Product Documents

By: Kristen Kaighn Posted: March 21, 2016 | Lifecycle Marketing I have a confession. I have placed 118 Amazon Prime orders in the last 6 months. Now, judging by the amount of cardboard in my garage alone, I should have known I might have a “problem.” Everything I’ve purchased were things that I could easily buy across the street, from protein shakes to batteries, cheddar bunnies to hangers, and, of course, all the things I’ll need for my new baby that’s coming in a few weeks. But my “problem” is really the product of Amazon’s secret sauce and why they’ve been able to retain me (an admittedly extremely fickle shopper) as a loyal customer. What goes into this “secret sauce” of customer retention? Is there a recipe for taking a business model and product from good, to one that customers can’t live without? As marketers, we know that we have to keep delivering value in the form of content, entertainment, education, and services well after the initial transaction in order to keep customers engaged and our brand top-of-mind. But customer retention goes past simply staying top-of-mind. It’s about understanding your customers deeply and ensuring that no matter where they are in their purchase cycle, you’ve got their back. This is what great companies have in common: a customer culture where everyone feels ownership of the customer experience—essentially living by the quote “customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” Today’s buyers are more likely to switch (brands, vendors, providers) than ever before, regardless of whether they’re a millennial or boomer. However, taking these steps towards building a customer culture in your company can make a big impact on your customer retention and grow your loyalty base: Step 1: Develop a Process Do you have a process for dealing with the positive and negative responses you receive from customers? Step one to building a customer-centric culture is to get your house in order because if it’s messy, everyone on the Twitterverse will hear about it. Okay, so maybe it’s not necessarily Twitter, but today’s customers are not shy about sharingboth their positive and negative experiences with a brand. Your plan will be unique to your business, your product or service, and your support structure, but it’s critical that everyone in your organization fundamentally understands your policy and process for handling customer feedback. As you develop your customer response plan, keep these things in mind: Take the time to listen to your audience. Address their issue with respect and timeliness, but appropriate humor also goes a long way (you are talking to a person after all). Don’t shy away from responding where they are, especially in the social arena. Step 2: Frame Every Interaction as an Opportunity Seize every interaction with your customers as an opportunity to make them happy. The top three reasons why customers switch brands are cheaper pricing, rude staff, and too many mistakes. This means that every touchpoint with your customer is important, especially when you consider the impact that retaining that customer can have on your business. The Pareto Principle states that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of your customers.With this in mind, here are three things to remember as you work to create excellent customer interactions: Offer promotions and discounts for your most loyal customers to keep happy customers, well, happy. Build your customer culture and teams with people who share the same values. Fanatical care for the customer can be built into your culture, so think about the different ways you can build it into yours. In some cases, this means that everyone spends time working customer support as part of their training, while in others, customers are the heart of every story the brand tells. Understanding your customers before they tell you something went wrong is critical. Having a centralized view of customers and coordinating their experiences allows you to avoid spamming them and lets you speak to them personally, with relevant messages. Step 3: Nail Your Customer Service As the face of your company, your customer-facing teams are the front line in sometimes tense situations. Their response can make or break you in the eyes of your customer.Arming your service team with the right tools to resolve issues can make a huge impact on your customer retention: Create a channel for service teams to relay customer feedback. Obviously, poor product design or experience will create some unhappy customers, but having a feedback loop from your customer teams to the appropriate contact internally will allow you to actively address and log these issues. Develop an arsenal of resolution tactics. A representative that can’t solve a problem can just make a bad situation worse, so make sure that your service teams have a robust arsenal of resolution tactics. Be prompt. No one likes hold music, so don’t torture your customers with lengthy wait times. Your customers are people and most people don’t love wasting their time on hold, so make their service experience as seamless as possible. Want to learn more about how to bottle your own secret customer retention sauce? Check out our slide deck,Customers Are Your Prospects, Too to discover how retention, loyalty, and advocacy drive revenue and should be every marketer’s biggest focus.

By: Linda Russheim  (Founder and Director of HT Financial Marketing and Monica Ralli (CMO of The Hay Group) In professional services, creating and sustaining long-term relationships with clients is ultimately a business’ most critical challenge. With multiple mediums and devices competing for your audience’s attention daily, the new era of marketing is all about an integrated conversation with a client. Organizations must truly understand their audience, which means allowing clients the opportunity to engage and interact with a company. In this way, their preferred behavior can surface and a deeper understanding is gained by both client (in relation to the offerings) and the business (in relation to client behavior). This integrated conversation provides the business with a line of sight from prospect to profit. This is valuable in itself, but becomes even more powerful as a way for marketing departments to demonstrate their impact beyond lead generation to sales, revenue growth and ROI. From an internal perspective, it is imperative that the marketing, sales, IT, and finance departments are fully aligned. Marketing automation is the catalyst for this, allowing for better understanding of prospect and client lifecycles. With this understanding, businesses can develop the appropriate ‘trigger’ for when action should be taken and by whom. Marketing can nurture customers through the sales funnel more efficiently and in a personalized manner, leading to increased lead generation – thus providing sales with Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). In turn, sales can then focus their time on their best prospects to close deals, resulting in increased conversion and a significantly reduced cost of sales. From a financial point of view, this is an attractive proposition. Recently, one of our clients – a global professional services company that invested in marketing automation as part of their digital transformation – moved to an inbound marketing model. The company overall had to be persuaded that what was happening in marketing would have a deeper impact on its overall business. In order to prove this, the marketing department was going to be held to a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) to justify the investment in marketing technology and automation. In this model, targeted, compelling content was created and shared with clients and prospects to foster an ongoing conversation. This ongoing conversation provided an opportunity for clients to engage in multiple ways, leading to a greater exchange of client information that provided the company with a better understanding of who they were trying to reach. Content creation and distribution are critical differentiators in professional services and help lead to long-term client relationships. The company underwent both a mindset shift and operational shift in marketing in order to learn how to develop campaigns that would resonate with specific audiences. In this way, they were able to create integrated conversations – a focus and approach that previously was not in place. Over a period of time it became clear that lead generation could offer the company some clear benefits: A more relevant and focused conversation around specific campaigns that led to consistent brand recognition in high-growth audiences. A clear view of the client behavior through all stages of engagement and value to the company from prospect through to MQL, sale, revenue, and ultimately profitability. Reduced cost-of-sales by engaging the salesforce on MQLs that had a greater probability of converting to sales. This more valuable conversation with clients and subsequent measurable results also elevated the marketing discussion in the boardroom gaining support from both the finance and IT functions. Discussions were centered around the client in a way that allowed relevant behavior to correlate directly to numbers. This process wasn’t seamless. Data clean up shouldn’t be underestimated nor should be explaining the concept of a ‘digital heartbeat’ to those outside marketing! There were challenges around moving to a data-driven client base, focusing on conversations with clients who had and were engaging with the company. And surprisingly the change in mindset for marketing to align around a singular engagement strategy and not multiple activities required an extensive re-education process. Although the company is still on the journey to complete the full marketing automation integration, its first pilot campaigns are showing very promising results. Specifically, there are improvements around client engagement and positive internal alignment between the marketing department and sales and finance. For the first time, all are aligned around the same objective. Many professional services firms and financial companies, have yet to appreciate that prospects and clients need time to engage and seek an integrated dialogue with the company. If tracked, their journey from prospect to loyal repeat-business client can yield multiple opportunities for the company in providing an exceptional client experience as well as strengthening the company internally with a common focus across a single issue – clients.

By: Brit Tammeorg Posted: March 18, 2016 | Mobile Marketing Businesses large or small can benefit immensely from mobile marketing. SMS marketing, otherwise known as text message marketing, is one of the most personal ways to communicate with your buyers. After all, what other marketing tool do you know of that allows retailers and business owners to have virtually immediate contact with their customers? More than 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes, according to a study by MobileSquared. And while email inboxes can get clogged with spam and unwanted promotions, customers are very careful about opting in to text message updates, which means that your message will reach the right person who is actually interested in your offerings. But simply investing in an SMS marketing program isn’t all it takes to reap the rewards. SMS marketing, like any other campaign, requires time, attention, and the occasional tweaking for your business, budget, and customers.Whether you’re already running an SMS campaign or you’re looking to start one, here are four tips to get the most out of SMS marketing for your business: 1. Comply with the Laws Text message marketing is a privilege for businesses, not a right. Each country adheres to a specific set of laws, so if your business’ SMS campaign has a global reach, make sure you understand the laws in each country. In the U.S., aside from the basic law that you must have the consent (opt-in) of your recipients to send them promotional texts, there are a few other laws that you should be aware of: Opting in can’t be a condition of purchasing. In other words, you can’t force anyone to consent to receiving SMS messages from you by barring them from buying unless they agree to opt-in. You need to include a “Help” function if you anticipate that your recipients may need additional information about your message. That way, they can ask technical questions about texting and get useful answers. You need to include an opt-out or “STOP” function that’s clear and easy for your recipients to do, and that works. Don’t tell them they can opt out by sending “STOP” to 9876 and then keep sending them messages after they’ve followed your instructions to opt-out. Don’t end up like Jiffy Lube with a $47M lawsuit settlement for sending unsolicited texts to customers or Papa John’s whopping $250M suit for the same reason. Not to mention Life Time Fitness’ recent settlement $15M for sending unsolicited marketing text messages.Bottom line: Make sure you’re compliant. Companies of all sizes get sued for the misuse of SMS marketing all the time. 2. Build Your Subscriber List So how do you encourage your prospects and customers to opt-in to receiving your SMS messages and comply with the law? There are several ways to build your SMS subscriber list by making the opt-in function more visible throughout your marketing channels.Take a look at some of the channels below to determine where you can add SMS opt-in information: Facebook: Add a “Mobile Number” field to any Facebook page sign-up and an “Opt-in” button for them to sign on to your SMS campaign. Make sure you validate the number before you add this person to your campaign. If they entered the wrong number, you could potentially be sending text messages to someone who didn’t authorize them. Website: Include SMS opt-in instructions on your website. Email: Make SMS opt-in visible on your newsletter. Direct Mail: All snail mail should have instructions for SMS opt-in printed on it. Mobile: Send an opt-in text, such as “Text YES to receive discounts and promotions from XYZ company.” Additionally, all of your customer-facing employees should be trained to ask for a customer’s permission for opt-in. This means that they need to be able to explain the benefits and details of your SMS campaign (coupons, discounts, appointment reminders, events, etc.). 3. Write Great Messages Text messages take a different form than emails and other channels of communication, so be mindful of how your message will be viewed. Your subscriber will see your message on a screen smaller than a computer, so keep your messages short and straightforward. But cutting down on the quantity of content doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice quality as well.Remember, your main objective is to give your subscribers information that they can understand quickly and easily. You can try to be clever or humorous as long as your customers are get it. The key is to follow the voice of your brand and be personal. Address your subscribers by their name and understand their behaviors (interactions with your brand, purchase history, downloads, etc.) and what stage they are in their unique customer journey. Then, use this information to send relevant text messages that hit the target. For example, if you’re a massage clinic sending a message to a new customer, text him with “Hi Kevin, thanks for coming in today. Enjoy %15 off your next sports massage with discount code: 15OFF” to keep him coming back.However you choose to shape your messaging, be sure to avoid these SMS sins: Don’t spam. Don’t send several texts a day to your subscribers. Depending on your business, an SMS campaign of 4-12 total messages per month should be sufficient. Don’t send off-target offers. Offer your subscribers something of value. If you constantly send them texts about products or services that aren’t relevant to them, you may lose them as an SMS subscriber or even as a customer. Don’t wake them up. Ideal texting time is between 9am and 8pm. Anything sent before or after that treads the line of being intrusive. 4. Measure Your Results Like your other marketing channels, you’ll need to understand how to measure your SMS marketing results to track the success of each campaign and learn how to optimize them.Track the following metrics and repeat periodically to continue to enhance your campaign: Calculate your churn rate. Take the number of your people who unsubscribed from your SMS campaign and divide it by the total number of customers who initially opted in. This will reveal how quickly your subscribers are leaving your campaign. Determine your redemption rate. Take the number of your subscribers who responded to call-of-action and divide it by number of total subscribers in your program. This indicates how successful your campaign was at generating responses. Calculate the cost. Take the cost of each SMS message and divide it by the redemption rate (calculated above). Based on how much you invested, did it perform well? SMS is quick and effective way to reach your audience wherever they are. By following the tips above, you can get your SMS marketing campaign off on the right foot. Understand the laws, build your subscriber list, craft great messages, and measure and analyze your results. Have you already started on your SMS marketing journey? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks in the comments section below! For more on SMS and mobile marketing, check out The Definitive Guide to Mobile Marketing.

By: Phillip Chen Posted: March 17, 2016 | Modern Marketing For marketers at growing companies who are ready to make the leap from a small marketing group to a larger-scale function, making their programs larger and more effective is almost always on their minds. But how do you grow with your programs so that you don’t get left in the dust? I started at Marketo when our marketing team was relatively small, and since then we have more than doubled. Throughout this time I have observed two types of marketers—the ones that have been able to grow with the company and the ones that weren’t able to punch above their original weight class. So how do you make sure that you’re growing with your company? Here are four ways to take yourself, and your marketing, to the next level: 1. Start Digging for Insights If you have no idea where to begin, start by looking at which of your programs are performing well and which could use some improvement. Indicators of program performance can include things like subjective opinion, pipeline attribution, or even something as basic as abnormal response rates. When you dig into this, you’ll find is that your original question will cascade into a series of additional questions such as “Is this an anomaly?” or “How can this be replicated?”. Ultimately, it’s the insights that stem from your curiosity that will lead you to a new idea to boost your programs. At Marketo, to gain insight into how we could grow our virtual event from 9,000 attendees to over 20,000 attendees, we put together a focus group of people with varying degrees of knowledge about what a virtual event was. Then, we asked them a series of questions, drilling into their answers looking for more insights. What we found were new ways of promoting the event, messaging around it, and other things our current event lacked. For example, we found that virtual attendees appreciate subtitles as not everyone can rely solely on audio. Another insight we found was that there was a misconception that a virtual event was a webinar, and that people didn’t realize it was very interactive and that they could interact with sponsors, network, listen to different sessions, download content, and also win prizes. Aside from focus groups, other ways you can uncover insights for your company include surveys, internal interviews, customer interviews, and of course reports. 2. Coordinate with Other Teams The difference between a small program and a larger program often comes down to cross-functional coordination. If you are effectively able to leverage other teams, you’ll have a greater impact with what you can do. The reason our field events at Marketo have grown so vigorously is because we have a buy-in process with sales and a coordinated effort of different roles and responsibilities to penetrate any given region. We start by showing our sales reps all the options available to them in terms of campaigns, events, and reports. Then, we have them request these options through a form or meeting. Doing this enables us to understand what our reps needs, which we can then translate into a plan. Our plans are reviewed by sales, so they can provide their feedback on whether or not it supports their objectives. As you can see, our program would be stifled if only handled by one group and not as a collaborative effort. Cross-functional coordination doesn’t apply to just sales and marketing alignment for B2B marketers, but extends to other departments as well as applies across marketing. Consider working closely with customer success, support, and other teams in your organization. 3. Plan Your Program Backwards Dream big, and then figure out what it takes to get there. This might seem intuitive, but in reality this is probably done poorly most of the time because of the considerable amount of effort it takes. Say for example that you want 1,000 people to register for your event. What do you have to do to get there? It will take a lot of brainstorming, and although you may not reach your goal initially, over time you will learn more effective ways to achieve the big dreams that you have. Remember that this is an iterative process. The first time you do this, your guesstimates or forecasts will probably be off. For example, you may think that sending one email can drive 100 people to a webinar, but it only really drove 10. While your assumption was off, the next time you go through this process, you will be able to better understand your investments and how to reach the numbers you are trying to achieve. 4. Obtain the Appropriate Resources I hate to tell you, but the honest truth is, if you want something to grow and scale, it will require resources in the form of time and money. What I will say though is that when there’s a will there’s a way. If you’ve done a good job of planning, you’ll be sharp and ready to handle any objections when talking to stakeholders—proving to them that what you want will help them achieve their goals. It’s unbelievable the number of times I’ve gotten my program invested internally over others, purely because I’ve put together a well-thought out plan of how the investment will be used and why it’s the right allocation of budget. At the end of the day, obtaining the appropriate resources is about creating a convincing argument as to why your program deserves more investment than another. To help you create a convincing argument, measure as many aspects of your program as possible to see where there may be outlier results that you can leverage to get your project funded. Things to measure may include pipeline, new logos, customer acquisition cost, new names, attendance rate, or number of marketing qualified leads to name a few. Growing with your marketing can be painful. It requires adaptability, a big dream, but also the willingness to learn and sweat to create something larger than yourself. Ask questions and get curious, bring in other teams to do something larger than just one function, plan a way to get what you want, and ask for the appropriate resources to get there with the right metrics to back it up.

By: Jignesh Shahfrom Grazitti Posted: March 14, 2016 | Lifecycle Marketing Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful channels for bringing new customers to your business. In fact, according to Edelman Trust Barometer, 84% of B2B businesses initiate the buying process with a referral. And data from Marketo Institute shows that the referral is the best acquisition channel for conversion rates at almost 4x the average. So, it should come as no surprise that many B2B marketers are following in the footsteps of companies like Uber who have successfully grown their businesses using referral programs. While companies from any industry can harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing, these types of programs pose unique challenges for B2B businesses. Due to the complex sales processes and expensive nature of some B2B products, you need to put time and careful consideration into developing your referral program’s strategy, structure and internal processes. Below are seven questions that you should ask yourself, your marketing team, and key players on your sales team as you develop a B2B referral program in order to anticipate issues and avoid pitfalls: 1. Is your product referral worthy? Customers will only refer your product if they have had an extremely positive experience with both your product and your company. Referral marketing is best suited for products with strong customer benefits and successful support. Before you consider developing a formal referral program, you need to assess the customer satisfaction levels for your product. Are your customers enthusiastic about your product enough to recommend it to others? To determine this, you may want to conduct a Net Promoter Score (NPS) study. NPS measures your customers’ willingness to recommend your product to other buyers. If a NPS study is not feasible, assess your customer retention and subscription renewal rates. 2. Which customers should you target? The most effective way to get your referral program off the ground is by targeting your best customers. Here are there things to look for when identifying these key participants: Payment: Start with targeting customers who are willing to pay for the product typically believe in its value. Avoid targeting customers that have just started on free or trial plans as they may not have experienced the full product benefits. For these customers, you need to first focus on making them successful before asking for referrals from them. Activity: Target customers who actively use your product as they can best communicate its value to others. Achieved ROI: Customers who have used your product to achieve measurable results can illustrate the product’s value better than those who have just started using it. 3. How will you promote the program? Now that you have defined your referral program’s target audience, you need to decide how you will ask them to join. For the most part, it’s better to start with a small, targeted push by sending invitations to those who are most likely to become referrers. You can do this through a targeted email campaign or by asking sales to send personal invitations.Once your program starts to take off, you can then begin to promote referrals more extensively through your website, blogs, newsletters, social media, and direct mail. You can also extend the referral program to your partners if you have an active channel program. 4. How will you qualify referred leads? Qualifying referred leads is a more complicated process for B2B companies. You need to confirm that your sales team hasn’t already identified the referral as a prospect. Depending on your sales process, this can be automated partially or completely using a marketing automation system and CRM.You also need to verify that the referred business has the budget, authority, and timeline to make a purchase. You can ask for this information upfront as part of lead capture process or your sales team may prefer to ascertain this information by speaking directly to the referred lead. This is where sales and marketing alignment is vital to define and agree upon how you will qualify and accept referred leads. 5. How will you hand-off referred leads to sales? One of the biggest pitfalls businesses encounter with B2B referral programs is that qualified, purchase-ready referred leads may get lost in the process. Not only is this a lost sales opportunity, but it may discourage customers from making referrals in the future. If you want your program to be successful, it’s essential that you work with sales to establish a system for tagging referred leads and directing their information to the right person who will follow up promptly.You may want to create separate CRM views or marketing alerts to make sure that the sales team follows up on referred leads quickly. Consider creating a written service-level agreement (SLA) with sales to establish how and when sales representatives will follow up with leads. 6. How will you motivate customers to make referrals? Even if customers love your product, they’ll still need a little motivation to introduce your brand to others. This is especially true given the cost of most B2B products and services. As a result, many B2B referral programs use rewards to motivate and thank the referrers.Here are some factors to consider when choosing an incentive structure: Reward Type: What type of reward will resonate best with your customers? Product discounts, free training, conference passes, and gift cards with tangible value are a few options. Choose the appropriate reward type (or types, if you are going to let customers choose) based on your customer demographics. Reward Size: How big does the reward have to be to matter to your customers? In general, senior-level buyers require larger reward sizes. What will your budget permit? Mile-Post: Will you provide rewards only when the lead makes a purchase? Given a typical B2B sales cycle, this can sometimes take weeks or months, so consider whether it make sense to provide a smaller reward as soon as the lead is qualified. Single or Double-Sided: Will you reward only the referrer? Or is there something you offer the lead as well so that they too benefit from coming in as a referral? 7. How will you automate your referral program? With all of the moving parts involved in a B2B referral program, it will save you time, money, and resources if you find ways to automate some of the tracking and administrating aspects of your program.Consider the following questions in order to help define how your marketing automation platform and CRM can support your referral program: How will you capture referred leads and referrers? Can you automatically qualify leads before handing them off to sales? How will you know when a purchase has been completed so that you can thank the referrer? Can you automate reward delivery? Make Your Referral Program a Pillar of Business Growth Word-of-mouth marketing is a worthy investment for any company with useful products and a significant customer base. Even though B2B referral programs can pose unique challenges, your business can build a successful program by identifying and anticipating these challenges from the start. Work with your sales team to identify your best customers and develop a referral lead-to-revenue process. Then, map out the incentive structure, the promotion strategy, and any automation needs. Now that you know what questions to ask yourself when developing the program, you can be on your way to making your referral program a marketing pillar of growth. If you have run a referral program before, do you have any considerations or tips to add? Please share them in the comments section below. This blog was co-authored by Rachit Puri at Grazitti.

By Sanjay Dholakia I’m often asked which industries are experiencing the most growth within their marketing departments, or even which sectors are most open to adopting marketing technology. Surprisingly, in the last few years, the world of sports and entertainment marketing has emerged as an industry of rapid adoption, with franchises looking for new and inventive ways to connect with their fans. This is an important shift: Promoting sports has long been a quintessential traditional marketing exercise, with glossy magazine spreads and television advertisements winning the day. It’s such an emotive world. While fan enthusiasm might wax and wane with a team’s win-loss record, the understanding is that well-established teams like the Detroit Pistons orPortland Trail Blazers — both Marketo customers — will always have support. You could forgive them for just doing the same marketing things they have always done. But instead, what we’ve seen is that franchises across nearly every sport — NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL, even cricket and rugby teams abroad — are flocking to tools that will help them deepen their interactions with fans. We’re seeing them embrace a greater marketing shift and rotate toward digital engagement in nearly every way possible. They are doing this in an effort to drive fan loyalty, ticket sales and repeat engagement in an increasingly noisy world for consumers. My point is, if the sports world is rotating so dramatically toward digital, what greater imperative is there for marketers in other industries to rethink their marketing approach and embrace the new, more effective way of engaging with prospects, customers, and even employees? For the next few days, I’ll find myself in Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive, where I’ll besitting down with executives from the Pistons, Trail Blazers and sports and analytics agencyE15 to discuss the latest ways the sports world is leading the pack in terms of innovation. Of course, we’ll also detail what other industries can take away from this. If you won’t be joining me in the great state of Texas, here is a preview of some high-level insights that can be valuable for every marketer. There are fans, and then there are FANATICS We live in an age where consumers have transformed how they interact with brands and, therefore, how brands must interact with consumers. Marketing is no longer a one-way stream of messages; it’s a two-way conversation in which what the customer has to say carries even more credibility than the brand itself. Your brand is what the customers — or fans — say it is. With this huge emphasis on trust and the value of referrals, marketers must drive engagement and advocacy — something that is de rigueur in sports marketing today. The sports world should be considered the ideal model for brand loyalty. All sports teams have fans, and fans will always attend games and support their teams, right? Wrong. Even sports have had to respond and innovate in order to capture fan attention. There are just too many ways to spend time in today’s world, not to mention the fact that technology and television have made the stay-at-home-watching experience more enjoyable than ever before. For franchises, the challenge is how to convert casual fans who might attend one game into people who are repeat ticket buyers and who invest even more in other ways, be it through merchandise sales or attending additional events at a venue. Imagine if you could take this expanded approach and apply it to your industry! Sports marketing is multi-faceted Sports marketers teach us that there is much more to a brand-customer relationship than a single point of purchase; it’s about a greater customer relationship with multiple touch points across multiple channels. With all of these variables, it’s important to be able to engage with people in all the ways and places that they would like to interact with your brand. This maximizes the value of the relationship both for your business and the customer. For franchises, this involves curating a fan’s first interaction with a team — be that buying a piece of merchandise in-store or online or attending a game — and then understanding how this relationship can be maintained and developed over time. There’s a huge listening component there: If Bob consistently buys tickets every time the team plays a specific competitor, the franchise should know to market accordingly and include complementary offerings. This could be better seats, specific gear, in-stadium food deals or suggestions of other ticket packages that Bob also might find interesting. This connection to both in- and out-of-stadium is huge. This treats a fan as a whole person — not a series of different entities interacting with a brand in isolated channels. If Sharon buys an ice cream cone in the last half of every game, why not send her an offer for a two-for-one deal next time she’s at the stadium? In fact, you can then suggest some other events for her to attend where she can make use of this coupon. The possibilities are truly endless. The sports approach works When brands adjust their approach to marketing and adopt the right tools — marketing automation being one such tool — the benefits and results are palpable. In the case of the Detroit Pistons parent brand, Palace Sports and Entertainment, the organization saw a 90-percent renewal in membership rates — the best in their history — and a 30-percent increase in season ticket sales. And in the case of the Trail Blazers, the team was able to increase season ticket renewals by eight percent (a 96-percent renewal rate), up single-game ticket sales by 30 percent and improve email open rates by 45 percent. Wow. If this isn’t enough motivation, I don’t know what is. Take a page out of the sports playbook, and see your customers converted to brand FANATICS.

This in-depth guide walks through the steps needed to set up a repeatable and measurable direct mail program in Marketo.

By: Chris Savage Posted: March 10, 2016 | Modern Marketing When we started Wistia in 2006, all of our marketing was centered around our video hosting product. We thought we were doing all the right things—demos over the phone, a PR firm, a “business-like” team page—so we didn’t understand why we had no money and only 5 employees. Then one day our filmmaker friend Chris Lavigne came by the office. He looked around, and then he proposed an idea so obvious and perfect I can’t believe I was ever skeptical of it: since Wistia is a video hosting company, why not use video in your actual marketing? I was a filmmaker myself before Wistia, but when Chris said this I was just confused. We already had a screencast of our product on our homepage. I didn’t understand what making more videos was supposed to add. We were marketing to other businesses, not putting together a reel, but Chris was our friend and he offered to make the video himself. So we agreed to let him do his thing. The video he made was pretty unconventional, at least for the time, because it wasn’t about our product at all: it was about the Wistia team goofing around on an ordinary day in the office, working hard but having fun doing it. And to our surprise, people loved it. The video was a huge success, which taught us an unexpected lesson—that people would respond to what we made if it demonstrated the fact that we actually care, heart and soul, about what video can do. This was one of the single most important shifts in mindset that had to happen in order for us to succeed. Hundreds of videos later, we’re profitable, with a much bigger team and customer base. And we owe it all to shutting up about our product and focusing on our mission of empowering everybody to get more out of video—what we now call mission-based marketing. But it didn’t happen overnight. Here’s how we aligned our marketing to a mission, and how you can do the same thing with your team: 1. Write Down How You Want to Change the World We burned through a lot of different missions before one of them stuck. Now, our mission is the compass we use to direct every single piece of content we produce. Everything supports that mission. Our early iterations were way too focused on our product and company goals because we thought a mission was about summing up how you worked and what you wanted. What we finally did was write down the things we valued the most about working at Wistia. We shared these with our team, got feedback, and together crafted a final draft. And it’s only by bringing all these people together that you really can get what you need: a mission that’s bigger than you and your company. So start marketing with a purpose: Write down the things that you value most about your work Share the values with your team and solicit feedback so they represent everyone Use this pool of shared values to work toward a cohesive mission statement. 2. Ask Your Customers What They Want to Achieve Imagine what your company looks like from your customer’s perspective. Essentially, you are a tool that they’re using to succeed at some bigger project, be it in business or life. Your tool is maybe just a small percentage—say 3%—of that project. The other 97% is what your marketing should be all about.To figure out what that 97% is, email and call your customers. Set up a forum or subreddit and ask questions there. Send out surveys. If you reach out for ideas often, you’ll gradually build a customer-company culture where the lines of communication are more open, and you’ll see more ideas emerge organically.Here are a few ways you can learn what your customers want to accomplish: Use a Google Forms survey to collect mass responses. It’s a very basic tool, and free, but it works really well to distribute surveys and collect responses. Set up a community if you don’t have one. You can use something as simple as a subreddit. You just need a place where you can talk informally with your users about the kinds of content they want. Go back to basics and call your customers. Ask them directly what they want to accomplish, and you’ll find that people can be a lot more candid and talkative over the phone. 3. Adjust Your Team’s Risk-Taking Threshold Mission-based marketing requires creativity, and creative ideas are fragile. Both extroverted and introverted people can get very shy when they have an idea for something that’s out of the box because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing or being judged.We start ideation meetings by writing “Don’t hold back” on a whiteboard, especially when people clearly have ideas but are hesitant to express them. Then, we’ll just throw out the craziest idea we can think of that still fulfills our mission, something just really outlandish. After the baseline is adjusted, everyone in the room feels a little freer to speak their mind. Case in point: this is how the announcement of ourEnterprise plan turned into a full-fledged parade.Create an open culture around creativity using the same method we did: Divide meetings into ideation, decision-making, and execution so you can think of the craziest possible ideas without having to imagine how to do them. Start ideation meetings by throwing off the baseline, then let the conversation guide you toward a solution that’s both creative and doable. Write down without judgment every idea that your team generates. You can figure out which ones make sense later. 4. Make Your Content-Creation Process Transparent and Accessible We work really hard to encourage a total content culture at Wistia. Everyone who works here is part of the mission, so everyone should be part of our mission-based marketing.To open content creation up to everyone, we documented our process. Instead of just blazing through everything like we usually did, we slowed down. We got dry-erase markers, drew it out on a wall, and asked questions about each step to figure out how and why it was in there. When we had it down pat, we put it in a Google Doc and opened it up to the team. Then, we set up a Trello board just for content ideas and invited everyone to participate. If you do this, you’re going to find that your idea board fills up incredibly fast. There’s only so much you can say about your product, but when you start to orient your content around your mission, the possibilities become endless.Try out this method out with your team: Map out your process in dry-erase so you can edit on the fly and display it in a central location. Transcribe the complete process into a Google Doc so your whole team can see and use it. Set up Trello boards to document the stages each project is in (ideation, drafting, revision, submitted, etc). Live And Breathe Your Mission Great marketing demonstrates how passionate you are about the mission you’re trying to help your customers achieve. It doesn’t matter if your company is in a “boring” field (I mean, we do video hosting for businesses!)—showing heart still matters. There’s a lot of companies out there that don’t think about this stuff at all, but this is really how you differentiate yourself from the pack. Get your team together and write your mission down, then talk to your customers about it. Democratize and make transparent your team’s content-creation process, then unleash its creativity by encouraging crazy ideas. What other steps have you taken to align your marketing around your company’s mission? Share them in the comments below.

FYI: New Virtual User Group on Community:  Real Time Personalization Virtual User Group ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By: Ellen Gomes Posted: March 9, 2016 | Targeting and Personalization Would you send the same email to your entire database? You could, but with a database made up of multiple segments and different types of customers (some very new to your product or service and some long-standing customers), sending the same communication to all of these folks would not be effective. Marketers now know and understand that effective email marketing is targeted and personal. Unfortunately, this vital learning is not applied equally across channels and programs, especially on websites. Every day, marketers are ignoring their own best practices and offering the exact same experience to every website visitor, every time they arrive—regardless of their behavior or attributes. Magnify that by thousands, sometimes millions, of visits, and marketers are missing a huge opportunity to truly connect with their audience as individuals—which makes a real impact on their revenue. And that’s where web personalization comes in. What Is Web Personalization? Web personalization helps marketers make their websites as personal and targeted as their other communications and activities. Specifically, the term web personalization refers to creating a dynamically personalized, highly relevant website experience for your website visitor (anonymous or known), based on their behavior, location, profile, and other attributes. Done right, web personalization means understanding and meeting your visitors’ interests, tailoring your website to fit their profiles, and ultimately providing them with a relevant experience—whether that’s a message, visual, content, or offer. Today it’s a mission-critical marketing activity that creates a more meaningful experience for your visitors and also generates better business results. Personalization is not just a ‘nice-to-have’; it’s a necessity in today’s market where your visitors are not only self-directing their customer journey (the majority of their research is done before you ever know them), but they are overwhelmed with messages on a daily basis. In order to break through and get your visitors to engage, you must offer them a relevant and personal experience. In fact, according to recent report by VB Insight, 87% of companies see a lift in key metrics (such as conversion rates, engagement rates, and lead generation or average order value) when they employ personalization. The Benefits of Web Personalization At the highest level, web personalization helps marketers address their website visitors in a personal and relevant way online—while also helping marketers reach their goals faster. But to break it down further, web personalization helps marketers in seven key ways: Build brand preference: You can use web personalization to strengthen how a visitor feels about you online and offline. For instance, you can use what you know about an individual (gathered from their interaction with your website) to tailor the messages you send on other channels and create content that resonates with them—making your marketing more personal and effective across the board. Understand visitors: Web personalization helps marketers understand the personas, demographics, and behavioral and firmographic data that represents your target audience and is most likely to result in conversion. Convert visitors: While many of your marketing efforts bring visitors to your site, the majority of those visitors—a whopping 98%—are anonymous when they arrive and remain so after they leave. Web personalization helps marketers track demographic and behavioral data, and unmask, engage, and convert prospective customers as they arrive on your site. Nurture and engage: While you are probably familiar with email nurturing, web personalization allows you to nurture customers on the web by continuing the conversation with them through targeted, relevant offers, content, and calls-to-action. Using web personalization, your website becomes another one of your cross-channel tools to accelerate customers through their unique buyer journey. Cross-sell and upsell: Understanding your customer segments and the types of offers, messages, and content that motivate them is a huge advantage that web personalization offers. If you have customers that have already purchased from you, you can sell them more by recognizing them as existing customers and segmenting them to receive offers on complementary products based on their past purchases. Optimize your campaigns: As you run web personalization, you can collect valuable information from your visitors about who they are and what offers, messages, and content resonate with them. These learnings can disseminate across your programs and cross-channel campaigns, making them more effective—both in terms of engagement with visitors and overall cost. Increase revenue: When you better understand your online visitors, buyers, prospects, and decision-makers—in other words, when you nurture and educate them based on who they are and what they do, and then present the most appropriate offer—you are improving your ability to drive revenue. Learn more about these benefits and how to create a comprehensive web personalization strategy by paging through The Definitive Guide to Web Personalization. This comprehensive 100+ page guide covers everything from how to develop a web personalization strategy, to sourcing the content for creating a personalized website, to testing and optimization and more. The Definitive Guide to Web Personalization is your guide to creating a strategic and dynamic personalized web experience. Download it today!

By Rebecca Lieb Digital isn't just everywhere, it will soon be everything. Since the 1980s, digital has been in an unrelenting phase of hypergrowth. In our lifetimes, we've witness centralized mainframe computers morph into distributed desktop computers connected to a network. By the late '90s most of those machines were instead connected to the World Wide Web. The next decade brought with it cloud and ubiquitous computing, technologies for anywhere, any time mobile users. Up next? Pervasive computing. Processors will be embedded in everyday objects to gather data for analysis and action, the catalyst of a new ‘phygital’ world in which digital connections bridge the physical and digital worlds. The Internet of Things (IoT), beacons, and sensors already enable a far deeper "conversation" between all elements of brand experience – including objects. Connected Devices – Impact Increasingly, consumers no longer differentiate between media and channels. Second screen activity is already transforming how they watch television, for example. They may simultaneously be shopping, buying, voting, emailing, or chatting with friends, posting on social media or looking up information about the show they are watching. They're likely not even viewing content on a TV. Cord-cutting is rampant. Consumers no longer care about platform or media ownership, what matters is access and convenience. So how do marketers find these fickle consumers, flitting between channels like digital hummingbirds? It depends. Any individual’s preference will be based on their own unique pain points and needs, the time and location when that need strikes, their behavior, history, culture, exposure to technology, peer influences, and myriad other factors. What is clear however is that the CMO must be as agile and multifaceted as the increasingly varied customer journeys they steward. Their brands are compelled to be omnichannel, and that "omni" accounts for ever-more channels and devices. The CMO's mandate is to bind omnichannel together with seamless customer experiences bound by the Three Cs: Consistency: Consistency in brand tone, outreach, response, presence, and culture. Expanding touchpoints allows brands to pervade consumers’ lives by providing timely content, services, and utility Content: Content is the unifying element of how brands manifest across all touchpoints across channels, platforms, and devices, online or off. Context: Context is the antidote to endless, noisy media proliferation. Data helps companies better understand customer context down to the individual level, including (but not limited to) personal, location, historical, behavioral, cultural, social, technological, and beyond. MGM Resorts sends hotel guests at the Bellagio Las Vegas notifications on the MGM app for nearby restaurants, shopping, and shows via their smartphones. Offers are highly personalized based on a number of factors: geo-location, time of day, loyalty member status, purchase history, and preferences. You might get a twofer ticket offer for tonight's show, while I receive a steak dinner special.A non-mobile example of the new “phygital” frontier is Navdy, an in-car display system that's been called the Google Glass for your car. It shows the driver relevant messages: navigation, text and voice messaging, and vehicle service notifications, for example.Beacons and sensors in retail locations can not only convey inventory information, but provide consumers with highly contextual offers. Sensitive to the shelf level, embedded devices know if the shopper is browsing ketchup or mustard and can tailor offers accordingly.‘Phygital’ Risks and RewardsHarnessing digital connections to foster deeper human interactions is the opportunity in bridging the digital and physical worlds. For brands and consumers alike this means: Increased relevance and context Greater visibility Greater utility (“brands as service partners’) Happier, more engaged customers Data that inform optimization opportunities (across customer and product lifecycles) Increased loyalty Improved conversion and business results Market differentiation As with other emerging technologies, the “phygital” world is also not without risks, particularly if strategy is secondary to a tactical approach. Risks can include: Attribution Impact Losing (or losing track of) customers along their journeys Viewing mobile as a secondary channel Advertising-only mentality Annoying or creeping out customers > opt-out Higher possibility of friction in “offline” contexts Under-use of content and brand assets Negative impact on brand sentiment/experience Ineffective or unethical use of data Wasted investment Planning for an omnichannel “phygital” world requires a renewed commitment to digital transformation. This includes orchestrating across not only internal teams but also agency and technology vendor partners. Planning must take into account media convergence, with a strong view toward integrating technologies to "play nice" together, everything from marketing to mobile tech to systems that may live outside of marketing's purview, such as CRM. Ready or not, we're hurtling into a brave new world. Brands that aren't at the ready in the channels and media, times, and places where customers and prospects wish to interact will in just a few short years risk irrelevance, even obsolescence.

By: Ellen Gomes Posted: March 4, 2016 | Content Marketing Last October, Facebook quietly launched Instant Articles for iPhone, “a beautiful new way to read articles in the News Feed that is faster and more interactive than ever before,” according to the company. This product is aimed at being a game-changer for the publishing industry by offering a solution to what Facebook and publishers identified as a problem of slow loading times and whether publishers could bring their own advertising to the table or would have to use Facebook’s ad network. Initially, it was rolled out to a select group of premium publishers—think along the lines of National Geographic, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Now, after about 10 months since its launch, Facebook announced it will open Instant Articles to all publishers on April 12 at their F8 conference—raising the question for content marketers everywhere, “Is this for me?” This blog will take a look at whether Instant Articles applies to brands and content marketers, and what this change might mean for them. Let’s dive in: Are We Invited? Brands today know and benefit from the power of social media. On Facebook alone, the user base has expanded to 1.04 billion daily active users and 934 million mobile daily active users as of December 2015, allowing companies to connect with their audience at scale. And with 63% of Facebook users getting their news through their social networks, according to Pew Research Center, content marketers everywhere are looking into how they can participate in the new Instant Articles feature. This begs the question, “Is it even open to us?” And that can be a complex answer depending on where you look. Officially, on the Instant Articles site, Facebook discloses that this product will open for all publishers. But how are they defining publishers? A magazine, journal or newspaper? That wouldn’t be great news for brands. What about as anyone who creates and publishes content? Now that would be awesome. Brands are ready to sign up—like yesterday. And whether they’ll be eligible or not is a question everyone is asking. In fact, Contently contacted Facebook for clarification on who qualifies as a publisher and received the following answer: “In April, Instant Articles will be open to any publishers that wish to join, but it is primarily designed for news publishers. While other types of publishers will have the option to create Instant Articles, in many cases there are other formats on Facebook that will better serve their needs.” This makes it sound like a yes—brands will indeed be able to publish Instant Articles, with the disclaimer that there may be more suitable formats available. So how do you determine if this is right for you? A New Way to Content in Unknown Territory Facebook Instant Articles presents a new opportunity to deliver content—whether you’re a publisher or brand—especially via mobile (a channel that has experienced almost nonstop growth since its inception). Because people face such an onslaught of messages—from their inbox, to social media, to offline communications—content that captures the interest of your audience and offers true value is now, arguably, the only way to capture their attention on any channel. Content marketing is now a familiar marketing activity that most marketers practice, and Instant Articles offers an immediate way to deliver content to an interested audience with faster load times—reportedly as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web—and without the need to navigate to a new channel. As a content marketer, the idea of a new platform for you to deliver your content to an interested audience can be both exhilarating and terrifying. There are so many places and platforms to disseminate your content today, but the promise of hosting your content on a platform that gets about one billion visitors a day is enticing, to say the least. But it’s OK to feel wary of an unknown platform and process, especially if you’ve developed a seamless way to publish and measure the impact of your content on other channels and programs. I’d encourage you to not let that stop you, as Facebook’s Instant Articles allows you to customize the typeface, color, and layout of your content to keep it on brand and use your existing analytics platforms to measure its success. It even allows you to serve adson your content, opening up a new advertisement channel. So if you have your content measurement down already—from early stage metrics like downloads and shares to late stage metrics like first-touch and multi-touch pipeline and ROI—you may still be able to apply these practices to the new platform to understand its impact, not to mention to optimize your results. Prepare Yourself, Instant Is Coming The Instant Article product itself is defined by its ability to instantly load with rich images, interactive content, and auto-play video. Today, this content is demarcated to users by a small lightening bolt icon in the corner of the article. Image: Courtesy of The Atlantic With this new product and its instant content feature, marketers face two challenges: Whether or not to be an early adopter How to adapt their content to fit the cadence and quality needed to succeed in this new environment There is definitely an advantage to being an early adopter of these products. Often, you gain more attention from your audience because the functionality is new and novel, and that’s worth something. Additionally, you usually have an opportunity to deliver feedback and learn with the product. But this can all come down to a matter of comfort and resources. Do you have the bandwidth to learn (probably a pretty intuitive) new platform and then add that step to your content publishing process? The second challenge of adapting your content to the platform is one that may affect lean or small teams the most. It will be interesting to see if brands, that have other objectives for their content (like demand generation), will have to adjust their content strategies to incorporate Instant Articles as a “new” type of content or if it will simply be an extension of what they are already doing and have planned to in their editorial calendar. Because this product is centered around delivering a high-quality experience to the user—with fast load times and interactive visuals—its success may force content marketers to redirect some of their attention toward tailoring content and interactive experiences for this platform, where they didn’t have to before. A Demand Generation Machine Finally, Digiday recently reported that Facebook is allowing some publishers test newsletter sign-up messages with their Instant Articles—trial publishers include The New York Times and The Washington Post. This is an interesting move for publishers whose biggest caveats when it came to publishing on a separate platform were ad revenue and audience ownership. With the possibility of reaching your audience on email through newsletter sign-ups, Facebook may solve both. For brands and the marketers alike, this could make a huge impact. If and when Facebook opens this feature up to brands, it will act as an extension to their customer acquisition activities for any brand, from consumer to B2B. It will be interesting to see how Facebook users respond to these new marketing opportunities—whether they will interpret articles from brands as marketing or as an improved experience. And for marketers, especially content marketers, as the digital landscape continues to change, the best advice is: Stay tuned and get ready! It seems that the downside to publishing on Instant Articles is almost negligible when contrasted against the benefits. What do you think about Instant Articles? If it opens up for brands, will you be on board?

By: Daniel Tolliday Posted: March 3, 2016 | Content Marketing If you ever find yourself banging your head on the keyboard wondering why there are so few hours in the day to produce content; don’t worry, you’re not the only one. Content marketing is an important part of a strategic marketing mix, building brand awareness, establishing thought leadership, elevating your messaging, and engaging your audience. But content takes time to produce and get out into the world. Sometimes, it can all come down to the way you manage your team and the content they produce. So, use this blog as a guide to speed up your editorial process without compromising the quality of your content. Let’s get into the five ways you can speed up your content editorial process: 1. Set Predefined Roles Within Your Content Team Whether you’re working with an internal team or external freelancers, it is critical for you to define specific roles for each process and determine who does what. If there’s only one person planning the calendar, producing all the content, and measuring its effectiveness–it’s likely that you’ll fall behind and that person will get worn out. This doesn’t mean that one team member can’t be used for more than one role; it just depends on your budget and resources. For example, your analytics manager may be able to write content about marketing analytics or your social media listener might have awesome design skills that you can leverage. Below are some common roles associated with content marketing teams: Content Strategy Director/Content Strategist: This is where it all begins. The director or content strategist is often someone high up in your organization that is experienced in digital marketing strategy. They will have created your content strategy and now it’s up to your content team to follow through and implement it. Production and Editorial Management Content Manager: Often called the ‘Content Marketing Manager’ or ‘Chief Content Officer’, content managers are responsible for overseeing the entire process–from start to finish. When an organization implements content marketing into their arsenal, the content manager is usually the first person hired. Managing Editor: The role of the managing editor is quite diverse and they often wear multiple hats. A typical day might involve editing several pieces of content, managing writers, and even working with the content manager to plan and update the content calendar. Social Media Listener: How is your content performing on social media? Your social media listener will be able to tell you. Whether they’re using tools like Hootsuite or Buffer, they will provide you with regular reports detailing how your content is performing on social media. Analytics Manager: Working closely with the social media listener, analytics managers help measure the effectiveness of content once it is published. They play a key role in proving the ROI of your content marketing activities and should have solid data and website analytics abilities. Content Production Content Writers: Whether they’re internal writers or external contractors, the number of content producers you need will depend on the quantity of content you wish to produce. Be sure to enable your writers as much as possible with resources, detailed briefs, and transparent writing guidelines to save editing time. Designers: What good is an article or ebook without a sexy design? A good designer is worth his weight in gold, as they are often the difference between a solid piece of content performing well or not at all. If you don’t have the budget for a professional designer and want to save extra time, you can explore using a tool like Canva (more on this tool shortly). Proof-readers: Many content teams share the workload when it comes to proofreading. Once an article has been edited, for example, it’s always good to get a fresh pair of eyes onto the piece for extra quality control. 2. Clearly Communicate Content Goals and Guidelines This is a key factor in speeding up your editorial process. Each piece of content should have a brief and your writing team should have access to a content guidelines document. Not only will this help them write faster, it will help the managing editor breeze through the first draft.Here are 4 questions to consider before sending anything to the content producer: What is the goal of your content? What themes or topics should it cover? Who will be reading the content? Think titles, industries, and company size. Are there any useful research links or existing assets that will help? It makes sense to provide your content producer with as much information as possible. It saves time and makes everyone’s jobs easier. 3. Repurpose Existing Content For each asset you produce, you should be able to leverage it to create at least 5-6 more pieces. One simple ebook can be turned into: A SlideShare presentation Tweets (using quotes from your ebook) An infographic An image for social media A blog post Webinars are also great for repurposing your content as they often cover a broad range of topics.Imagine if you have already written 5 ebooks; that’s around 25-30 extra pieces of content just sitting there waiting to be produced, which is a huge time saver. And speaking of time savers–there’s none better than a valuable editorial tool. 4. Use Editorial Tools and Templates Sending emails back and forth is a huge time waster; especially when an asset requires multiple rewrites. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help simplify and speed up the editorial process.It is important to note that you should not get too wrapped up in using tools, especially if you’re looking to save time. Sometimes, a simple spread sheet and word processor is all you need.Let’s take a look at a few (of the many) valuable time-saving tools: Trello: The days of overflowing inboxes are coming to an end–thanks to editorial tools like Trello. This tool allows you to organize content projects and have your writers upload drafts, comment on projects, and even track the time it takes to complete each task. Google Docs: With Google Docs, your editor can add comments directly into each document. Hosted in the cloud, there’s no need to store the files anywhere–they’re stored securely on Google’s servers. Once it’s finished and ready for publishing, you can save the document onto your computer. BuzzSumo: Having trouble with content ideation? BuzzSumo allows you to search for the best performing pieces of content on the web. You can rank them by LinkedIn shares, Facebook likes, and much more. This gives you a clear indication about what type of content works best for your target audience. Canva: If there was one time-saving tool I personally couldn’t live without–this would be it. Canva includes templates for every type of visual graphic imaginable (Facebook and Twitter cover images, for example), and images can be easily tweaked for uniqueness within seconds. Not to mention it’s free, too. 5. Utilize a Content Calendar As one of the most effective ways to speed up your editorial process, content calendars save time by revealing the bigger picture. Usually managed by the content manager or content editor, it should include content goals, useful links, and show you what is due and when.But how do you map out your content calendar? Fortunately, there are a variety of free tools available: Google Calendar: With Google Calendar, you can create your own version or download one of the many templates available online. Simply create a new calendar and start filling in your content ideas and what marketing objectives or company goals they map to. The best part of using Google Calendar is that you can receive notifications to your phone and desktop when your content is due! Excel Spread Sheets: This is perhaps one of the easiest and most effective ways to manage your content editorial process. Set up columns for the due date, publishing date, writer’s name, keywords, notes, and any other information relevant to your needs–and remember to use one tab for each week or month, depending on how much content you are producing. This reduces clutter and makes it easier to navigate through. But, if you’re looking for a more robust content management experience, there are many content platforms that can help you manage your content process from start to finish—from building an editorial calendar to tracking the production progress to publication and more. Using tools and calendars are effective time savers and a great way to give you a complete perspective of your content creation process. But what you really need to remember is to stay focused on one task at a time and allocate tasks among your team when there is an overload of work. After all, they are only a limited amount of hours in the day–and time management is something everyone must deal with. What tactics or tools are you using to save time in your editorial process? Let me know in the comments below! http://events.marketo.com/summit/2016/

Celebrate Women's History Month with the Marketing Nation Community! Join us in paying tribute to the generations of women whose commitment to nature and the planet have proved invaluable to society. Each week we'll have a new community challenge. The post with the most 'likes' during that week will win a $50 Amazon Gift Card. To be eligible to win you must: Have your profile *completely* set up, including photo, avatar, bio city and state. Post during the correct week, indicated below. (i.e Discussions about the influential woman that are posted the following week won't be eligible) Make sure posts are tagged with #WHM2016 Follow the guidelines below! Winners are peer selected and will be chosen based on number of 'likes' on the post, so please, VOTE VOTE VOTE! View the instructions below! COMPLETE. March 7 - March 11: Comment in this thread in Marketing Central of who the most influential woman in your life is and why. WINNER: ​. You can view the entries here: Most influential woman in my life is... COMPLETE. March 14 - March 18: Post a blog in our Women in Business section about any Women in Business / Technology related topic. Read our ​ first and then GET BLOGGING! Some ideas for topics are: a customer success story, comment on something going on in the news, pose your own question, provide your tips and tricks for success, or report on something interesting you learned at a conference. WINNER: Dory Viscogliosi COMPLETE. March 21 - March 25: Nominate a woman in YOUR organization who you think is making history by commenting in this thread in Marketing Central. She could be paving the way for other women to be successful, showing strong leadership across the organization, or producing stellar results and killing it in their job! Whatever the reason, nominate and let community decide the winner. (*Note, there are two winners for this challenge. The person who writes the nomination AND the person nominated will each receive a $50 gift card!) WINNERS: ​ and her nomination ​ COMPLETE. March 28 - April 1: Post a discussion in Marketing Central and share details about your favorite organization that promotes or helps women in technology. WINNER: with her post about Bad Girl Ventures​ What is Women's History Month​? The roots of National Women’s History Month go back to March 8, 1857, when women from New York City factories staged a protest over working conditions. International Women’s Day was first observed in 1909, but it wasn’t until 1981 that Congress established National Women’s History Week to be commemorated the second week of March. In 1987, Congress expanded the week to a month. Every year since, Congress has passed a resolution for Women’s History Month, and the President has issued a proclamation.

By: Charm Bianchini Posted: March 2, 2016 | Targeting and Personalization What happens when B2B marketers from leading companies gather for a day? They talk about account-based marketing (ABM), of course! ABM has recently gained momentum in the B2B community as an alternative to traditional demand generation strategies. It is a strategic approach to lead generation in which your time and resources go into targeting a key group of specific accounts. Last week, the FlipMyFunnel conference brought together some of the top digital marketers in the Bay Area for another stop in a multiple-city roadshow focused on account-based marketing (ABM) and sales. Understanding what account-based marketing is, why it should be leveraged within marketing programs, and how to measure it effectively were key themes throughout the day. The agenda highlighted customers deploying various ABM programs as well as real struggles being experienced in this new ABM world. Let’s take a look at four key takeaways from the conference that will make an impact on your account-based marketing strategies: 1. The Funnel Must Be Flipped Gone are the broad-based marketing days. Forrester Research states that less than 1% of leads turn into revenue generating customers. Because of this, it’s time to challenge the status quo and focus your time, budget, and resources on generating quality leads vs. quantity. If you want to win and retain certain key accounts, you need to utilize ABM. The old lead funnel with Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Purchase as funnel stages needs to shift toward an ABM-focused one with Identify, Expand, Engage, and Advocate as the funnel stages. Since we sell to accounts and multiple people within accounts, using ABM to identify and engage the right people in target accounts will help you increase pipeline and improve sales and marketing alignment. While your funnel might be smaller at the top, it will yield more qualified leads in companies that you care about in the long run. 2. Pick a Level of ABM to Execute Deploy the type of ABM programs that work best for your company. What does that mean? There are different types of ABM and one might be a better fit for your marketing strategy and goals. You may want to concentrate on a handful of large accounts and dive deep into an ABM strategy, take a few hundred accounts to do targeted marketing to, or fold your ABM accounts into your existing marketing programs. Spend time on working with sales to select the right accounts and execute marketing programs across various channels for maximum ROI. And you don’t have to master ABM in a day. Prevent yourself and your team from getting overwhelmed by starting small and growing from there. You need to implement ABM in a way that works for you and your organization. 3. Select the Right Technology The conference asked all speakers to list the technologies they are using to execute ABM programs. It’s nice to see marketers are not on their own. Many technologies today make the delivery of ABM scalable and precise. FlipMyFunnel published an ABM stack outlining more than 900 technology vendors to assist the ABM marketer. At the center of the technology stack are marketing automation platforms, like Marketo, that track account insights and engagement, and enable companies to create personalized relationships with their buyers. If you’re just getting started with an ABM strategy, start by evaluating your technology stack and make sure you are leveraging the right technologies to conduct and optimize your ABM programs. 4. Optimize and Measure Launching an account-based marketing program can be hard, but measuring your results can often be more challenging. But, especially with a new strategy and program, measurement is critical to optimizing and ultimately growing your program. Track the funnel flow starting from the top of the funnel to discover incoming accounts and early results. Some metrics to consider include new names, account engagement, conversion rates, meetings, pipeline, velocity, opportunities, and closed revenue. In addition to tracking key metrics, an important part of ABM is getting regular feedback from sales and collaborating with them on new ideas for optimization. So set goals, A/B test, learn from the results,and iterate. To learn more about how to get started on ABM, check out our ebook: A Recipe For Lean Account-Based Marketing. And to discover how Marketo is using it today, come watch my presentation, Account-Based Marketing: Marketo’s Collaborative Approach, at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit.

By: Liz (Courter) Oseguera Originally Posted: March 1, 2016 | Marketo Blog ​| Engagement Marketing Engagement marketing is becoming an increasingly complex, yet critical task for modern businesses and organizations. Every form of marketing today—from mobile to direct mail—requires an in-depth understanding of your audience if you want to engage with them and stand out. There are several ways for you to discover the insights you need. You can evaluate your data or survey existing customers to figure out what your target audience needs or you can go to the places where they’re already sharing this information—community forums. Community forums are one of the best (and most commonly overlooked) channels that provide marketers with an invaluable, and often free, pool of queries and topics of interest. By being proactive and taking advantage of the expanse of users and information on forums, you can transform the way you engage with your prospects and customers. Here’s everything you need to know to get started on integrating community forums into your engagement marketing strategy: where to turn, what to look for, and how to use your new insights: 1. Take Advantage of All Available Forums There are three kinds of forums, and all are extremely valuable for market research: major forums, niche, and company forums. Major forums are useful for evaluating a massive, diverse audience and spotting large trends. Niche forums are much more akin to customer surveys, but on a larger scale. Utilizing both sets of forums in tandem will yield the most effective data to implement change in your customer acquisition strategies. Let’s dive into a few major forums that you can glean insights from: Quora: A Bank of Questions that Need Your Answers Quora is a social forum built around a Q&A functionality. It is free to sign up, however there is a massive emphasis on valuable content that is managed by the Quora community through an upvote/downvote system. To date, DMR Digital Stats/Gadgets reports that Quora answers span over 400,000 topics, and the site’s forum engagement has scaled to over 80 million unique visitors per month. Due to its Q&A structure, Quora is a great resource for finding out what your target audience is confused about or having issues with. Reddit: The Front Page of the Internet Reddit is a massive forum and is making a very compelling shift towards the business sector with a buzzing and information-rich BusinessHub. Reddit is the 32nd most popular website in the world, according to Alexa, and has a vast pool of content and highly informed users. This allows businesses to conduct market research on a very diverse group of people, over a wide array of subjects, to find the right influencers and gauge the best topics to engage their audience. Yahoo!: The Most Popular News and Media Site Alexa reports that Yahoo is currently the 5th most visited site in the world. While it’s known for its email services, Yahoo is also a popular search engine, news source, and Q&A platform. In fact, Yahoo Answers has been around since 2005 and accounts for 4.5 million unique monthly visitors. Yahoo also provides Yahoo Groups for users to join in on more niche topics. The overall volume and depth of content on Yahoo allows marketers to compare over a decade of content to find trends, while still researching the needs of current active users. LinkedIn: The World’s Largest Professional Network LinkedIn is a powerhouse in the B2B sector—with a website rank of 16th in the world and users totaling 400 million, according to Alexa. Focused entirely on business, LinkedIn’s users can provide valuable insight into any industry. LinkedIn Groups are also extremely popular and give members the ability to find content and connections in their unique industries or niches. Due to its largely professional membership, LinkedIn and its groups can provide quick and easy research on your prospects and customers. After you have a general sense of how to engage with potential customers, start tracking forums that serve your specific industry or niche. Niche forums are much more akin to customer surveys, but on a larger scale. Utilizing both sets of forums in tandem will yield the most effective data to implement change in your customer acquisition strategies. Where major, general forums can inspire content ideas and engagement strategy to increase your customer base, niche forums can provide the insights to help make your brand a true thought leader in your space and deepen engagement with your audience. Think about who your target customers are and the right niche forums to find them on. Below are some examples of niche forums for specific audiences. If you do not see one applicable to your industry listed below, The Biggest Boards maintains an active list of forums and online communities in just about every category. City-Data: The City-Data forums are home to all kinds of discussions based on physical locations, which makes this a great resource for real estate professionals or any brick and mortar business that is invested in the local community. Stack Exchange: Stack Exchange is a compilation of 130 mini Q&A sites. It’s widely known as the largest community of programmers, with 26 million professional and novice programmers congregating there every month. Insurance Forums: As the name implies, Insurance Forums is an insurance community, bringing together more than 72,500 registered members around the insurance industry and how to succeed in it. You can use the “Forums” drop-down to find the exact topics you are looking to research, such as long term care insurance or retirement planning. /r/nonprofit: Reddit’s subreddit /r/nonprofit is great for news, trends, and questions regarding nonprofit organizations. To find more specific information, use the search bar in the top right and make sure to focus your search just in the /r/nonprofit subreddit. CNET: CNET has you covered on everything tech-related. With a forum for nearly every product and every major brand, CNET is a bounty of information for tech industry leaders. You can find the forums section of CNET in the footer of the homepage. SportsHoopla: This forum is very straightforward and easy to use. It clearly differentiates college and professional athletics, and hosts separate forums for each major sport. myFICO: myFICO’s forum has excellent organization on topics for financial services professionals, covering broad and minute topics from credit questions to loans and personal finance discussions. Education Week: Education Week is a one-stop-shop for news, research, data, events, and forums for education professionals and enthusiastic parents. If your company has its own community forum, peruse it for valuable insights from your very own customers. And if you don’t, it’s never too late to get started on building your customer community. The Marketing Nation is Marketo’s community for digital marketing practitioners to share their knowledge and thought leadership, learn from other like-minded marketers, access community-based support, and most importantly, help us shape our product roadmap by contributing to our active ideas section which has over 400 customer ideas that have been implemented. 2. Look for the Right Things Once you’ve decided where to start, jump right into your research by searching for your industry.If the site doesn’t have a visible search bar, you can use Google. In a Google search bar, type in “site:” followed by the URL of the forum you are using, and then the keyword you want to search for—like your industry, product, or band name. For example, “site:quora.com digital marketing” will display a list of pages on Quora that match the search “digital marketing.” You can also look for tabs like trending now, topics, read, top stories, or other tabs that are relevant to your industry. Browsing more general topics, in addition to searching for specific terms, will help you find prospects who might be so new to the industry that they don’t use the “right” terms yet or those who are looking for your solution in the wrong places.Once you have found relevant posts or questions, take note of the following things: Questions: What questions is your target audience already asking about your industry or product/solution? Take special note of any trends that stand out and try to pintpoint at which stage in the purchase cycle certain questions seem to arise. Common misunderstandings: Are there common misconceptions of your brand, product, or industry? Recurring words/phrases: Identifying these commonalities will help you understand how your audience thinks about your industry and interacts with your brand. Even if some of the terms are not technically correct, using (and correcting, when necessary) those keywords will help you communicate.  Opinions about your brand: Find out what your existing customers like and don’t like about your processes, products, or services. (And resist the urge to start defending your brand to angry dissidents.) Opinions about your competitors: What does your target audience like and dislike about your competitors’ products or services? Influencers: Who motivates conversions in your niche? Who do buyers look towards to influence their purchase decision? 3. Integrate Your Research into Your Campaigns for Better Engagement The data you’ve gathered from scouring relevant forums is actionable, so apply it to your marketing strategies to better reach and engage your audience. These are just a few channels you can integrate your insights into: Email marketing: A better understanding of what your audience is asking at each stage of the funnel will help you create more engaging email marketing programs. Tweak and personalize the content in your automated email campaigns to address specific questions or misunderstandings that are relevant to your audience’s needs and buying stage. Content marketing: A list of real questions and common misunderstandings is a great resource for planning yourcontent marketing plan around. You can also reach out to new influencers you discovered for features or interviews. SEO and PPC: These will be closely tied to your content marketing efforts, but pay special attention to recurring words and phrases that your audience uses. Then, use them strategically in your ads and throughout your content to attract organic and paid clicks you’ve been missing. Social marketing: In addition to promoting all the new content ideas you’ve developed, use your social marketingplatforms to influence brand image in light of new insights about your audience’s opinion of your brand and your competitors. What can you magnify and own, and what might need correcting? You also may need to update your buyer personas in light of some of this new information. Are your customers really who you thought they were? You might be surprised. Make sure to update those profiles so you’re targeting your audience better moving forward. And don’t forget to share your new insights with the rest of your team like sales and customer service. All of your marketing, throughout the entire customer lifecycle, can all be improved by a better understanding of your target audience. Learn More About Your Audience Today Community forums are an often-neglected gold mine of data and audience insight. Too many marketers struggle to create effective marketing personas or create content and ad campaigns that really connect from scratch, when the insights we need are right at our fingertips. The best part is that you don’t need to clear your calendar to get started. Just choose one forum that fits your audience, do a quick search, and see what you discover. The possibilities are endless. Have you already started looking through community forums to discover what your audience is interested in? I’d love to hear what insights you’ve found in the comments below!

this is an example doc used in [this post] that shows how to create successful nurture programs LNA: Install Snippet Email (EXAMPLE) Overview An email educating and encouraging new leads to install the snippet in the Optimizely product. Hypothesis By sending an email with a humorous subject line about installing the snippet, users will be more likely to open the email than if they are sent a serious subject line. Baseline Conversion Out of all leads that were delivered our "Snippet Install Email" (5,000), 35% of them opened the email (1750). Goal Increase create account conversion by 7% Baseline conversion = 4,900 leads per variation Audience New leads that created a self-serve Optimizely account Content Cadence: 1x week to new leads Notes

By: Mike Tomita Posted: February 19, 2016 | Digital Marketing Return on investment (ROI) is an important part of digital marketing (and  really, almost every part of marketing)—it tells you whether you’re getting your money’s worth from your marketing campaigns. And if you’re not, it’s critical to get to the bottom of it, and understand why so you can learn how to improve your campaigns. But first, you need to understand how you can effectively measure the ROI of digital advertising. The most instinctive way to measure digital advertising ROI is to track metrics that tie directly to revenue and profit (think conversions, opportunities, etc.). While it sounds great on paper, in the real world, this oversimplified view can paint an inaccurate picture of your ROI, especially if your product is sold at a low price per unit. Big picture measurement often factors in soft metrics—things like brand impressions, impressions, website visitors, and downloads—which help tell a more complete story. Here’s how to measure ROI using soft metrics for three popular digital advertisements—mobile video ads, native advertising, and programmatic advertising: 1. Mobile Video Ads Mobile video advertising can be more effective than regular web video advertising or even television advertising. This is because mobile is a much more intimate medium—it’s less of a shared experience and has fewer distractions. When done well, mobile video ads provide helpful information that drives traffic to your website, increases brand awareness, and is valuable enough for social sharing. Home improvement retailer Lowe’s recently demonstrated the value of mobile video ads with their #lowesfixinsix campaign on the popular video app Vine. The quick tips are fun and informative—and over 35,000 of their followers choose to have their ads in their feeds. Measuring the ROI of Mobile Video Advertising When evaluating the success of your mobile video advertising, take these metrics into account: Brand awareness: Measure brand awareness by looking at your direct traffic numbers (hits that come from viewers typing the URL directly into their search bar), the number of people who searched for your video by its name or hashtag, the number of clicks that came from referrals, and the number of social media shares and mentions. You can also find current search data on your brand name by using a tool like Google Trends. Purchase influence: Did your ad lead to an increase in sales? Look at the first-touch and multi-touch attribution that was generated by your video or video program for a look at the ROI but for a larger picture, look at the amount of traffic generated by your campaign and compare it to your sales numbers—including the numbers before and after the campaign launched. Accessibility: Track the placement of your ads and test them to make sure they are viewable on all devices and that they are not hidden on the page. This ensures people actually have access to your ads. Mind share: While you have no way of measuring how often people discuss your brand with friends over coffee, you can get a good idea how often people are talking about it by looking at the comments and shares on your mobile videos. A successful mobile video ad will have both. 2. Native Advertising Effective native advertising fits seamlessly into the organic content of the sites that carry them. Also known as an “advertorial,” this type of advertisement provides useful information to readers in a format that resembles non-paid articles on the website. Native advertising can be found in hard copies and online newspapers and magazines, but it’s also seen on social media sites such as Facebook.IBM pays to publish their own content on the Forbes platform as IBMVoice. Their paid content looks and feels like an article on the site, but it’s clear that it’s marketing content. In fact, native ads that look too much like unbranded content can actually hurt your campaign and reputation if you leave readers feeling duped. Measuring the ROI of Native AdvertisingMeasuring the ROI of native advertising can be challenge for many marketers. It’s measured primarily by click-throughs, which is an important factor to consider, but other measurements are also critical in understanding the full picture of its performance: Customer acquisition: How many click-throughs via native advertising led to acquiring information that you can nurture toward conversion? To measure this, divide the total number of click-throughs by the number of people who submitted contact information (for example, by signing up for your newsletter). This number should be higher in connection with a native advertising campaign. Reputation: Does the information presented in your native ad help develop the company as a trusted expert or thought leader? Does it increase the number of people turning to the brand’s website for advice? Look at the number of comments and queries you receive in connection to your ad, as well as increased traffic. Brand recognition: Do more people recognize your brand as a result of the native advertising? To determine this, look at your website analytics to find the number of hits that come in from your native advertising directly, and then use Google Trends to see if the number of people searching for your brand name is increasing. Mind share: Are people sharing your content on social media? Are they talking about it? You can usually find the number of social media shares right on the content page. 3. Programmatic Advertising Programmatic advertising is software-created, specifically-targeted advertising. You probably see this type of advertising many times a day online—they’re often displayed as banner or sidebar ads that change whenever you refresh your page.  A huge amount of marketing dollars go into programmatic advertising. In fact, eMarketer reports that it expects to see programmatic ad spend reach $20.41 billion this year. This type of advertising is automated—created directly, without an ad salesperson or contracts, and is based on your goals. The biggest advantage of programmatic advertising is that it can be altered to best meet your company’s needs, based on the demographics, location, and behavior of your target audience.Diesel, a popular fashion brand, included programmatic ads as part of their multi-channel campaign last fall. Their Shazam ads, for example, included copy specifically designed for the targeted setting. When Shazam couldn’t recognize a song, the Diesel ad empathized with the user. Measuring the ROI of Programmatic AdvertisingBecause of its versatility and flexibility, programmatic advertising metrics must be measured frequently to be effective. While things like click-throughs and mind share are important your measurements should focus on areas such as: Recognition and reputation: Search for your brand name on social media and keep track of the number of mentions, as well as whether the mentions are positive or negative. Your recognition should increase the longer your programmatic ads run. Website traffic numbers: As your brand becomes more recognized, you should see an increase in traffic, from people who come directly to your site by typing in your URL as well as following your ad. Hard metrics are without a doubt important for proving and improving ROI (and demonstrating the value of your activities and spend to the C-level), but it’s critical to track vanity metrics in addition to ROI in order to have a comprehensive view of how your ads are doing. As your brand pushes marketing boundaries into new strategies—like mobile video ads, native advertising, and programmatic ads—make sure you are measuring ROI beyond just revenue impact so your whole team can continue to drive engagement and improve sales.

By: Frank Passantino Posted: February 22, 2016 | Mobile Marketing Ad Tech (paid media) has been around for quite some time—with advertising on social networks and popular ad platforms like Google AdWords—but it has historically been seen, and treated, as its own category. A big shift that we’ve seen over the last year or so is that Ad Tech and MarTech are gravitating closer and closer together as a response to the demand from the market for connecting these two technologies. Looking at the combination of these two technologies and the continued migration towards a more mobile world, we start seeing opportunities for new types of paid media that help marketers create seamless, end-to-end experiences for their target audiences. This blog post will examine a new type of ad that blends the elements of Mobile Ad Tech and MarTech. The More Modern Ad Let’s take a look at a new solution—Facebook Lead Ads. A Facebook Lead Ad is a new type of ad unit that Facebook announced in mid September last year that’s designed specifically for the mobile channel. This ad unit allows a marketer to specify a set of questions via a form to capture a person’s information inside of the Facebook mobile app without the person ever having to leave the app. Imagine scrolling through your Facebook news feed on your mobile device and coming across a newsletter subscription ad that interests you: You tap on the subscribe button because you’re interested in receiving the personalized newsletter. Next, you’re presented with a form (inside your Facebook app on your mobile device) that the marketing team has built to capture data on the your interests and communication frequency preferences. The examples below show what this flow looks like. Now, you’re able to choose the content you are interested in hearing about—in this case, it’s Web Personalization—and how frequently you want to hear from the advertiser (once every two weeks). That’s it, with a few quick taps you can submit your details and the company is now able to effectively deliver personalized content to you based on the terms you specified. Mobile Ad Tech + MarTech = Better Mobile Marketing As you can see with the example above, Facebook Lead Ads allow marketers to seamlessly capture information about a person with just a few taps on their mobile device. When someone engages with a Facebook Lead Ad, they are presented with a form that is pre-populated with information they have already shared with Facebook, such as email address (work or personal as specified by the marketer building the form), phone number, mailing address, etc. This makes the form submission process quick and easy. No more re-directing people to a mobile version of a form on a mobile version of a landing page that requires multiple taps and manual data entry. Instead, the person filling out the form has a seamless experience with the brand with minimal interruption. The best part? Your marketing automation platform can continue the seamless experience once someone has submitted a form. The answers to custom questions, like frequency of communication or specific interests, can be transferred into your marketing automation platform’s database and then used to inform your marketing programs for instantaneous responses and continuous engagement. This shifts the focus from outbound marketing and webpage sign-up forms to mobile inbound inquires, email subscriptions, sign-ups, registrations, and so on. Now, marketers can trigger a sequence of events based on an in-app form fill out. Take the example above. The marketer may want to trigger an immediate email response based on the prospect’s interest. Using the example above, let’s assume Marketo has already set up a nurture track for Web Personalization. Upon subscribing to Web Personalization content via the Facebook Lead Ad form, Marketo can then add the people who submitted the form to the relevant nurture track in order to continuously deliver specific content the person has requested and engage them based on the frequency that they specified. Together MarTech and Mobile Ad Tech improves a marketer’s ability to offer a more relevant experience to their audience. How are you using Mobile Ad Tech in conjunction with your marketing automation? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

By: Sanjay Dholakia Fellow marketers, if recent economic headlines are leaving you antsy, if not mildly panicked, you’re not alone. Last year ended on a whimper — fourth-quarter gross domestic product grew by only 0.7 percent — and then the stock market promptly dove about six percent in January amid predictions of greater turmoil ahead. The uncertainty also has had a spillover effect on many smart marketers I’ve spoken with since the financial tempest blew in with the new year. Increasingly, they talk about internal pressures from their companies’ financial gurus to choose cheaper alternative products and services. Even though they remain far from best-in-breed in their categories, the argument is that they are “good enough.” And it doesn’t end there. As more marketing departments are asked to accomplish more with less, the to-do list grows, while resources are stretched thinner and thinner. Pretty soon, marketers are looking at program outcomes and saying, “Well, good enough.” Just good enough? This hardly sounds like a battle cry for success. Actually, it feels more like a myopic recipe for mediocrity. Marketers are in the business of finding new ways to make their companies stand out from the pack, and in doing so, drive the bottom line. You can’t achieve these goals with “good enough” as your guiding principle. Marketers need to know how to resist the “good enough” temptation in their operations — and they also need to know how to articulate the value of their own offerings so they avoid falling victim to the “good enough” mindset with their own customers. Here are some very basic lessons I wish someone had shared with me on why “good enough” — for lack of a better term — really sucks. ”Good Enough” Costs A Lot “Good enough” gets expensive fast. When I graduated from college and needed to swap jeans and sneakers for formal business attire, a relative suggested that I shop at a discount shoe retailer famous for offering deals. I took the recommendation and returned home with a real bargain: two pairs of shoes for the price of one. A couple of weeks later, the first pair had rubbed my toes so raw that they bled when I walked. The other pair wore out within three months. I had to buy two new pairs — I bought with quality in mind the second time. The postscript: Buying “good enough” ended up costing me three times as much — and gave me bloody feet. Like a pair of lousy shoes, “good enough” inflicts a little more hurt each day. Say you have a goal of increasing customer retention, but you’re also juggling driving new revenue and entering three new markets. With the plan you have time to execute — emphasis on have time — your retention begins to improve, but nowhere near the rate that would actually move the needle for the company. But at least the numbers are rising, so you proclaim, “Good enough!” That’s no way to operate! Same thing goes for the tools marketers use. I’ve seen companies choose a solution just so they could save $20,000 a year in costs. But did their “good enough” products help scale the business? Nope. In the end, the companies were forced instead to hire more people to deal with the limitations, costing another $200,000 in incremental yearly costs. No self-respecting CFO or CEO will argue that the $200,000 is better than the $20,000 cost. If they do, your company has bigger problems. “Good Enough” Wastes Time The Romans built their first aqueduct in 312 BCE. It was one of 11 separate structures that would supply water to the city of Rome for centuries. The ancient Romans didn’t scrimp on the quality of masonry, brick or concrete used in construction. If they had gone with “good enough,” their aqueducts would have crumbled long before Julius Caesar. The aqueducts were so well built that some even found use in the Renaissance era. This is long-term thinking with an exclamation point! Short-term thinking won’t allow you to plan very far into the future. Going with a good enough strategy, or even good enough talent, means you’re bound to wind up wasting time, effort and money to compensate for the original mistake of a penny wise, pound foolish approach. In marketing, if you settle for the “quick fix,” you’re bound to shortchange yourself in the long run. “Good enough” often slows down your entire team as they seek to cope with the inherent limitations of poor planning or a subpar tool. Worse, tools that are not built to last — by design — will force you to stop your business at some point to replace the product or service that was “good enough.” I’ll very often hear a statement like this: “Well, we don’t need all of those capabilities right now; we’ll just replace this later.” Huh? Yeah, because everyone likes to tell their CEO, “We are taking a break for a few months to redo the process we just did six months ago!” Take a cue from the Romans, and choose talent and tools that will last your company a lifetime. “Good Enough” Will Guarantee You A “C” Every marketer I talk with wants their company to aspire to greatness. They’re in this profession to ignite change, and so nobody wants to belong to the middle of the pack. But “good enough” suggests that you’re willing to be average. Think about the words. When have you as a marketer ever felt satisfied with average? Average will not get you the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve. Average will not drive revenue, and it will not help you gain an edge in the marketplace. There is so much coffee out there at our local gas stations and supermarkets that is absolutely sufficient from a convenience and caffeine perspective that we could claim a glut. That coffee is absolutely “good enough” for the purpose of jolting us awake. It’s not going to kill us. But, it’s not going to taste great either. It’s a solid “C.” That’s why millions of us, every morning and every day, still go out of our way to get that high-quality $5 cup of joe. We don’t settle for “C.” If you want to be a great marketer, “good enough” talent, strategies or tools will never enable you to reach the top. It sends a message to your organization: “Hey, we’re okay being … well, okay!” You have to compete with the best ammo you can muster. And this means not just thinking for today’s outcomes, but tomorrow’s, as well. Go for the “A” outcome — say no to “good enough.” This post originally appeared on Marketing Land on February 9, 2016.

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