Product Documents

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

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

By: Chris Gillespie Posted: March 22, 2016 | Sales It’s an easy mistake to make, and most of us are guilty of it: we make decisions based off our emotions, which sometimes steer us in the wrong way. And as a sales rep, who could blame you? You’re juggling conflicting priorities that pull you in all sorts of different directions. Some days you’re focused on sharpening your product knowledge and other days you’re learning to listen better and uncover compelling events. Support teams want you to set better expectations, marketing wants you drive people to a conference, and your boss needs you to forecast more accurately. With all of these moving parts, your productivity is constantly rising and falling, and if you don’t pay attention to the health of your funnel, your income and job security will always be in flux. But with some driver-awareness, you can learn to steer things towards success. Sales Is Like Driving a Car The analogy I always like to draw is that sales is like driving a car. As you’re driving, you pay attention to the road, speedometer, and mirrors for helpful feedback that keeps you on track. In sales, you also have constant feedback from the people who ignore your emails, the pitches that backfire, and the deals you don’t win. The problem here is that we sometimes start ignoring this feedback because it can be uncomfortable. So instead, we stick to talking about our wins. But the consequences for ignoring this feedback in both selling and driving are the same: after a while, you’ll drive yourself off the road. The first step towards staying on course is learning to accept feedback and resisting the urge to defend yourself. It’s important not to see it as criticism because feedback is the only way you can get better. Once you’ve done this, the best place to start looking for feedback is within your sales pipeline, which in many ways is the quantitative accumulation of all of your sales feedback. Based on what’s not going well, you can steer yourself out of a ditch and onto the performance highway. So, check your mirrors for these three common pipeline problems and learn how to address them to get back on track: 1. Not Enough Leads Coming In While this is a top-of-the-funnel problem, the issue may not be with your marketing or sales process, but with your perspective. If you’re starting from scratch in a new territory, you’re in a good spot. The best thing to do here is identify what makes a “good target” from other successful reps and start going through the list of companies you have. Spend your time narrowing them down into a few manageable lists, then determine youroutreach strategy and get cracking. But if you have a module of set accounts that you’ve been at for a while, you may be suffering from a bias against familiar companies that you refer to as “dead territory”. Your deep knowledge on prospects in the territory might actually be holding you back. Approach these accounts with a fresh mindset, and make a point of going after the ones that are hard to get and challenging yourself to call everyone in that account or ask to be referred in. Flip things on their head and you’ll start seeing results. As motivational speaker, Jim Rohn said “If you truly want something, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.” So find a way. If you feel that you have already reached out to every possible company, consider that whatever list you’re working with is like looking at your territory through a straw. You start to think that you’re seeing the whole world when it’s really just a fraction. I know this from vast experience and I’ve often found myself crying “I’ve called everyone in the state of New York!” before suddenly getting a fantastic inbound lead. Take a break and get some outside perspective. Tell your peers what you’re running into and get their feedback on new ideas. There are always more approaches, lists, data providers, and strategies. 2. Leads Aren’t Moving Forward Are your prospects getting excited or setting up next steps, but then nothing follows through? Perhaps you need to work on your delivery. Work on your pain discovery process and how you apply your product to solve a prospect’s specific problem. Without getting to the pain point plus a commitment, you’re going to just keep having conversations that go nowhere. So, don’t let your discovery calls end until you have discovered their pain. If there’s no pain, then there’s no commitment to move forward in the process and buy. What does pain sound like? It involves emotionally charged words like fear, worried, serious, terrible, embarrassing, awful, etc. You can discover it through repeated questioning and genuine curiosity, and when you hear those words, dive into them with more questions. Once you have identified a specific pain, demonstrate how your product solves it and secure a commitment to buy. Use a line like, “Great, so if we can help you improve [insert pain point here], is there any reason you wouldn’t be able to sign today?” and repeat back to them what you just heard. This invokes what Psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the “consistency principle” and drastically increases compliance. 3. Full Pipeline, but Nobody Is Ready to Buy Most people have a hard time telling anyone “no”. The natural reaction is to say “maybe” and then try to avoid you. You can fix this by directly telling people that you want them to feel comfortable telling you they’re not interested, and politely explain that you’ll end up wasting a lot of their time chasing them if they can’t. Once you have identified that your prospects are indeed interested and you understand their pain points, you need to figure out why they are not acting immediately. Ask questions to see if they’re seriously committed to solving things. When you do finally get to the bottom of things, their reason for not acting may be something like lack of authority, lack of budget, internal politics, need to make a hire, etc. In this case, you’ve finally reached a concrete core-objection that you can work with them to build a mutual close plan. Feedback is tough, and no one ever said it would be easy to hear. But it’s only through admitting that we’re fallible and listening to our critics that we can identify our blind spots and course correct. Like a driver on the road, if you aren’t constantly checking your mirrors and listening for the honks of other drivers, you’re putting yourself in peril. And the same goes in sales—you need to be able to look at your funnel, see what’s blocking you from merging onto the performance highway, and realize that it might be something that you’re doing. So, it’s time to course correct!

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

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

This blog originally appeared on Forbes.com, July 28th, 2015 and was written by Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez Technology is no longer the tail that wags the marketing dog – it is the entire dog, nose to tail. There was a time in the not too distant past when digital was an add-on function in the marketing equation. Today, digital is at the core of everything we do in marketing. And that has profound ramifications for the business of marketing, the people who practice it, and the companies that rely on it to grow and succeed. Just as technology has transformed how companies market themselves and their brands, it is having a similarly momentous impact on corporate marketing organizations and the people who staff and manage them. For corporations to fully capitalize on the technology-fueled marketing revolution– or just avoid being left behind – they will need to completely rethink and restructure their marketing departments. Companies large and small are already starting to align their marketing departments with the new technology-driven business environment, but these changes are happening with less urgency than is warranted. Marketing should be a leading indicator in business (and technology), not a lagging one. So what does the tech-empowered marketing organization of the future look like, and what do you need to do to build one today? In my mind there are two big areas of focus: A Customer Mindset A study we commissioned earlier this year that found that 75% of CMOs and senior marketing executives expect to own the end-to-end customer relationship in the next three to five years.  Assuming even more responsibility for managing the entire customer lifecycle, the CMO is now organizing the marketing function around the customer rather than around channels, internal processes and tools (e.g., no more separate email and social marketing teams). We’re also seeing centers of excellence emerging to connect common, horizontal functions and drive coordination around engaging the customer. This includes breaking down the old barriers between customer acquisition and loyalty.  Suffice it to say that if you still have a separate digital group in your marketing department, you are probably headed in the wrong direction. A New Team For years the key players in the marketing department were the VPs of brand marketing, corporate marketing and product marketing. Who are the leaders in this new digital age? The term “content marketing” barely existed five years ago. Today most marketing departments have at least one executive whose sole job is to oversee the development and distribution of content to attract and engage customers. The modern marketing organization is increasingly being powered by an engine that is process-driven. This has given rise to a new role, the head of marketing operations,who isresponsible for driving that engine with the right blend of technology and data. I also believe we need to designate a head of listening. This individual would listen to what the customer really says and understand how she behaves via the web, mobile, social and the “real” world, too. Always advocating for the customer’s needs and wants, the head of listening would use these insights to empower the marketing team to respond in real-time, customer-by-customer, thus helping to build the long-term relationships that produce outsized revenue growth. Notwithstanding all of this progress, too many companies are not evolving fast enough. To paraphrase the great poet Chaucer, time and tide wait for no company. Forward-thinking corporations are moving aggressively to build customer-centric, technology-driven marketing organizations that are competing more effectively and poised to win the future. Is your company ready?

This article was written by Steve Sloan, Marketo's SVP of Product and Engineering Who hasn’t ever watched Ronco rotisserie salesman Ron Popeil tell you to "set it and forget it" or marvel while someone shows how they created their perfectly chiseled body in a P90X class? Ever since the FCC lifted advertising time restrictions on television in 1984, the airwaves have been chockablock with high-buzz pitches hawking everything imaginable. I love them. These infomercials represent some of the absolutely best examples of content marketing you’ll ever find. They’re clever, compelling and tell stories that resonate with people. And they offer lessons that marketers ought to take to heart. Lesson 1: They use storytelling to inspire emotions Nearly all of us have watched one of those commercials for a few minutes, a half hour or many half hours. Infomercials tell wonderfully compelling stories about human beings that we all can relate to in some way. They may make us feel hopeful; they may make us feel more optimistic, they may make us feel more alive – the point is that they make us feel something. If you’ve ever watched an exercise infomercial, you can almost believe you’ve just completed a workout. (Hey, I’ve burned calories just watching them go through their paces!) The best infomercials feature the smart use of visual images and personal testimonials to help convince any fence sitters watching that this would be a perfect fit for them. And they do wonderful jobs telling stories that get viewers emotionally involved. Great marketers understand that it’s about how people feel, not about what they think. People may think based upon rational ideas but they act on feelings. We want to get them to act but we first need to get them to feel. What infomercials get right is the focus on the human element and what it means to people, not just what a product does. That’s the way to draw us in. One company that gets this right is Patagonia, who used storytelling to turn their customers into activists. The company, which sells high-end outdoor goods, also has a mission to improve the environment. The company long relied on its owned media – both catalog and website – to foster its message of conserving the environment amidst its wares for sale. And through this consistent, cause-driven promotion, Patagonia fans remained loyal customers and believers in the company mission. Show your customers some love by making them feel like their voices are heard and that they’re a part of your greater cause—it will make a big difference. Lesson 2: They go hand in hand with attribution metrics The smart strategy behind infomercials isn’t solely focused on the fact that they can influence viewers’ feelings. The marketers behind infomercials can be extremely disciplined about measuring the economic impact of their story telling.  Based on the phone number someone dials or website they hit, marketers have clear metrics about what is working – by ad, channel and time slot. They will pull multiple levers to find a mix that gets the outcome they really matters – a purchase.  We’ve all seen scattered, irrelevant marketing storytelling across the web.  Combine that with the cryptic attribution metrics that so many of marketers rely on every day. Lesson 3: The narrative passes “The Two Drink” test If marketers are ever going to better connect with people, they must frame their stories with the right lenses.  A marketing friend of mine has a great little trick when he gets stuck or just created some jargon-laden blather that doesn’t mean anything intellectually or emotionally.  He applies what he calls the `two beer’ test. Imagine sitting down for a drink with a friend while you describe your product. What would you say? Would they smile and lean in, or start to check their phone?  If you really want to grab someone, you would serve up a few anecdotes as part of a fun story with colorful, compelling details. And after that first drink, you might loosen up even more and really get into the actual story. You wouldn’t focus on product specs; you’d talk about why your product really matters. Next time you are passing across the channels and land on QVC, pause and check it out.  They have been connecting with viewers for 29 years. There’s no secret formula at work. QVC succeeds because they know that the path to people’s wallets is through their hearts, not their minds. It’s a lesson that all content marketers would do well to take to heart. PS – And yes, you now have a new excuse to watch that P90X commercial!

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: Jim Kowalski Posted: April 20, 2016 | Engagement Marketing My wife recently had an outpatient procedure at one of the best hospitals in the country. Thankfully, everything went well; and our experience at the hospital was first-class. But as I drove us home and struggled to remember most of the instructions we were given post-op, the marketer in me began to think about ways hospitals can use engagement marketing techniques and technologies to better improve the patient discharge experience and drive significant financial benefits at the same time. The Potential According to data from Medicare, at least 20% of patients who are discharged from hospitals or other medical facilities make a repeat visit. The costs of these re-admissions exceed $17 billion per year and are growing. Spurred on by the penalties and other provisions for re-admission in the Affordable Care Act, hospitals, consultants, industry experts, and others are all seeking ways to reduce this number. While not a panacea, one simple solution is better patient engagement and education throughout the process. Industry studies have shown that patients who have a clear understanding of after-care instructions are 30% less likely to re-admit. When you’re talking the health and happiness of patients and billions of dollars in potential savings, any chance at improvement should be seriously considered. And sometimes, the simplest can be the most effective. The Payoff At Marketo, our teams work with healthcare providers from all across the country to create ways to better engage with new and returning patients, nurture them through the entire experience, educate them, and even engage their family caregivers to improve the overall quality of their experience. These customers and those who use marketing automation and engagement technologies see a wide range of financial benefits, including a significant reduction in patient re-admission rates. A good example of this is Kindred Healthcare, a Kentucky-based post-acute care provider. Using marketing automation technology, Kindred has been able to improve engagement with patients and caregivers through targeted, relevant content that answers the major questions healthcare providers are asking. The results in a short period of time are impressive: a 4.1% reduction in re-hospitalization from transition care facilities and a 5.1% reduction in re-hospitalization from nursing and rehabilitation facilities. Other providers I’ve spoken with report another additional benefit. As family caregivers engage in the content and education provided, they are more apt to choose the same hospital for any elective surgeries or procedures they have coming up as well. Hospitals are reporting higher satisfaction rates as patients and family members have more content at their fingertips. So what are the lessons we can glean from healthcare? Well, they aren’t isolated to that industry. In fact, marketers can apply them anywhere: Relevant content and messaging are critical—and so is the ability to deliver them with an understanding of who your individual customer is. Kindred Healthcare started by surveying their audiences to understand what their biggest concerns are and then developed content that addresses them. Build loyalty and advocacy over time because happy customers drive referrals. This is true of any business model—business-to-business or business-to-consumer. Your customers are your prospects, too. In fact, research from Teradata shows that 61% of people would to tell their friends and family about their good experiences and that 27% would sign up for a company’s loyalty program. Engage customers continuously over time—with messages and content relevant to their situation that drives them toward a desired action or outcome. Being mindful of who your audience is and what resonates with them the most will help push them further along in the customer lifecycle. And these steps are all made simpler for the marketer with the right technology. In an industry so complex, it’s refreshing to see that there are still simple solutions that can drive so much value across the entire customer lifecycle, from awareness of a medical facility to post-discharge. Now, if I can just find that piece of paper they gave me, so I know when to give her that medicine…

By: Sesame Mish The most important part of any marketing team is its people. Without the right people—and the right combination of people—things like resources, processes, and strategy won’t be optimized. You need dynamic individuals at the helm, all working in areas of their strengths, banding together in unison to achieve company goals. All marketing teams should think of it this way—and digital advertising teams are no exception. So, what’s the best way to form your digital advertising team, in particular? Let’s explore… By now, marketers are acutely aware that we’ve entered the digital age—we communicate by email with our customers, we promote our brands through social media, and we always point people to our website to learn more. On that same note, we have seen the advertising landscape undergo a massive shift—from the retro Mad Men-esque days of print ads and advertising agencies all the way to the present day emergence of digital ads and internal digital advertising teams. With this transformation comes a new set of roles and duties that need to be taken into consideration when forming your digital advertising team. But at the same time, we don’t want to forget the attributes and skills that made our Mad Men predecessors so great. Therefore, Modern Mad Men need to embody both the old and the new—someone who understands the foundational elements of being a good advertiser with someone who lives and breathes the digital space. With this in mind, check out our new infographic, Mad Men of the Millennium, to learn which elements you should consider when forming your modern digital advertising team. View the infographic in a new window here. Please use the HTML code below to embed this graphic <a href="http://blog.marketo.com/2015/11/infographic-how-to-form-your-digital-advertising-team/"><img alt="[Infographic] Mad Men of the Millennium" src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Mad-Men-of-the-Millennium_Marketo.png" width="100%" /></a><br><p><small>Brought to you by <a href="http://www.marketo.com/marketing-automation">Marketing Automation Software by Marketo</a></small>

By: Michael Powers Posted: November 20, 2015 | Modern Marketing Ladies and gentlemen—stop everything you are doing. She. Is. Back. Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for (or at least I have). After three long years since her last musical masterpiece—the James Bond theme song for Skyfall—Adele is back. If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting in anticipation for the release of her new album, 25, which dropped worldwide today. While Adele has awed us with her consistent success—producing hit after hit—I was curious to see if her new album would rest on the same themes, ideas, and messages of her last successful album, 21. After years and years everyone (in my opinion) has been waiting for a teaser, which happened when “Hello” debuted as a television ad in early October. But some fans may have been slightly disappointed when watching the video for “Hello,” thinking…”Really? Another album about a break up or a man from her past?” But this thinking was shattered by a recent Rolling Stone interview with Adele: The lyrics sound like she’s addressing some long-lost ex, but she says it isn’t about any one person—and that she’s moved on from the heartbreaker who inspired 21. “If I were still writing about him, that’d be terrible,” she says. “‘Hello’ is as much about regrouping with myself, reconnecting with myself.” As for the line “hello from the other side”: “It sounds a bit morbid, like I’m dead,” she says. “But it’s actually just from the other side of becoming an adult, making it out alive from your late teens, early twenties.” Mind blown, right? Once again, Adele’s done it—blown the socks off of her audience. A reinvention, a whole new message, and not to mention a whole new (fantastic) look (in case you’re reading this, Adele). Alright I know what you’re thinking, how does this tie into marketing? My point is that we have seen Adele go through the rapid-growth, fast-success, early stages of her life, but we’re witnessing and participating in her transition into adulthood—a shift that has been expertly managed by Adele and her team, making her fans feel like a part of the change without alienating them. We get to see a whole new side of her, while still enjoying her power ballads. This translates directly into how companies manage growth and change. At a certain point in your company’s growth, there comes a time to reinvent your brand and bring your company to the next level. But to do this, it takes very careful and strategic planning to make sure that there isn’t a negative impact for your customers and that there aren’t negative connotations for your brand. So, to create a smooth, successful transition from a high-growth adolescent stage to mature adulthood like Adele, here are 3 things to consider: 1. Don’t Totally Reinvent the Wheel If you’ve noticed it’s time for a transformation, it means you’re paying attention to the perception of your brand in the industry. However, fight the urge to totally overhaul your brand. You have customers and fans who like you for who you are now, so start by determining which aspects of your product/service offering are the most successful. Then figure out what you need to take it to the next level. The smallest tweak or alteration could do it. Once you’ve made this change, now it’s time to work on your messaging—how are you effectively communicating this change? For Adele, this meant definitively stating in a Rolling Stone interview that her album is about growing up versus breaking up, and offering insight into her life. For you though, Rolling Stone might not be the best place. Determine the medium based on where you will best reach your audience and communicate your change there. When Yahoo revealed their new logo after a month-long marketing campaign, they first shared their news on Tumblr and gained a ton of organic traction from likes and reblogs. In a Tumblr post that followed, CEO Marissa Mayer stated, “We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo – whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud.” Given Tumblr’s user demographics and the fact that Yahoo had just bought the social network earlier that year, Tumblr was the perfect channel for them to first announce the news because it aligned well with their vision. 2. Challenge Yourself As your brand transitions into the new phase you want to just continue to build on the success you’ve had in the past. However, your main goal here should really be to establish a higher credibility with your audience. This is going to take some fresh eyes, so bring in someone new to help with this. Whether that’s a new executive to work with the group, a consultant for a special project, or, in Adele’s case, adding a percussionist to her already fantastic band to keep 25 sounding fresh. You need someone in the group to identify and bring your mistakes to the surface; this will make you more successful with the transition. 3. Take Your Time The last thing you want to do is make this big change and have it be a huge flop. Develop a strategic plan for how you’re going to build this new brand, or elements of the brand, and test it. Use a consultant or test groups to test your messaging with your different personas. Once you’ve received feedback and made the proper alterations, build your roll-out strategy. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Even our lady Adele slowly released her new album one song at a time. (Wait, that seems familiar…do I sense a drip campaign?) Last year, Airbnb re-branded around the feeling of “belonging”. As reported by Bloomberg Business, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia explained that they had grown so quickly since their founding that formal branding had initially been sidelined, so they collaborated with design firm DesignStudio to help them build a better brand. DesignStudio conducted in-field research, interviewing staff members and even dispatching a few of their own team members to stay with hosts in 13 cities across 4 continents, resulting in insightful stories and hours of video footage that all yielded the same message about the brand: No matter where you were on Airbnb globally, the one thing that’s consistent is belonging. From that, they reshaped their messaging around what they dubbed the Bélo: the universal symbol of belonging. Your dedication to the transformation and maturity of your brand will show the industry that you are here to stay—and this is true for both musicians and companies. This will be what sets you up for your next round of funding or your IPO, can help you break into new segments or, in Adele’s case, simply grow up in the public eye (easier said than done for celebrities). The important thing to remember is that as you break into new audiences, never forget where you came from. If it fits into your new business plan, you always want to make sure you’re still expanding on your original buyers or personas. To do this successfully, you need to hold on to your die-hard fans, as well as reinvigorate them with something fresh. Take me for instance, today I’ll be revisiting the #duchessadele hashtag I created around the time 21 was released. A poor attempt to have Adele be recognized by the royal family, but hey there’s still be hope! So as you take short breaks throughout the day today, spending 5 minutes each time to really absorb the message and experience of Adele’s new album, think to yourself: What were the stages of your company’s brand? Can you look back on the time when you were a young star on the rise or the time when you were singularly focused and it didn’t work? If that’s the case, ask yourself what you’re going to do to make the transition into your new adult brand.

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

  The marketing world has undergone a dramatic shift: digital now touches nearly every customer interaction. Marketing has become a technology-powered discipline, with the two areas so interwoven that chief marketing officers are projected to spend more on technology than chief information officers by 2017. The rise of digital has led to the emergence and explosion of marketing technology (MarTech) applications and platforms. Marketers can now collect and analyze large and disparate volumes of data—and make their insights actionable with a degree of precision just years ago was only a dream. This gives more power to the CMO, who constantly aims to address the basic question of marketing: how to engage and acquire customers for the long term by making engagement and acquisition more attainable and measurable. The best way to do this? Assemble and integrate a collection of complementary marketing applications – commonly referred to as a MarTech stack. MarTech To The CMO—“We’re Here To Help” There are so many facets in marketing that engagement and measurement can best be accomplished by tapping into data from a multitude of different channels. Think of some of the latest developments, from social listening to video engagement to chat analysis, which produce a treasure chest of customer and prospect data that, when combined, offer insights far greater than a single application could offer. As the channels continue to multiply, there is no shortage of MarTech companies offering the latest acquisition, engagement, retention and measurement tools. In fact, the number of MarTech companies has doubled in the last year to the point where there now are over 2,000 firms vying for the attention of CMOs.  Many marketers are still in the early stages of understanding the value that an extensive marketing stack can deliver. Others are leveraging the value that a rich set of complementary solutions can yield when integrated and working together. Companies including Citrix, New Relic, and Computer Associates are developing valuable marketing stacks with dozens of applications that share data with one another. But they are in the minority—just 9% of marketers have a complete, fully utilized MarTech stack, according to a study from Ascend2. The pace of adoption is bound to accelerate for the simple reason that marketers who harness the value of a well-considered marketing stack will out-perform their rivals and capture market share. Leading marketers will make sense of the vast amounts of data they acquire and figure out how to act on that information. A good MarTech stack can help you get closer to prospects and customers by obtaining information about what they are doing in the digital and offline worlds. For example, it is now possible to seamlessly combine information from a customer or prospect who completes a variety of online and offline actions - visits your website to learn about a new product, watches an online video, attends your annual event and the sessions related to their interests, tweets about their experience, and contacts your call center. This information coupled with an engagement automation platform will improve personalization, relevance, and timeliness leading to improved engagement, conversions, and ROI. Come together, right now It is imperative to develop a technology ecosystem that supports your company objectives—be they acquiring new business, retaining existing customers, or increasing your average revenue per customer. There are a lot of technology applications that can be implemented throughout the customer lifecycle to drive outcomes you desire (check out a fine piece by ChiefMartec.com CEO Scott Brinker on the MarTech landscape). Interestingly, the companies that are leading the investment in, and deriving results from, deep marketing stacks most often don’t come from the ranks of the Fortune 1000. Instead, it’s often emerging, rapidly growing businesses that are leveraging the available toolsets to build broad marketing stacks, sometimes involving more than 20 applications. And they are seeing the benefits. In a recent interview Bill Macaitis, CMO of Slack, emphasized the importance the right technology stack to create and deliver a great customer experience. Today’s CMOs need people within marketing who can think creatively about how to use software and data-science to improve results. People who are knowledgeable about both software and data increasingly have opportunities in marketing. In fact, in an “Ask The CMO” article, Barbara Messing, CMO at TripAdvisor, admits that very few of her acquisition team members come from a traditional marketing background; instead she has many more data scientists. A recent HBR study sponsored by Marketo described marketing technology as essential to creating agile and fluid structures and driving customer engagement. That’s because agile and fluid organizations are highly innovative. These teams understand that they can gain better insights into the unique relationships and connections with their customers and prospects by embracing technology. It boils down to this: The better your marketing technology stack, the more it will help you know how best to acquire, engage, and satisfy your customer.

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

By: Sanjay Dholakia Posted: April 6, 2016 | Modern Marketing Historians of digital marketing will be hard-pressed to find another era when marketers faced so many challenges or so many opportunities to affect dramatic change. Like I always say, marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the last 500 and will change more in the next five than ever before. A report out today from The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), sponsored by Marketo, shows just how much our world is shifting. In the past five years, marketers have been grappling with the emergence of new technologies, but the challenge–and perhaps opportunity–is about to go into overdrive over the next five years. Now, we’ll have to grapple with the added complication and explosion of Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and virtual reality technologies–technologies that will dramatically transform how your customers engage with your brand. If you lose their interest, buyers can switch brands or cut the cord with a keystroke. Marketers need to be listening and responding not just in every channel, but in every place and every moment. So what does this mean in practice? The Path to 2020: Marketers Seize the Customer Experience Marketo turned to the EIU to help with the answer. EIU surveyed nearly 500 CMOs and senior marketing executives around the world to learn what these experts thought about the technologies and customer trends that are most likely to change marketing over the next five years. The findings describe how marketers are taking advantage of the rapid-fire innovations in digital technology to reshape their brand’s relationship with customers. Here are the top six that I found most interesting: 86% of CMOs and senior marketing executives surveyed believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. More than half of respondents believe the accelerating pace of technological change, mobile lifestyles, and an explosion of potential marketing channels via IoT will change the field the most by 2020. This will be driven by billions of possible interactions between a company and its customers, forcing CMOs to manage staggering amounts of complexity. Marketing leaders *must* have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects at mass scale. It will be impossible for CMOs to build and manage a customer experience without one. New media will continue to trump old media, and the top channels for reaching customers in 2020 will be social media, internet websites, mobile apps, and the mobile web. More traditional publishing-centric channels, like television, radio, and print, rank far lower. Brand equity will depend more than ever before on fostering consistent and personalized experiences that leave customers satisfied. The biggest technology-specific trends that will most impact marketing organizations by 2020 feature small screens or no screens–mobile devices and networks, personalization technologies, and IoT. Smart marketers will need to use these new tools to learn customer buying patterns and the context of where someone is in their decision journey. What’s more, they’ll need to be able to predict what customers are most likely primed to do next and be ready to influence them at the proper moment. So how do these findings directly impact you, the marketer? If we all believed that the advent of social, mobile, and digital changed our world, then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Sorting through the data, several emerging trends will occupy the attention of CMOs and, by default–their teams–throughout the remainder of the decade. The explosion of IoT and the ability to connect and interact with customers everywhere–literally everywhere–will fundamentally transform where and how we expect marketing to be in the very near future. This promises that the marketing we used to know is gone. Marketing is now the very essence of a company. Marketing is the brand. Marketing is the customer experience. And in the words of JPMorgan Chase CMO Kristin Lemkau, who was interviewed for the report, “the experience is the marketing and the experience is what drives performance.” I encourage you to take a look at the report and find out for yourself what’s on the horizon. Get ready for what’s next.

During the development of our whitepaper “Designing a Marketing Organization for the Digital Age,” published by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBR-AS), Eduardo Conrado, executive vice president, Strategy & Innovation Officer (and former chief marketing officer), Motorola Solutions, was interviewed. He spoke about how marketing and sales work together at Motorola Solutions to create meaningful customer experiences. Below is an excerpt from his interview. HBR-AS: What are the pressures you see falling on the marketing organization and how is it responding? Conrado: Marketing has to assume the role of engaging with customers and employees. At the same time, as you drive communications channels outside and inside of the company, they tend to be more digital in nature. So by default, marketing has a duality of the traditional communications engagement role along with a technology role. HBR-AS: So how is that affecting the structure of the marketing organization? Conrado: In some companies you see marketing and IT combined, as we did at Motorola Solutions. In other cases, you see marketing and IT working together. If there is a lack of leadership or knowledge-sharing between the CIO and CMO (in terms of CIOs being more customer-facing and CMOs being digitally savvy), and if you see the Chief Digital Officer role being created, it means the CMO or CIO is not stepping up to his/her role. HBR-AS: Can you tell me the story about how you assumed both the IT and marketing roles and how that came to pass? Conrado: When I was CMO, we had digital marketing teams, but the digital implementations ran through an IT development team. It made more sense if we had thoseteams tightly linked. So during conversations with the CIO, we decided to combine the teams into one, reporting into my organization. The strategy and the actual implementation go hand-in-hand. In order to make the IT department more customer-facing, it would need to go through marketing or sales. I already had a passion for and knowledge of the IT component, so I picked it up. HBR-AS: What was the customer experience before you made this combination and what is it like now? Conrado: We’re in the process of building it out. I will tell you that investments are being made based upon functional priorities. Before the teams were combined, we had websites for each of the customer transaction types. Now we have a more holistic view of the customer as the information flows across the organization. That allows us to break down what the customer is trying to accomplish by customer type. Then we can identify and repair any broken systems within the company to improve their experience. HBR-AS: Is it a single experience because it’s all online in one website? Conrado: What we’re building is a way to define what the customer is trying to accomplish and how to make it easier to do it digitally. Going back to your earlier question, the CMO role is evolving from being marketing communications to actually heading up technology-enabled customer interactions. The role of the CMO should morph, depending on the company. It could morph into impacting the way that technology gets deployed. It could morph into playing that role in terms of how the company shifts and defines user experience beyond just website design, reflecting a holistic view of design thinking. HBR-AS: More of the selling process is done online through content, which is more of a marketing role than a sales role. How is that changing things? Conrado: It really didn’t change that much. I think we got the teams to work a little bit closer together. As you bring in conversations that take place between sales, marketing, and IT around the customer, then those pieces have to work closer together by default. HBR-AS: So they’re just working closer together or how does it reflect that more of the customer journey is managed by marketing? Conrado: No, marketing is just one part of it. Sales also has a big role to play. It doesn’t change the relationship between marketing and sales in terms of what the teams do, rather it broadens the conversations that marketing and sales can have together. HBR-AS: There is a lot of discussion around the traditional marketing role of creativity versus one now which is much more focused on predictive analytics. How do you see that skillset changing going forward? Conrado: If you go back three decades, marketing was actually advertising, and creativity plays a big part in that. I still think there is a big creative element in terms of what marketing does to get the right message out. But now, with the complexity of the roles and the fact that you’re also adding technology to it, you’re adding data, and you’re adding insights based on that data, which is what analytics provides. So the role of the CMO itself has become much more complex, along with the skills and the types of teams they oversee. When you look at the marketing department, you might still have a brand team and an advertising team, but then you also have a digital team as well as an insights team that has analytics within it. In the future, CMOs are going to have to be comfortable with technology and with the use of data for insight. HBR-AS: So how is the marketing organization currently measured and how do you think that is going to change in the future? Conrado: I think that companies measure customer engagement based on revenue growth. It is part of the sales organization, but ultimately, what are the programs marketing is putting in place to support that? There are some programs that you can attribute direct revenue to, but there are a lot of them where that’s not the case. If the marketing and sales teams work together with common goals, they will produce revenue growth.

This article was written by Chandar Pattabhiram, Group SVP - Marketo Earlier this month I had the pleasure of participating in a Google Hangout sponsored by our partner Neustar on the topic of marketing to customers, not devices. This is something I’ve spoken a lot about in my time in marketing and especially during my time at Marketo. The industry has moved beyond the concept of business-to-business interactions or even business-to-consumer; today, it’s all about business-to-human interaction, or, as this particular discussion series is named, human-to-human interaction. In the hour or so that I spent with my esteemed fellow panelists, there were a multitude of interesting insights, but I’ve boiled it down to five pillars to share this knowledge with you. It’s About Long-Term Interaction, Not Short-Term Transactions The most successful companies are those that look to build long-terms relationships with their customers, not just market for the sake of the quick sale. Today’s consumers have so many choices, short attention spans and are constantly getting bombarded with marketing messages. Ultimately, they will pay the most attention to messages and brands that resonate personally. Marketers that engage  customers with individualized messages, in a manner relevant to them, will see the most success i.e. transactions. This concept can be overwhelming if you’re a large enterprise company connecting with thousands, even millions of customers regularly. Luckily, we finally have the technology to complete these humanized interactions at-scale. The marketers who can lead their companies to connect with customers every step of the journey will win. Pick Your Technology: Think Empirically, not Emotively This idea of being with your customers at every step of the journey is critical. If you’ve looked at the marketing lumascape recently, you’ve noticed that there are hundreds of technology solutions and potential partners, with new options appearing every day. What this means is that marketing teams have the flexibility and power to choose the solutions that best fit their needs along whichever point in a customer’s journey. Their ultimate goal should be to fuel what I refer to as the “virtuous engagement cycle”—a look at the complete customer journey that results in acquiring customers faster, keeping them longer and converting them into advocates for your brand, who in-turn influence new prospects. Smart marketing leaders will only invest in technology that provides measurable ROI at these different stages. For example, if your team needs to grow pipeline, invest in the product that is going to generate the highest volume of opportunities , not just ones that are best suited for driving inbound marketing leads. In other words, technology that drives complete value vs. interstitial value. We have the luxury of choice, and it is imperative to take the time to determine what the right technology partners are for ourselves and ultimately our customers. Show Me the Money: Value, Not Vanity Speaking of ROI, marketers in the last decade or so have prided themselves on vanity metrics—clicks, engagements, website visitors, and so on. This is an improvement from the mass media campaigns of the past, but modern marketing needs to be aligned toward how much revenue it is driving for the business, as I’m sure your CEO or CFO would agree. This goes hand-in-hand with the ideal of choosing the best technology partners, because you need the right tools that will measure ROI in the way that’s most beneficial to you. It’s all about the cha-ching! Focusing on driving revenue is the best way to align with with your CEO or CFO and even your sales teams in a B2B context. Simply put, how can you demonstrate that marketing is moving the needle and contributing positively to the company’s bottom line? Opti-channel vs. Omni-channel You’ve probably heard the term omni-channel, but what about opti-channel? Omni-channel is somewhat an utopian concept about reaching your audience across all potential avenues–web, social, email, mobile, print, TV, etc.  A customer rarely engages across every channel. But opti-channel is about understanding how–i.e. via which channels–the customer prefers to engage in. Then, the task is optimizing your communications to create a seamless and unified experience across them all as a customer engages with your brand. I call this continuous context. The best way I can illustrate this is by referencing my Netflix account. Let’s say I’m watching The Shawshank Redemption (one of my favorite flicks) on my iPad while I’m on the road, but I don’t quite finish the movie before I get home. Later, when I have a moment to finish watching, I log in to my account via my TV, and there’s the movie ready for me to view right where I left off. Not only that, but Netflix is full of suggestions for what else I should watch based on my past activity and preferences. It’s not feeding me advertisements for some movie I’ve already watched, it’s trying to continue the conversation by providing personal value. Imagine doing that as a marketer! That’s what we now have the technology to do. Balancing Art and Science For marketing, tomorrow will be about the Einsteins as much as it will be about the Picassos. What I mean by this is that the marketing leader of tomorrow will need to be as much a scientist as an artist. Marketing will always be about connecting to build relationships with your audience and doing it in an emotive away, but the trade has evolved so that we now need to understand data and use it to guide our actions. Data is the key to what’s working and what’s not working and it is imperative that we pay attention and adjust our interaction strategy accordingly. If you haven’t seen the weather reports, the data blizzard is coming. Humans are about to hit 19 billion devices. That’s 19 billion streams of data and 19 billion ways to respond. The most important thing will be finding the beacons in the blizzard; what data really matters and what will best inform your actions to meet your goals. To make it through this storm, you’ll need technology that not only tells you how your current programs are doing but that will also predict what your customers will be doing in the future. A good metaphor for this concept would the Google self-driving car —in this case, you just pick the destination where you’re headed and the car’s system processes massive streams of data and does all the self-driving to get you there, anticipating the route and road hazards ahead of time; Marketing systems will do the same—you pick your destination and goals, and the system does the all the complex processing of data to get you there, listening and adapting as you learn more. That’s All, Folks So there you have it. At last we have the technology available to treat every customer like a real, live human, not just a B or a C in the business-to equation. As marketing leaders, let’s get out there and drive these humanized interactions. At scale.

By: Sanjay Dholakia, Marketo - CMO The traditional marketing funnel may be as dated as bell bottom pants, but that hasn’t held back Charlie Metzger, the chief marketing and communications officer for the Detroit Pistons and its parent company, Palace Sports & Entertainment, from turning in spectacular results. Metzger has deployed marketing technology in the company’s operations to help drive a 90% season-ticket renewal ratehttp://cmo.marketo.com/conversations-and-interviews/what-its-like-to-be-head-marketer-for-the-detroit-pistons/. The secret? Metzger has traded in the funnel for what he calls “the circle.” Read this excerpt from an interview Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBR-AS) did with Metzger during the development of our whitepaper, “Designing a Marketing Organization for the Digital Age.” HBR-AS: Are you seeing the traditional sales funnel itself changing? Metzger: I think it changed eight to ten years ago. HBR-AS: What is its equivalent now? Metzger: It’s social, search, sale. You’re building a community, and it’s not a funnel anymore; it’s a circle, and at the beginning of that circle is the fact that we’re looking for advocates. So you’ve got to put yourself in a position where people are recommending your product and talking about you. That is really where it starts. It doesn’t start with you driving awareness. It starts with working on creating advocates for your product or service and, hopefully, they are telling others. HBR-AS: What sort of pressures or opportunities is the marketing organization under and how are you dealing with them at the moment? Metzger: It starts with the ability to have access to data and also to have access to data in real-time. Then you need to be sure that you’ve got the ability to move fast. The pressure is far greater than it used to be because you could be missing opportunities staring you right in the face. HBR-AS: Your situation is probably unique because there is a product on the field. It’s a team and you’re not necessarily able to change these rules. Metzger: Yes and no. Certainly, our product is on the court; it’s the Detroit Pistons and we also have outdoor music that we do. But whether you're at P&G, IBM, or the NBA, all organizations have the ability to use technology and gather intelligence on their customers. Not only what their customers are buying, but what they’re thinking, what they’re saying, and what they’re sharing with other people. You just have much more of a window into what people are thinking and, more importantly, sharing about you with others. HBR-AS: How is that changing the role of marketing?  Metzger: If we’re learning things about our existing customers or future customers, we’ve got to be able to translate that easily and simply to our sales team. If they want to follow up and get smarter, or hopefully make a sale, or influence a sale going into the future, that data and information has to get transferred to them as quickly as possible but also in a user-friendly way. HBR-AS: In terms of the innovation between marketing and sales, how does that relationship work? Metzger: At the end of the day, business hasn’t changed really. We still want to build brands and drive ROI and sell a product or a service and create loyalty.   HBR-AS: How is your marketing organization itself changing?  Metzger: I see marketing groups insourcing more than outsourcing. Marketers always will outsource certain things to partners, but I think you’re going to see skillsets, particularly in content creation, social and digital, probably being insourced a little bit more. You’ll probably see more of that in the future. HBR-AS: That’s because of speed? Metzger: Speed and technology, and also because of the way that people are used to consuming technology. So instead of viewing an offer again, going way back, through television or through a direct mail piece, or even a Sunday paper, people are communicating all the time on their phones. You’ve got to be able to create content that can work there.  It’s democratization of the ability to be able to create some of that yourself now. I think it allows marketers to potentially be able to take that on, whereas historically they might have had to outsource that to an agency. HBR-AS: So you’re saying that by and large agencies aren’t able to move as quickly around all those different media platforms, from television to mobile? Metzger: I spent 12 years in an agency so I see the huge value in agencies.  I just think that agencies will be different, too. Technology is going to change the speed and the pace at which everybody has to move. If you build the community the right way, and you’re building your social network the right way, and they’re searching for products or services or ideas or whatever it is that you’re offering, we believe that will translate and then lead to sales. It’s so much different than the old purchase funnel where it was pending consideration and awareness. We now know that the first place anyone shopping for anything will go is online and look at what others are recommending. You don’t influence them at all the way you used to so now you’ve got to be part of those communities.  

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

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