Amazon on a regular basis. I get an email that says, “Hey Sanjay, just wanted you to know that those boots you were looking at just went on sale.” And, what do I do? I buy the boots and say “thanks so much for letting me know”! In a conversation with Seth Godin, he stressed the value of direct interactions with clients. While other departments can also provide insight, nothing is quite as valuable as direct feedback from customers using your products. Brands can now better track these insights and interactions across multiple channels thanks to the growth of marketing technology. I think, ultimately, this will become the new basis of competition. It used to be that firms competed on price—then, they competed on brand awareness—then, they started competing on experience (think, “my visit to Starbucks today”). But, now as customers increasingly want companies to get to know them and continue to advance the relationship, they will choose brands (and more specifically, people at those brands) that engage with them most effectively. Those companies will win, and the others will lose. Engagement is Putting Marketing in the Driver’s Seat The function that owns engagement within organizations is quickly changing. Our survey of marketers revealed that 75% of CMOs and senior marketing executives expect to own end-to-end customer engagement for their companies as the steward of the customer journey in the next three to five years. That’s up from just over a third who say they have that responsibility today! That puts marketing squarely at the center of revenue generation and company strategy. This is a giant and bold claim, and probably a little controversial too. But, I don’t see how it doesn’t happen if the goal for a company is to build a continuous, ongoing relationship with someone that shows them that we understand the broadest context of our relationship together. As a company, I want the people in functions like sales and service, for instance, to be very transactionally focused on creating a delightful experience for the customer in a single moment. I actually don’t want them spending their time thinking about the broad relationship and the arc of future interactions as that might compromise their ability to deliver right now for the company and the customer. Marketing will be uniquely suited to get above the transactional focus that is necessary in other functions—working in strong coordination with them—but, as the architect of the overall journey. It’s an exciting time to be a marketer because we get to have a closer relationship with customers and prospects than companies could in the past. How do YOU define engagement? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. And if you’re just joining us, learn what nearly 500 marketers see as the future of marketing, or read thoughts from visionaries likeGavin Heaton, Jim Stengel and John Hagel. Next week, we’ll talk about exactly how to bring the marketing department to the front of the customer engagement process.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: February 24, 2015 | Engagement Marketing​ We’re living in a Marketing First world. If you haven’t yet experienced this shift for yourself—bear with me; it’s coming. Over the past few weeks, I’ve dug deeply into the results of “The Rise of the Marketer,” a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, to highlight some of the study’s key insights. Last week, we explored the changing attitudes towards customer engagement. This week, I’d like to explore another finding from the survey—how marketers will play a larger role in company strategy. This is a huge development, and a dramatic shift in many organizations from how marketing was asked to contribute in the past. Marketers Will Earn a Position on the Starting Line In our survey, when asked if marketing would shape company strategies over the next three to five years, roughly 80% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it would. As we heard in our previous conversation with visionary Seth Godin, marketers have historically been like runners in the final leg of the relay race. We take a product or service and determine how to help it reach the intended audience. But this approach is going to change. In fact, the race will be redesigned entirely, and it will no longer be a relay. Instead of being handed the baton, marketers will be in the race from the beginning, playing a greater role, and having more influence in setting strategy to determine which product, service, or market a company should even pursue. Why is this happening? Because, the shopping and buying process has changed forever. Buyers have more information at their fingertips than ever before and they are using it to self-educate. They’re reaching out to companies later and later in their decision-making cycles. As a result, if a company hopes to engage and influence that shopper, they have to do it earlier. This new digital, social, mobile world, is the domain of the marketer. That means that marketing is the only function that has a chance to influence buyers before they have all but made their decisions—putting the marketer in the driver’s seat, or at the starting line—either way, it’s Marketing First. Marketers everywhere should be excited about this. Across the board, marketing has the chance to play a bigger role in company strategy than ever before. Validating this fact, in our survey, “Strategy and Planning” was nearly tied for the top spot in terms of skills that marketers felt like they needed to develop in their organizations . When you look more closely at the data, you can see this change emerging even further; marketing teams are doingfar more, and they expect to expand their reach in the future. Here’s more from our survey: 75% of marketers believe they will be responsible for the end-to-end engagement and ownership over the customer’s lifetime—not just marketing, but support and continued engagement as well. More than 80% of marketers agree with the statement, “We need to change the structure and design of our marketing organization to meet the needs of our business over the next three to five years.” When asked which areas of business areas marketing teams will drive in the next three to five years, the answers were also intriguing: The focus on advertising and branding will decrease compared to today. More than 70% of respondents indicated that marketers are currently focused in these areas. When asked if their focus would remain the same in the future, only about 40% believed they would even have a person focused there. Instead, marketers will put more energy, time, and effort into areas such as strategy, digital, and customer lifecycle engagement.. From Participating to Leading In many ways, this is already happening. Marketers have been leading strategy for years in many organizations. And, it has been accelerating in recent years as marketers have become increasingly responsible for customer relationships, and, perhaps even more importantly, increasingly responsible for being the source of customer engagement data. The marketer knows the customer better than anyone else in this digital world. They are the keepers of customer data, which means they can spot trends before anyone else can—trends in customer behavior, needs, and interests. These are core components of a successful business strategy. Marketers Know Their Customers: Marketers share a deep intimacy with their customers that is simply unmatched by any other business function in a company. We understand what channels customers’ use, where they come from, and how their unique backgrounds contribute to their unique behaviors. This ability to resonate with customers is absolutely critical to business growth. Marketers Know How to Leverage Technology: It’s a digital-first world, and marketers have a stronger command of the most forward-thinking technology. We know and use the tools needed to better understand our audiences and reach them more effectively. Marketers Drive Revenue: With better technology and tools, marketers can effectively demonstrate our ability to drive revenue for our companies. With the data to prove our initiatives are driving revenue, we’ve earned a seat in the boardroom. If you are the steward of the customer and you are driving revenue, you probably should have a strong hand in leading company strategy—don’t you think? I, for one, am excited to see how this Marketing First world develops. How is this movement toward the next generation of marketing happening in your organizations? Do you have any insight or personal experiences to add? If so, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: March 3, 2015 | Engagement Marketing At our core, marketers are storytellers. We love to tell stories that evoke emotion and pull at heartstrings. As I have shared my vision of the next era of marketing, I’ve talked about how marketing is changing. But, in this post let’s start with how it’s not changing when it comes to building a brand. Then, we can turn to how we, as marketers, willneed to change to build our brands in the next era of marketing. Storytelling Is Timeless In the era of engagement marketing, the essence of what makes you and me marketers won’t change. No matter how much digital, social, mobile we have in the world around us, Marketing will always need well-told evocative stories, and the ability to communicate to your audience’s needs, wants, and emotions. Think about Skype’s “Stay Together” campaign: It demonstrated how people are using technology to develop deep, emotional relationships across great distances. It was a shift from talking about their product and features to talking about the emotional benefits of using their product. In one story, two young girls, each born with one arm, connect from across the world to learn from one another’s experiences. They teach each other valuable lessons about self confidence, and share those iconic teenage-girl moments, like swapping hair and makeup tips. The two girls don’t just keep in touch—Skype allows them to become best friends, even while living on separate continents. The campaign is global and spans multiple channels, but it’s also personal and emotional. It connects with the audience. These kinds of campaigns—big narratives that span a wide range of experiences and stories—will still have a key place in the future of marketing, because we can all connect with them. Your Story As A Starting Place What will change about this type of storytelling in the era of engagement marketing, is that marketers will not use these stories to talk “at” their audience–in cinematic fashion, but rather as a way to initiate a conversation and elicit a response that they can listen to. They will need to create this type of storytelling over time–not just at a single moment, but rather a conversation and narrative that builds to create engagement. Customers will also create these stories with us, by engaging on or across social media, and other channels to share and tell stories. The story becomes part of a larger journey that a customer takes, and how the customer responds will help the marketer determine how best to talk with them. Technology Helps Stories This all means that a big change in the future will be the role of technology in storytelling. Technology augments who we are as marketers—where our core love of storytelling is enhanced by the ability to make the interaction last longer than a single point in time. Technology helps marketers engage with their audience, over time and in a personalized way. It’s the only way to do it at scale. And, it’s the only way to meet the customer everywhere they are—as opposed to just pushing a cool story at them through a single channel like TV. Marketers themselves recognize the power of technology to impact their success in the future—as demonstrated in the results from the recent survey conducted by the Economic Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo: More than 80% of marketers will rely on technology to engage customers in conversations and build advocacy and trust with customers. Furthermore, when you look at where marketers plan on spending budgeting dollars in the next three to five years, the picture becomes even clearer. Departments are budgeting to meet the customer everywhere they are–tying multiple places together in a dialogue. More than one-third will increase their budgets for social marketing, and roughly 30% will invest more in mobile marketing. Marketers Must Learn How to Do It In the survey conducted by the Economic Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, we found that marketers were feeling a high degree of urgency to develop this new muscle and capability in their organizations. When CMOs and other marketing leaders were asked what skills were the top areas they needed to develop: The #1 answer, at 40%, was “digital engagement” The #2 answer, tied at 40%, was marketing operations and technology 27% indicated customer experience and engagement Building Ambitious Purpose and a Dialogue In an earlier post, I talked about how marketers will be responsible for the customer experience, but we haven’t yet talked about what that will look like. Customers are hyperconnected. They are also overloaded. I’ve seen studies that show that each of us are bombarded with nearly 3000 messages a day. Customers are looking for more relevant connections and ever greater meaning in their lives. Simply put, the bar is now even higher for marketers to get through. This evolution means we need to think bigger; we need to tap into ideas that inspire customers and help them find meaning in the world around them. We have to develop our “ambitious purpose”. This is what we have always tried to do as marketers. We just need to do it bigger now. And, we need to do it in very different ways. We need to effectively harness the tools that customers are using—meet them everywhere they are, on a sustained basis over time. If I think 90 seconds of a YouTube video, television commercial, digital ad, or entertaining social post is going to build my brand and real engagement, I probably will be sorely disappointed. Customers are now the keepers of our brand in this new digital world, and we need to build it with them. That requires a new and unique set of skills, namely the ability to harness new technology platforms and use them to engage customers. What’s old is new—very new. But, if we keep the core of what is true to marketing and embrace the need for new skills and capabilities in this new era of engagement marketing, our potential for growth and real brand connection is unbounded. What do you think? Has the rise in digital technology changed the stories marketers tell and the way we tell them? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: March 10, 2015 | Engagement Marketing I’ve frequently said that marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the past 50. And, I think it is going to change even more in the next 5. Change has become the new normal, and as marketers, we need to adapt. Today’s customers have a 24/7 mentality. And our success is no longer just based on how clever we are, but how adept we are at connecting with customers at the speed of today’s digital world. When I’m on stage, I sometimes tell the story of my most recent move. I had a long list of things to do—like everyone else. There I was—in the passenger seat while my wife was driving—and I thought I would knock off one item off of my to-do list by trying to secure a mover. I searched on my phone, landed on some broker page, filled out my information, and off it went to 52 different moving companies. I got a call back in 5 minutes from one company. Then, over the next 2 weeks, I got 51 other emails and/or phone calls from the other companies. Which one do you think I gave the business to? The game was over before the other 51 companies even got to the stadium. The internet never sleeps. When we go to bed in California, people are eating breakfast in Norway. When Birdman won the Academy Award for Best Picture, everyone knew it within a matter of minutes. Trending hashtags, viral videos, SnapChat—all of these provide ways for people to relay information within seconds. We have entered into a real-time marketing environment. Keep up or perish. Marketers Don’t Create Customer Journeys…Customers Do This is the world I keep talking about—the Era of Engagement Marketing. When we are on the receiving end of real-time information from customers, and from events around the world, marketers can’t afford to be last. Marketers cannot be deluded into thinking that they “map out customer journeys” and that customers dutifully follow those paths—on the marketers’ timeline. Anyone suggesting that is doing marketers a great disservice. For one thing, the idea of mapping a journey is so 2000-and-late, and…slow. Marketers must be able to have a conversation in real-time. I often will describe it in talks as the equivalent of mapping out your conversation flow before you go to a cocktail party. Try sticking exactly to that script. How do you think your evening will go? Why would someone think it any different in interacting with customers? For the second thing, and even more importantly, customers create and guide their journeys—they have access to so much information, in so many places, that they are self-directed. Marketers have to be able to move with the discussion whenever and wherever their customers are—in real-time. We, as marketers, have to be always on—anticipating the start of the race and pacing ourselves to guide and react throughout the journey. In the Economic Intelligence Unit’s conversation with Jim Stengel, former CMO at P&G, a different metaphor came up. If marketing used to be an assembly line, with marketers coming in at the end to figure out how to sell a product, they are now in a trading room, he explained. Marketers need to be able to respond to events as they happen. A much discussed example is how Oreo responded during the blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl with “you can still dunk in the dark.” It was quick, witty, and memorable. It seized the correct moment. Even a day later, and that response would have been DOA and utterly forgettable. If you take a look at data from “The rise of the Marketer,” a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, you can see these ideas emerge in the numbers. New Skills and Structures are Vital If you recall from my earlier post about the survey, more than 80% of marketing executives believe we will need to restructure marketing to better support business. Think about it—in an always-on, Marketing First world, how will our current marketing departments measure up? Most marketing teams aren’t equipped yet to respond to information 24/7, let alone proactively be communicating in an integrated way 24/7 When marketers need immediate responses, they won’t always be able to act based on a pre-established plan or journey that they dictated for their customers to follow. They will need to think quickly, and respond appropriately, in the right channel, at the right time and with the right message—at scale. Last week’s post highlighted salient statistics on this score—that when CMOs and other marketing leaders were asked what skills were the top areas they needed to develop, the #1 answer, at 40%,  was “digital engagement”, and the #2 answer, tied at 40%, was “marketing operations and technology.” Furthermore, 38% of marketing execs are looking for strategy and planning skills in the next 3-5 years. Among companies that see an urgent need for change, the number is even higher, climbing to 44%. Marketing leaders are recognizing that living in a real-time world requires much stronger strategic thinking as we all seek to adapt. As the way customers prefer to communicate evolves, marketers need to respond with speed and agility. And to do this, we need to invest in skills and technology that allow us to meet customers on their level, in real-time. In the next era of marketing—Engagement Marketing—agility will rule. Do you feel that the need for agile marketing tactics is on the rise? How is your marketing team keeping up with the always-on world? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

When creating a dialog box campaign type in RTP, you can set up the length of time (in seconds) the dialog box will display. The provided options include: 5, 10, 30, 60 seconds or Never which means the dialog box displays until clicked on. To customize the timeout and set it to any duration you want, see the following: Set the Timeout to be Never. Click on HTML. Edit the campaign’s HTML and insert the JavaScript below (also see here😞 <script>     (function(){         setTimeout(function(){             AITag.jQuery('#trwDialog').dialog('close');         }, 1000*            15 //seconds         );}()) </script> By default this JavaScript will add 15 seconds timeout to your campaign, you can change it to any duration you want by editing the code. Also see: Triggering RTP Campaigns with a Delay

In Feb14' version we've added RTP activities to the smart campaign standard filters and triggers. Therefore you should no longer use the old way of capturing URL parameters in order to measure your campaign performance and engagement. Please follow the instructions below to set up your smart campaigns in the new way: https://docs.marketo.com/display/DOCS/Define+a+Smart+List+for+Web+Personalization+Activities https://docs.marketo.com/display/DOCS/Define+a+Smart+List+for+Predictive+Content+Activities Cheers, Yanir.

Our Community Blogs are a great way for our customers to have a voice. We want you to share your the successes, innovations, experiences, and ideas with your peers to help build your personal brand and heighten your awareness. The Nation is a powerful tool, and it's at your fingertips, don't be afraid to use it! Not all of our blogs are open, some you have to participate and earn status to be able to contribute to ( Blog) while others are open and free for everyone to contribute to ( Blog)! To see a full list of the different blogs Marketo has (both on and off the Community) you can visit our ​ page in ​. When posting to one of our Community Blogs, here are a few guidelines to remember: Do not duplicate content, meaning do not simply cut and paste content from your personal blog and post it. See "Re-purposed content" below Have a thesis, POV, or CTA Feel free to link to your personal blog if it is relevant to the post Limit external links in your posts, as we aren't trying to drive users off of Community Keep it focused on Women in Business and how it relates to topics like digital marketing, marketing automation, engagement marketing, building teams, workplace equality, and more Do not sell or pitch products...we are monitoring these. Soliciting your personal products or services could result in removal from the blog Share something new and actionable. We want our reader to walk away with the sense that they learned something 400 - 500 words. Re-purposed content: You are welcome to re-purpose content you already have, as we understand you have day jobs and can't dedicate your life to solely writing new content for Marketo No more than 75% overlap with existing content. In other words, rewrite the content with the Marketo user in mind. Make it unique to the Marketo Community Different headline than original post Again, limit / omit external links. It's recommended you include these as part of your author description if you plan to include them at all Frequency: This blog is featured on our page, so we are always needing fresh and relevant content there consistently No spamming (don't post more than once a day) Recommendations: Write when you have time, but don't feel like you have to post right away. Store some content up, and come up with your own content calendar Keep an eye on the blog and post when you see it's becoming stale Comment and participate in other customers blogs, your input is valued greatly Pay attention to the what's hot in the industry Pay attention to what our customers are interested in by scanning conversations in ​ & ​ Ready to post? Find your blog by viewing and get started! If you have questions, let us know! HAPPY BLOGGING!

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

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