Product Documents

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.

By: Crystal Vaughan Posted: December 15, 2015 | Modern Marketing If building a customer community for an organization were like planning a wedding and inviting guests, customer communities often are the second cousin who’s invited only when slots open up on the attendee list. But take it from me (I’m in the middle of planning my own wedding), they really should be a guest of honor. The Importance of Building a Customer Community Many companies see communities as a ‘nice-to-have’ and not as critical to the organization as sales and marketing, but the reality is that a customer community is a critical direct line to your customers and has the power to build your brand with your most powerful advocates. 2016 is the age of the customer, as the market moves at a speed not yet seen before, driven by customers’ high expectations for personalization of their journey. Businesses will need to realign and reorient their strategy specifically around the customer or risk losing out on developing and fostering a valuable channel as customers form communities of their own. During the last few months, I’ve researched and planned for the 2016 execution of an online community for Invoca. At the same time, I’ve also been planning a wedding and actively applying the lessons I’ve learned along the way to help lay a successful foundation upon which I’ll build Invoca’s community. Below, I share my advice on the three most important things I’ve learned from wedding planning that’s helped me assemble an online community proposal: 1. Get Executive Buy-In Early On While the tradition of asking the bride’s father’s permission before proposing is somewhat outdated and not as frequently used anymore, asking permission and getting buy-in is still a vital part of a community-building process. Getting internal buy-in and support is a rule of thumb within organizations as they build large initiatives. But, like a nervous fiancé about to ask permission, I bet you’re wondering: what’s the best way to set yourself up for success when you ask? Start by doing your research. Then create a project plan and define methods to measure your results—think about what success looks like for this initiative and ask yourself the hard questions you’ll likely get. Then present your plan to an executive sponsor. Their buy-in as you build an online community will help support your goals and guide you with your project plan, ensuring you stay in alignment with the overall business objectives. It will also assist with defining exactly what is being built and the importance of the initiative to the rest of the organization. 2. Customer Experience Matters Just like you have to understand your wedding guests and gauge their interest in the different elements of your wedding (did someone say photobooth?), you’ve got to gauge the level of interest your current customers would have in an online community. This may not be the main channel they are interested in actively participating on–perhaps they interact more with your brand on your blog or want instant support via chat or a Twitter account. But can you incorporate these elements into your community so they can get everything in one place? Getting consensus on what your customers want before throwing money into developing an online community should be part of your research. You want to establish a channel that supports development of the customer and helps them get value out of their current investment, while also ensuring you see a return from your investment. Establishing this type of customer experience broadcasts that you are listening to what they want and creates a strong foundation for your first interactions with them. So set up a primary channel to communicate with them and nail it. 3. You Need a Team to Bring It to Life When you’re planning a wedding, you’re either one of two brides: a bride that thinks in siloes or a bride that thinks all-encompassing. Those that think in siloes are the equivalent of marketers who have “tool bloat”, needing a decorator for wedding decor, florist for floral arrangements, and caterer for wedding menu. However, in my experience, I’ve found if you bind everything together, it’s a great way to indirectly support the main initiative. For instance, find a venue that incorporates catering, décor, lighting, floral, all in one complete package, and you’ll have an entire team working toward one main goal instead of trying to coordinate between all of them. The same goes for building an online community. Many think online communities are strictly for customer marketing, upsells and advocacy, and as such, marketing-owned. But it is much more than that–they allow for instant, unlimited communication and unparalleled networking, giving customers a chance to build stronger relationships with each other and the business. If your community is going to be a success, it needs to be rebranded internally, adopted widely and owned company-wide. Sales, marketing, customer success, product development and even finance need to work together in order for the business to have a successful community. By putting together a cross-functional team of champions, each person will be able to promote and indirectly support the online community. Aligning the goals of the community with the goals of all your organizational stakeholders is vital. When companies align the community goal across all departments, employees know to make decisions that put the customer first and are more likely to contribute to the world-class customer experience you are trying to build. Ready, Set, Plan The online customer community is often a neglected opportunity. Businesses that incorporate the launch of customer communities in their plans and immediately hire customer community managers know community is a strong driver of business value and revenue. When community is seen as an actual product of the business, organizations will invest in it because they understand that building engaged communities will keep their customers happy, which results in lower churn. Businesses that don’t incorporate communities into their plan will need to play catch up quickly in order to remain competitive in a customer dominated world. In 2016, my prediction will be that organizations will begin to reinvent themselves to focus on the value of loyal relationships and critical real-time customer engagement over resolutions and transactions. I want to invite you to join me as I traverse through the world of the online customer community (sorry, unfortunately, my wedding guest list is already at full capacity!) If you haven’t already, consider building one out yourself. It’s a great time to be a community manager! And if you’re already on top of it, leave me some feedback below on how you have built out your own community, what tips and tricks you can offer, or any other comments you may have!

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

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.

By: Renata Bell Posted: February 15, 2016 | Digital Marketing As the primaries heat up, politicians are leveraging digital marketing and social media to capture the hearts (and votes) of U.S. voters.Having a strong digital presence is now table stakes for political candidates. Whether 50 years ago or today, there are 3 things successful political campaigns have been able to learn from marketers: be targeted, be efficient, and be clear with your message across all channels or be lost in the cacophony of the elections. So, let’s take a look at how political candidates, over time, have adapted to incorporate digital marketing into their campaigns to effectively communicate their message. When Digital Marketing Meets Politics What does this look like in practice? Let’s answer that question by taking a look at how political candidates have structured and used their websites and how that has evolved to mirror marketing best practices. Then, we’ll look at how candidates have adapted their strategies to take their message to social media platforms. The Website In 1996, just five years after the first website was built, Bill Clinton and Al Gore took advantage of the web to promote their campaign. These running-mates launched their own site, which is still up today, stating their tagline and offering additional resources. At the time, presidential campaigns had little insight into who would come to their website. With no data to back up their actions and no measures to test by, their website laid out everything—from debate information to biographies to downloadable bumper stickers—in hard-to-navigate columns. By the 2000 and 2004 elections, websites were much more robust with new modules, calendars, newsletters, and lots of content. While these new capabilities were great and candidates seemed to embrace them, the sites suffered from looking cluttered and lacked a clear call-to-action. In the two examples below from the Bush/Cheney website in 2000 and then again in 2004, you can see the evolution of call-to-action and site organization. A marked departure from the clutter of the earlier websites, Barack Obama’s 2007 website harnessed the power of a clear message and call-to-action. Taking a page from the marketing playbook, instead of overwhelming his readers with more information, he created a clear message and call-to-action (join the team), with a more organized display for additional information. Overall, you can see a drastic shift in the site design to be less cluttered and provide clear visuals. In fact, Obama’s website was launched by Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, who created it with the intention of being a networking site where volunteers could create groups, plan events, raise funds, and connect with each other. Look how far it’s come today: Digital Marketing is a Cornerstone for the Modern Campaign Not only did website capabilities advance as time progressed, but so did the different web properties to help candidates reach a broader audience—namely social media. The 2008 campaign year was an unprecedented turning point in which candidates embraced social media. This was especially true of the Obama campaign, which harnessed the power of social media and digital marketing to connect with his supporters on a new level. As Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post said, “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.” Obama also leveraged YouTube like never before. The campaign’s official channel was collectively watched for 14.5 million hours, as reported by political consultant Joe Trippi. And from Obama’s success, a lesson emerged that political candidates from any party, running for any office (from local mayor all the way to president), will not soon forget—candidates need to be everywhere their audiences are if they want their message to reach beyond their base of voters. As for the current presidential candidates, almost all of the candidate sites today echo a similar format: clear message, clear call-to-action, neat navigation, and a giant email signup (plus links to social media sites). The emphasis on digital spending, social media, and other online paid ads is only going to increase as the election gets closer. Already, some candidates are changing their strategy to focus their spending specifically on digital marketing channels. Consider how presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has mixed traditional avenue with digital. She spent early on and often on traditional methods—$12 million on television, $6 million on direct mail, and set aside about $6 million for digital advertising. She has leveraged the most diverse and unique channels to interact with her followers: Instagram, Pinterest, Periscope, Snapchat, even a Spotify list with Clinton’s curated music including Katy Perry and JLo. Does listening to Clinton’s playlist sway more people to vote for her? I don’t think so, but it’s just one piece of the cross-channel puzzle. In fact, on hillaryclinton.com she has 14 or so webtrackers, including Optimizely, Facebook Custom Audiences, and Google Adwords. In contrast, Donald Trump has only 3 (Facebook Custom Audience, Google Analytics and Google Dynamic Remarketing). However, Trump hasn’t turned his back on digital marketing and social media. His website, like the other candidates, is simple above the fold and then below it invites visitors to sign up for SMS alerts, watch his YouTube videos, and participate with the campaign on social media. Trump Website: Above the fold Trump Website: Below the fold Among his Republican candidate primary competition, Trump seems to be using social media most effectively, although he is arguably one of the loudest (albeit THE most controversial) social media contributors. Which makes sense: small statements can travel far at the speed of light with social media. Stats released by Twitter after a GOP debate Take a look at another candidate, Bernie Sanders. He has spent more money than any other politician before on digital marketing: a whopping $10 million, while he has spent minimal funds on traditional avenues such as television and direct mail (Bush spent $35 million on television ads alone). Digital marketing has been at the heart of his marketing strategy, and that appears to have started to pay off with the target demographic of the millennial generation. After the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus, some 84% of voters ages 18-29 voted for Sanders. While millennials are an incredibly loyal generation, they also see through political pomp and want nothing to do with political campaigns from the past. Being able to interact with candidates on their own terms, on their own channels, is incredibly important to them. It won’t be surprising to see the rest of the presidential candidates start to pay more attention to digital marketing channels as the need to appeal to different, segmented groups grows more pressing. One thing’s for sure, while smart political campaigns are certainly applying marketing best practices—targeted and clear messages—undoubtedly, they could get even more personal and create more tailored message to followers that care about certain issues more than others. Do you think having more curated and personalized content from your representatives would be helpful? Let me know in the comments section below.

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

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

By: Ellen Gomes Posted: January 4, 2016 | Content Marketing It’s a new year, which means it’s time to get started on making your resolutions a reality (both personally and professionally). If you’ve set personal goals already (like seeing the inside of 24 Hour Fitness more than once a week), but you’re looking for a professional goal that will make a tangible impact on your brand and organization, you’ve come to the right place. Does your business communicate with its customers? Yes, of course it does! So this resolution is vital to any and every business: create and maintain a consistent brand voice. This blog is here to help you make this an actionable resolution by sharing the importance of a consistent brand voice and some tips and tricks on to create and maintain it. Why You Need a Consistent Brand Voice It’s important to present a consistent experience across channels, and the best way to do this is to define your brand’s voice.  Whether you’re creating content for your blog, your website, or on social, the style you write in will become the “voice” of your brand. Think of your brand’s voice as its personality. It helps make your brand more genuine and personable, but it needs to be consistent. While you might adopt a more playful voice on Twitter and a more professional voice in a whitepaper, consistency is key if you want to create a brand that your customers recognize and engage with over time. How to Determine Your Brand Voice The voice you use for your brand depends on the persona you’re creating content for. In some organizations, you may address different personas. It’s important to identify both a “go-to” voice that addresses everyone and one that addresses individual personas. Stephanie Schwab of Social Media Explorer breaks down a brand’s voice into four categories: Character/ Persona, Tone, Language, and Purpose. Here’s her list of attributes for each category—which of these descriptors resonate with your brand? (Note: You may decide that some attributes fit with one buyer persona, but not with another.) Character/Persona Friendly Warm Inspiring Playful Authoritative Professional Tone Personal Humble Clinical Honest Direct Scientific Language Complex Savvy Insider Serious Simple Jargon-filled Fun Whimsical Purpose (different content will probably serve different purposes) Engage Educate Inform Enable Entertain Delight Sell Amplify Create a Consistent Voice Once you’ve defined your voice, you’ll want to aim for consistency across your entire company—allowing for some variability for each persona.Here are some strategies we use at Marketo to achieve a consistent voice: Create brand guidelines. Ideally, you’ll develop a distinctive visual and written style that makes your brand instantly recognizable by your audience. To create brand guidelines, simply translate this style into words, include plenty of examples, and get buy-in from the C-suite. Check all your content against these guidelines and be sure to share them with any outsourced design agencies and your writing team. These guidelines will work best as living documents that are updated as you encounter new questions. So what should your brand guidelines include? Here’s a list to get started: Visual Guidelines—Do you use stock photography? How can your logo be used? Anything that visually supports your brand should be included here. Style Guides—This is where you indicate any writing style preferences that support your brand. Do you capitalize product names? Do you prefer open or closed words—for example, web site versus website. Do you have a style guide you rely on as your guiding principle—like AP Style or Chicago? Document these here. Personas—If it’s an internal document, it may make sense to include the details of your personas in your brand guidelines. Personas help writers and designers understand the audience they are trying to reach and make your visual and style guidelines come to life. Align your writers. Make sure anyone writing for your brand (whether it’s advertising, press releases, ebooks, or blog posts) is closely aligned. Start by ensuring that they have access to your brand guidelines. If multiple people handle these functions, meet regularly to review and improve. Extend the review process. We firmly believe that everyone needs an editor, so if the structure of your organization permits, having someone to share your writing with and get feedback from can make you a stronger writer. For example, at the end of each day, the social team could send their scheduled tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn posts to a cross-functional team of reviewers. This way, members of the PR, demand generation, content, SEO, and PPC teams all have a chance to weigh in. (This is also a great way to catch typos and bad links!) A consistent brand voice is one way to make sure that your customers recognize you and understand that you are talking to them. Take these tips with you into the new year and see the impact it has across your organization. Do you have tips to share on building a consistent brand voice? I’d love to hear them in the comments section below. http://events.marketo.com/summit/2016/

INDUSTRY NEWS Mobile In Mind: Thoughts on the Present and Future of Mobile Marketing Forbes Across all industries, brands are spending more time on researching and implementing mobile marketing strategies. From mobile advertising and mobile wallets to mobile sales mechanisms and reward-based mobile advertising, executives are realizing the current benefits and planning for the future opportunities mobile has in store. Interestingly, researchers have estimated that consumers interact with their mobile devices over 100 times a day. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to determine at what point during these interactions is the consumer most likely to engage with mobile advertising. Internet of Things Data Could Fuel Ad Targeting Ad Age IOT has promised to turn people’s everyday interactions with everyday items into data for logistical and marketing applications. The industry is approaching the next stage of connected appliances and food packaging. This means marketers need to figure out where all this information will go and how it will be used. Marketers Should Use Data to Build Trust with Customers, Says Report by EY and Forbes Insights Forbes Customers have more information available than ever before to assist them in their buying decisions, and winning customer loyalty has become an increasing challenge for companies. Less than a third of CMOs and marketing executives fully understand where trust is eroded. In fact, 51 percent of executives believe that there is a significant opportunity in the use of analytics for customer insight and in expanding the use of external data sources. However, only 37% say they have the capability to use analytics to tailor communications and outreach to the customer. This is a low number considering that many marketing executives see personalization as the next big trend in marketing. Age of the Data-Devoted Marketer Information Age Big data is disrupting the way marketers understand and interact with their audience. However, while analytics will help to identify targets, and understand customers, it must never be at the expense of creativity. This means having the ability to act intuitively and not necessarily because it’s laser-targeted at a key audience. The article highlights that in order to be successful today, marketers must wear many different hats. This means that they are analytical and data-driven, while having a strong grasp of brand, storytelling and experiential marketing.

"Kids today are lazy and entitled. Technology is ruining our lives. Advertising is out of control. Get off my lawn!” Every generation shares the same fears and uncertainty about the future that the previous generation once had. We may not see it at first, but there’s really no escaping the fact. It’s a realization we don’t like to face because it means we’ve crossed a line. The line. You know the one…when you start echoing the same things your parents once said. South Park’s Perspective on Sponsored Content is Hilarious and Frightening The truth is that we often overlook the worries of the past that we now complain about as if they are brand new. Many of our shared concerns as a society come in cycles, and what was old becomes new again. The current season of one of my favorite TV shows South Park has focused on some of these shared concerns from the past that are making a comeback—like political correctness, gentrification, and advertising overload. It’s an odd and intricate mix of themes, but if you’re fan of smart insights and 3 rd grade humor, I recommend checking it out. As a marketer, a recent storyline in the show that revolves around the fear of advertising grabbed my attention. It all centers on the increasing intelligence of ads’ ability to predict what you, as a consumer, will click on or interact with in real life. In several scenes, the characters in the show have an almost impossible time accomplishing anything online because they are constantly being distracted by “sponsored content,” which sidetracks them from their initial intentions. While this battle of attention is raging, one of the kids, Jimmy, discovers that there are people in the world who aren’t really people at all…they’re ads! Only Jimmy has the ability to distinguish these walking, talking, artificial intelligence driven ads from real people, which leads to him being kidnapped by a shadowy group of ex-newsmen to help expose the conspiracy. As I said, odd and intricate. It’s a frightening look into a world gone horribly wrong. What led to this new world of mixing advertising with entertainment in all forms? Is it all our grandparents’ fault? Or maybe our great-great-grandparents’? I’m sure it goes back even further than that, but let’s take a look back at the progression of this “new” type of advertising. Sponsored Content in the Real World Back before the internet and television, the radio ruled entertainment at home. Product sponsored shows were invented in this era and popular stars of the day mixed entertainment with advertising in a very early form of sponsored content. Even then, listeners were impatient with commercials, so advertisers experimented with new ways to sell their wares. In fact, soap operas were originally radios shows sponsored by detergent brands to reach the homemaker demographic, but the value of beloved and trusted personalities endorsing products was quickly realized. Remember George Burns and Gracie Allen singing the praises of the heavenly canned meat product, SPAM? Product placement in movies is another familiar advertising method that has been around for decades. Product placement involves the clever insertion of products into the storyline or events of a movie to subtly expand brand awareness. As a viewer, you unconsciously recognize a product and, if done well, associate it with a beloved character or aspiration. I can still remember E.T. following that trail of Reese’s Pieces and thinking, “I could reallygo for some Reese’s Pieces right now.”" Recently, I’ve noticed the almost seamless evolution of the old radio concept of sponsored advertising on television. This spot below from the Comedy Central show Drunk History is a great example of this. On this show, comedians will enjoy a few adult beverages and then retell the story of a historical event or person. The advertisement for a new video game below, set in Victorian London, could almost pass unnoticed as a segment of the show. Even if you were fast forwarding through the commercials, you probably wouldn’t skip over this because it features familiar faces from the show you’re watching and is structured in a very similar way. It’s also entertaining enough to keep you interested as it doesn’t focus on the product itself, but more on the experience and the fun the host and guest are having playing it. The wheel of advertising never stops turning The fact that this tried and true method of advertising has found a home in the latest form of popular entertainment shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. It’s just another medium in the continuing endeavor for people to sell their goods, services, and opinions to each another. Like anything else, it takes time to polish and refine the process so that it becomes more valuable than distracting, both from a consumer and marketer perspective. As consumers, we look to the fast forward button and ad blockers to skip over the ads that don’t resonate with us. But as marketers, we continually strive to show relevant ads to those who are most interested in our products or services. As the wheel keeps turning and technology progresses,  marketers will get better at targeting our ads to the right audience and these fears of advertising will fade in the past… until the next generation. Have you seen any sponsored content lately that felt seamless? I’d love to see them in the comments below.