IN THIS EPISODE: George meets up with a power group of HubSpot Partners and Dharmesh Shah, CTO at HubSpot to recap Partner Day 2017 and speak about...
The post Hubcast 136: HubSpot Partner Day 2017 With Dharmesh, Impact, Impulse, & More appeared first on The Sales Lion.
Google today announced the release of the Google Assistant SDK. The SDK will allow developers to include Google Assistant interactions in their hardware prototypes.
The Google Developers Blog says, “The Google Assistant SDK includes a gRPC API, a Python open source client that handles authentication and access to the API, samples and documentation. The SDK allows you to capture a spoken query, for example "what's on my calendar", pass that up to the Google Assistant service and receive an audio response. And while it's ideal for prototyping on Raspberry Pi devices, it also adds support for many other platforms.
To get started, visit the Google Assistant SDK website for developers, download the SDK, and start building. In addition, Wayne Piekarski from our Developer Relations team has a video introducing the Google Assistant SDK, below.”
The post Google Assistant SDK Announced appeared first on WebProNews.
Author: Ellen Gomes
Usually, by the time you hit the last day of a conference, you can feel the energy dwindling, but that wasn’t the case for day three of Marketing Nation Summit. Maybe it was the awesome party and Train concert the night before, but sessions were packed—both with people and awesome content. Here are some takeaways and highlights from a few key sessions:
Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group, kicked off his session, 2017: The Year of Tough Choices, by setting the scene: we do a ton of stuff. And, according to Michael, that stuff can do more harm than good. In fact, he shared a stat that highlighted this for the audience: after 40 impressions in a short period of time, sales decline. It’s not even that your marketing messages aren’t being listened to, it’s that buyers are actively punishing you for overwhelming them with volume.
So why do we do it? Because the CMO is expected to deliver ROI for the organization. Michael posed that “behind every bad marketing idea is an executive who asked for it,” and then challenged the audience to make tough choices, highlighting that “in 2017, we have a choice to do what our boss tells us to do or what we know will work.”
But it’s not really about blaming your boss. It’s about continuing to do activities just to check a box. We need to stop blaming our boss and instead start proposing new ideas. We are the leaders. It’s our job to hold ourselves accountable to drive impact for the organization.
It is time for us to become a champion leader.
Instead of trying to stop directives from the top down, we need to start championing ideas from the bottom up.
You can’t create an idea champion—you have to earn that. When we champion other people’s ideas, we earn a supporter for life. So look around on your team, and ask yourself, whose ideas have you championed lately?
Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared, shared the lessons he’s learned as he implemented account-based marketing (ABM). With simply amazing slides, his real-life advice went beyond high-level strategy and theory to tackle the issues that ABM marketers face in their day-to-day. So, according to Joe, here’s what they didn’t teach you in ABM school:
“Have you ever just aimed to be a five out of 10?” asked Jay Acunzo, Host and Creator of the Unthinkable podcast. In his session Be the Exception! How Brilliant Marketers Get Bigger Results by Doing it Their Way, Jay challenged the audience to stop working within the status quo and push their own boundaries to create exceptional work. No one aims to be average, but they end up creating average work by simply repeating what’s come before—going through the motions without questioning their intent and purpose.
The leap from average to exceptional isn’t actually a leap at all—it’s a process. And it includes 3 steps:
And then last, but not least, Jeff Bullas, Founder, and CEO of JeffBullas.com, closed out Marketing Nation Summit with the final session of the day: The 3 Key Pillars of Potent Content Marketing. In this session, not only did Jeff share three key pillars (described below), but he also shared these pillars in the context of how he built his own brand and company, from an initial blog about Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer, to practically a media empire that tops traffic and influencer lists across the globe. Let’s take a look at the content pillars that supported his amazing growth:
Pillar 1: Attraction
Whether you already have a site, page, product, or blog that you’re promoting or you are starting from scratch, Jeff pointed out that a key pillar of success is attracting the right audience to your content. And for him, that starts with traffic. “Without traffic, you don’t exist on the web,” exclaimed Jeff. And to take that a step further, you need to optimize all of your content for search engines. This can take time, but it’s absolutely worthwhile. He noted that 50-55% of the traffic on his site comes from organic search, and that’s because he is optimizing his content for search engines.
Pillar 2: Seduction
Once people have discovered your content, they have to be seduced. What does Jeff mean by this? You have such a limited share of your audience’s attention that you need to make sure your content is seductive enough (read: interesting, engaging, relevant) to keep them interested. “If your content is bland or boring, they are out of there. You are one click away from oblivion,” shared Jeff. So use language that people like, test your images, and test your headlines.
Pillar 3: Commitment
Ultimately, you want your audience to convert. Whether that is into a subscriber, into a buyer, etc., you want to own your traffic and audience as much as possible. Always look for ways to seamlessly ask them to commit to you.
And that wraps Marketing Nation Summit 2017! It was an amazing, energizing experience. There are tons of wonderful sessions we didn’t get a chance to cover here, but what did you find most valuable out of those that we covered, or was there a session you saw and loved? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
Live From The Marketing Nation: Day 3 – ABM, Content Marketing, and Leadership was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
The post Live From The Marketing Nation: Day 3 – ABM, Content Marketing, and Leadership appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
Author: Omair Malik
Have you ever found yourself (and your team) wasting time, missing out on opportunities, or failing to meet your goals? It can be perplexing when you know that your strategy is airtight—what could be holding your back?
After analyzing all the clues like a detective in a riveting HBO finale, you may realize the culprit is lurking in your marketing technology stack! A bad technology choice can pose a variety of problems for you and your team—maybe it’s too slow, maybe it doesn’t scale, maybe it doesn’t sync effectively with your other technologies or maybe it’s just too clunky and difficult to use.
So, if it’s time for a change, how should you go about it? Some of my colleagues have written excellent guides on how to get started but I’d like to focus this post on the product demo, which is a critical part of any evaluation of technology.
During your evaluation, the product demo is your chance to understand how this new platform will change your life for the better. Rather than a generic recording, you get to speak to experts who’ll be able to answer your questions and paint a clear picture of how you can lead your team to success.
Based on my experience in talking hundreds of customers through this process, I’d like to explain how you can use 5 simple steps to make sure the sales demo you receive is a valuable exercise that will help you pick the best platform for your team.
You might be tempted to skip the discovery call altogether and insist on seeing the platform immediately. Maybe you find yourself annoyed with the barrage of questions you’re getting about your business and your evaluation when all you want to do is buy something immediately. After all, you already know what the problem is! You just need something to fix it.
However, going into a demo without explaining your requirements means that you’ll either see every single product available or a generic overview, which will make it hard to connect the dots. This will translate to a longer evaluation and a harder time making the right choice.
If you take the time to explain your goals to the salesperson, they’ll be able to craft a custom demo that will answer your questions, address your pain points and give you clear differentiators for your eventual decision. Instead of thinking of your sales rep as pesky, consider them as a partner on your team who’ll help you make the right choice and get your team on the right track.
For the demo, think of your situation today. What parts of your process are frustrating? What parts are critically important? Use these activities to map out 3-5 “missions” that you want to see tested out during a demo. This could be as mundane as sending out an email to something more complex such as managing and reporting on all your webinar programs for the year.
Once you’ve got these, ask the sales people to demonstrate how their platform would handle these tasks and make sure that they spell out for each of them:
By doing this, you’re avoiding the dreaded PowerPoints or canned recordings that you could just as easily see in a Google search. Instead, you’ll have a customized demonstration where you can ask pointed questions. You’ll be able to walk away with a clear understanding of how each platform will make you and your team more successful after the evaluation.
A productive demonstration will be like a conversation. As the sale person to walk you through each “mission” you’ve crafted for them, offer critique and feedback on how you see yourself using the platform. If you’ve seen any competitors, ask them how they differentiate themselves. Find out how their customers in similar situations have used their platform. Finally, imagine yourself in the platform repeating their steps over the course of the year. An interface that may seem simple to use could quickly become limiting while an overly complex system could become difficult to use at scale. Make sure to voice any concerns you have and carefully consider their rebuttals.
Nobody likes surprises. If your bold new software implementation is going to cause ripples across the company, you’ll want to make sure you’re not stepping on anyone’s toes.
If your project involves changes to your database or your website, it’s a good idea to bring on a representative from IT to explain how your company’s infrastructure works. If you want to implement a new strategy to drive leads to your sales department, it doesn’t hurt to bring on a sales person to see how life will change for them after implementation.
This means they’ll be able to ask the right questions and will be prepared for the new direction you’ll be boldly steering the company in. The last thing you need during an evaluation is someone derailing you at the last minute.
As you sit through the demo, be sure to take some time afterward to discuss your impressions with colleagues. Try to recall the details of previous demos and compare what you saw. If anything concerns you, reach out to your sales person and see how they respond. It’s very likely that they do have that functionality but simply couldn’t show it because of time constraints. If it makes sense, be sure to schedule a follow-up demonstration to address any lingering questions.
I hope these steps are helpful for you in your next evaluation. If this turns out to be useful or if you have extra steps that you think are missing, please let me know in the comments below!
5 Insider Tips to Get a Demo That’s Actually Useful was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
The post 5 Insider Tips to Get a Demo That’s Actually Useful appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
Registria has released results from a new study which found that younger and more affluent consumers would prefer to connect with brands through their mobile device, over email and paper literature, immediately after purchasing a new product.
According to the study, 47% of consumers aged 18-34, and 47% of consumers who make $100,000 and above, say they would like to receive product setup instructions, tips, and service and warranty information directly to their mobile device.
"Consumers want to connect with the brands they buy. Their reasons for wanting to do so not only provide value to them as customers, but they are also significant revenue-generators for manufacturers," said Chris McDonald, CEO of Registria. "The process of product registration has evolved over the past 40 years, and mobile technology makes it even easier for brands to use product registration as an engaging way to onboard customers."
According to Registria, product registration has been the main vehicle for durable consumer brands to identify and understand their consumers. However, the traditional process of filling out paper or online registration information can be a barrier. In the study, 68% of all consumers say they never register their products, and of those:
- 38% intend to, but forget or just never get around to it
- 16% say it's a hassle, and
- 12% don't want to share their personal information.
56% of consumers say that receiving warranty and service plan information is the most important reason to register a product, while 25% cite safety and recall notifications as the most important reasons to register.
These priorities shift among younger consumers aged 18-34, who think it is more important to register products in order to be notified of deals on accessories and complementary products. In addition, consumers with higher income of $100,000 and above say staying connected with a brand for loyalty and VIP programs is the most important reason to register.
The post Millennials and Affluent Prefer Mobile for Brand Connection After Purchase appeared first on WebProNews.
Author: Ellen Gomes
It’s day two at Marketing Nation Summit and the pace of interesting content and conversations—from the keynote, to a bustling expo show floor, to fantastic breakout sessions—has not slowed down. The day kicked off with breakout sessions, progressed to an awesome keynote led by the Marketo CMO, Chandar Pattabhiram with a multitude of awesome guests (including Queen Latifah 
), and ended with more awesome breakout sessions. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.
Opening the keynote, Chandar announced the launch of Marketo University, and the release of free training courses for the next generation of marketers. And this commitment extends beyond Marketo University with a partnership with GreenFig University, a micro-university offering micro degrees in applied business science, to develop and deliver a digital marketing course to students and professionals across the United States. Additionally, Chandar shared Marketo’s continued commitment to mentoring the next generation of marketers at Marketing Nation Summit. This year, in partnership with College Track, we invited students from underserved communities to come participate in the conference, network and attend sessions.
Chandar kicked off his keynote by giving the audience a small quiz about which brands came to mind when he mentioned a few words. The brands he featured? Apple, Nike, Tesla. These brands were featured because they have won the mind of the customer and therefore are icons. Winning the mind of the customer sounds easy enough for these icons, but what does it mean for us and our brands?
Chandar posed that you can win the minds of your audience by following the three A’s:
1. The Art of Storytelling. Winning minds starts with winning hearts, and that is done with engagement and storytelling. Great storytelling goes beyond the data to build a bond with a customer. A deeply moving story can affect change. How can you create a moving story? Be interesting, be authentic, and be relevant.
2. Adaptive Engagement. For many years marketers ran the show and customers listened. Now, the paradigm has shifted. It’s gone from brands talking and customers listening to customers talking and brands (and everyone else) listening. It’s come to down to listening, learning and engaging. The big difference is that we can do this at scale today.
Engagement is also about “acting” the lifecycle because it’s not enough to just talk about the lifecycle. How many of us are actually spending dollars across the entire lifecycle? The answer is surprising—only 13% of marketers. To adapt, marketers should build the bond early, grow, and evolve with the customer to create a bond for life.
And then Chandar shared this example of lifecycle:
And the audience was like:
Next, Chandar invited Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director at Panasonic System Communications Europe to the stage. Stephen shared his experience using marketing technology at Panasonic to share their brand story across finely-tuned full-lifecycle marketing.
Stephen shared that Panasonic has taken the customer lifecycle and dissected it so they can message the customer in the right way, with the right story with the right product (and they have many… so it can be complicated). Panasonic started off using Marketo for acquisition, but now have so much data that they’ve been able to introduce many more programs, including a customer welcome program, retention programs, and win-back programs. They have put Marketo at the heart of the customer experience and adapted it based on where the customer is sitting. Stephen noted that their campaigns have increased exponentially but that doesn’t mean spamming people, instead “our segmentation has gotten finer and finer, as our engagement platform gets a finer and finer resolution of the customer.”
Tuesday’s keynote also played host to a lively panel led by James Cooper, Editorial Director of Adweek. James was joined by CMO panelists Kimberly Kadlec of Visa, Kristen O’Hara of Time Warner, Tyler Williams of Zappos, and Marisa Thalberg of Taco Bell, and their conversation on the future CMO ran the gamut from data to internal alignment to porta potties.
Some of the best moments?
After much anticipation Marketo’s SVP and General Council, Margo Smith introduced Queen Latifah to The Marketing Nation (we were very excited!). Queen Latifah shared how her upbringing shaped her world view, how she determines her next projects and the importance of failing. Here are two big takeaways, Queen Latifah shared with the audience:
Know Yourself: Queen Latifah shared that as she broke into the hip hop scene, as a young person she had to define herself as a brand early on. She could have easily been MC Latifah, but she looked around and saw the misogyny in hip hop and understood that she could say something with her music and with her brand. She signed her first contract as Queen Latifah and has listened to her gut on every project and career decision from there, helping her choose a path that offered projects and sponsorship that are authentic to her and her values.
Embrace Failure: “Be a constant student,” Queen Latifah implored. Constantly learning will keep you humble but provide constant growth. Growth was a big theme for Queen Latifah who also emphasized the importance of failure. Margo asked, “Were you afraid as you moved into different areas of your career—like from singing to acting?” The answer? A resounding “Yes!”. But Queen Latifah encouraged the audience to look at the fear of change and the fear of failure in the eyes, and move forward with your plans. What’s the worst that could happen? You fail? “Then you pick yourself up and try something new, or try it again.”
As breakouts began, we had Marlene Williamson, CEO of Watermark, moderate a much-anticipated diversity panel that included Susan Lovegren, HR Executive and former Chief People Officer at AppDynamics, Joe Militello, Chief People Officer at Pivotal, and Lisa Curtis, Founder and CEO of Kuli Kuli. The panel covered several interesting topics around inclusion—including the impetus for immediate change and how employees and companies can make change happen.
According to the expert panelists, at many organizations, inclusivity is getting the attention it deserves because employees—especially young employees—are pushing for organizations to be conscientious and responsive to diversity issues. Panelists shared some “grassroots” inclusivity initiatives, including ideas like diversity channels on Slack, reverse mentorships (where new grads mentor executives on a chosen project), and Patrons & Protégé programs for high talent individuals. But, panelists agreed that for inclusivity to be an effective vector for attracting and retaining diverse talent, it must be core to company values, and should start with organizational leadership.
And this wasn’t a breakout session, but I’d be remiss in not sharing it here. Together, Marketo and LinkedIn shot a Facebook Live and Periscope session on Content in the Engagement Economy with industry influencers and content experts, Michael Brenner, Ardath Albee, and Jeff Bullas.
Didn’t catch us live? Don’t worry you can check it out here:
We can’t wait to see what magic the final day of Marketing Nation Summit 2017 brings. Did anything stand out to you from today? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
Live From The Marketing Nation Summit: Day 2 – Storytelling, Brand Evolution, and The Future of Marketing was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
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Since Microsoft's $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn three days after Christmas 2016, little has been heard from what would be Microsoft Dynamic's bold upgrade to the CRM industry. But the picture has become much more clear since Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently gave Reuters the details of upgrades to its sales software that integrates data from LinkedIn.
As Reuters describes: The new features will comb through a salesperson's email, calendar and LinkedIn relationships to help gauge how warm their relationship is with a potential customer. The system will recommend ways to save an at-risk deal, like calling in a co-worker who is connected to the potential customer on LinkedIn.
The enhancements, which will be available this summer, will require Microsoft Dynamics customers to also be LinkedIn customers.
Microsoft is a small player in sales software. According to research firm Gartner, the company ranks fourth - far behind Salesforce.com and other rivals Oracle Corp and SAP - with just 4.3% of the market in 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Nadella, long known as a champion for the democratization of artificial intelligence (AI), said it would be a key component to Dynamics: "I want to be able to democratize AI so that any customer using these products is able to, in fact, take their own data and load it into AI for themselves."
Microsoft's "third cloud" is Nadella's term for Dynamics which caters to the fields such as sales and finance. With Office 365 (work productivity and flow, email, etc.) and Azure (computing and databases) as the first two clouds, Nadella all Microsoft products utilizing a common set of business data that can be mined for new insights with artificial intelligence
"I think that's the only way to long-term change this game, because if all we did was replace somebody else's (sales), or (finance) application, that's of no value, quite frankly," he told Reuters.
With this news, it's no surprise that Linked also announced both a new ad targeting platform (Matched Audiences) and that LinkedIn now has 500 million users.
The post Microsoft and LinkedIn Ready to Challenge Salesforce CRM appeared first on WebProNews.
Author: Ellen Gomes
As 6500+ marketers descended on Moscone in San Francisco, it could only mean one thing. Marketing Nation Summit has arrived. We kicked off the 2017 Marketing Nation Summit on Sunday with an amazing Fun Run, Marketo University training, and our annual customer and partner awards gala, The Revvies. As the official day one (Monday) at the Marketing Nation Summit wraps up, this post will cover highlights from the amazing keynotes and breakout sessions.
New Customer Expectations
Things kicked off with a literal bang—with live drums and dancers. The audience was amped when Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas, took the stage and jumped into his TED-style talk describing the new world of communication and customer expectations.
What a start! #MKTGnation pic.twitter.com/q69zzUxmJJ
— Fred Hagerman (@FredHagerman) April 24, 2017
Steve described that today with digital marketing as the norm, marketers expect to be able to reach millions of people in an instant. And that’s pretty amazing but it a testament to the fact that change is now measured in seconds versus decades or years—we are living in a hyper-accelerated pace of change. Technology has the world around us.
“Today we are making more complicated decisions than ever before, & as marketers do it in seconds” ~ @nstevenlucas #socialmedia #MKTGnation pic.twitter.com/akTTPJ69ha
— Tamara McCleary (@TamaraMcCleary) April 24, 2017
Technology has helped advance the expectations and knowledge of our buyers. Our audiences are more focused than ever before on being treated as individuals. Steve asked the audience, as consumers, “Don’t we want to be valued?”, and “Don’t we know it when we aren’t valued?”
Then Steve highlighted the challenge for marketers, where we’re fighting the law of supply and demand. Creating demand has become a de facto goal for many marketers, but the problem is in the supply curve—people have a finite amount of hours, and we have a fixed amount of attention.
The demand model many marketers operate with doesn’t account for the new way that buyers access information and how empowered they have become. Today, the buyer has a louder voice than the brand. It is the era of the buyer.
As marketers, our success is hitting a limit—as we bump up against the law of diminishing returns. If an activity is successful, like digital marketing, we invest more and more in it but we’ve reached the point that the volume is overwhelming for our audience. Our engagement over time needs to be more scarce, and frankly more valuable.
It’s not just volume that is making marketing less effective, but the need for a personal relationship with the brand. Volume, unchecked does damage to our brands. You see buyers that opt out not because they dislike the brand, but they dislike the volume. Buyers still want to be marketed to, in fact, they want a real and lasting relationship with brands that get us. We need to embrace that we are no longer able to prescribe the terms of the relationship. We work for the buyer. Go curate the experience for the buyer.
So how can you effectively engage your buyer? Steve shared that engagement is curating a personalized and meaningful experience and that we need to put all our energy into making our share of the finite buyer attention as meaningful as possible.
We’re spending too much time talking at buyers and not enough time engaging buyers. Engagement is what moves them to choose us. Steve shared that engagement is about value and values. So how can you lead in the Engagement Economy? By following these three rules:
Next, Steve invited a group of executives to join him on stage to share their insights on marketing in the Engagement Economy. The first was a panel led by Jamie Gutfreund, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Wunderman. She introduced Penny Wilson, CMO at Hootsuite, Tracee Nalewak, VP of Customer Experience Marketing at Hakkasaan Engagement Group, and Jeff Wright, VP of Data Analytics and Automation at Autodesk and invited them to discuss how they are adapting to customer expectations, creating memorable moments and shaping their organizations to succeed in the Engagement Economy. Key highlights from our brilliant CMO panel include:
Then, Marketo’s COO Greg Wolfe took the stage with Ariel Kelman, VP of Worldwide Marketing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) to discuss how to create a valuable journey for customers. Ariel shared that the journey AWS creates for prospects and customers is heavy on valuable, educational content and light on gated forms. His goal? “How can we help them [customers] adopt this technology?”, and “How can I make my customers successful and give them opportunities to highlight their success?”
You can’t fake customer success with marketing. Advocacy is earned. #MKTGnation
— Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley) April 24, 2017
Our next guest was Reggie Aggarwal, the CEO of Cvent, who shared a little bit about leveraging technology to amplify the power of human connection. In the Engagement Economy, events are one of the most effective ways to drive revenue because they help you engage your customers and prospects 1 to 1, and in person. And, nothing beats face to face. The true power of technology in that interaction? It helps events become measurable and shifts them from expenses to an asset.
Our final guest was the CMO of Box, Carrie Palin. Carrie shared insights with the audience about how Box is thinking about the technology stack that will prepare them to engage in the Engagement Economy. She shared that in addition to having Marketo act as the central nervous system of the Box stack, they are trying to deploy the right technology to address their wide range of personas in a targeted and specific way, and bridge the chasm between sales and marketing.
Finally, after much anticipation James Corden joined Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas on the stage and, to the delight of the audience, engaged in witty banter with Steve over the faux living room set-up, his presentation advancer, and the Amazon Alexa on stage. Steve asked James about how he thinks about creativity and storytelling, to which James replied that his methodology is less about the individual outputs (the video, the sketch, etc.) but more about, “what does it take to be ahead, or even, around the curve?”
Corden challenged marketers to think about how quickly the world is evolving. From his point of view, it’s a pace that is impossible to keep up. Convention or the status quo is the easy path, but he shared with Steve and the audience that, “The great thing about the internet is that the good rises to the top. If it’s good. People will find it. Chewbacca mom, for example. There is no great marketing person behind that. That’s a wonderful, creative, and freeing place to be if you are in the business of making content.” According to Corden, success in new areas can, “feel very new,” but it’s “actually the same. For example, you look at the rise of eSports (televised professional video game tournaments) but it’s actually the same. It’s not different than why someone would watch golf. To watch someone be extraordinary at something.”
In his presentation- Learn to Speak, Share and Market Human, Bryan Kramer, industry influencer and President and CEO of Pure Matter, shared why it’s important for brands to let their ‘human’ shine through and how they (and you) can do it.
Based on his research, he’s boiled what it means to be human, as a person, and a brand into three traits: 1) Simplicity, 2) Empathy, and 3) Imperfection. And he pointed out that while it’s easy to think of brands that embody one of these elements, it’s fairly hard to find a brand that does all three. But, what it really comes down to is connection. How you connect with a business matters, and has a very tangible impact on how long of a relationship you will have with the service or business. Connection is what drives sharing, and it’s at the core of relationships.
What drives connection and sharing? It turns out that there are a few personas of online sharers (in fact, you can find out what kind you are here) and that ultimately, as a brand, or as a person, you are what you share. So if you want to change the way that people perceive you—you can share something different. But, he cautioned, do it authentically and honestly.
Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade, delivered an authentic and humorous presentation on how to think like a CMO.
Neisser authored The CMO’s Periodic Table, which originated from a content marketing and social media strategy he created to boost his company during a tough time in 2008.
To help the audience truly think like a CMO, Neisser helpfully provided the acronym CATS—complete with cute cat pictures—which is outlined below:
To really let Drew’s message sink in, check out this hilarious video of someone trying to organize their 10 kittens for a photo (spoiler alert: kittens do not cooperate for photos).
Joe Pulizzi is often called the godfather of content marketing, and it’s for a good reason. He’s championed content marketing both personally through his awesome books, but also through his company, Content Marketing Institute. This year he brought a fresh perspective, imploring marketers to think beyond being a cost center and really become a revenue driver.
Marketers are creating more content than ever before—9 out of 10 companies are doing content marketing—and serving it on more channels than ever before, and unfortunately, they aren’t monetizing it.
This. This is the kicker when it comes to most brands’ #socialmedia. (Thanks for the great slide @JoePulizzi!) #MKTGNATION pic.twitter.com/yvVczsAIAb
— Emily Shannon (@PrettyandPoor) April 24, 2017
Joe’s main point of view? Build an audience, and then monetize your audience. But he didn’t just leave it there, he showed us how to create great content and build an audience and then, using examples from top companies that had successfully made this transition, he showed us how to monetize it. Here are the steps you should follow to ensure you’re creating thoughtful, valuable content that will build a following, and allow you to monetize:
@JoePulizzi entertaining. Take control of your content & building a media company, own ur audience, dont build on borrowed land #MKTGNATION pic.twitter.com/u50SJNgv2q
— Sian Simpson (@SianSimpson) April 24, 2017
Chief Evangelist & startup advisor, Jill Rowley delivered a crisp and relevant message on the importance of social selling in the Engagement Economy.
Attendees learned a framework for being #CustomerObsessed and #KnowingThyBuyer—and Jill also shared the five pillars of social selling:
With proven performance benefits & ROI of social selling, it is essential that modern sales organizations learn how to create authentic relationships with ideal buyers, optimizing connection while driving revenue for their company. Companies that invest in social selling improve forecast accuracy, total team attainment of quota, & renewal rates, all of which are very important in the subscription economy.
Cheryl Chavez, GVP Product Management, Marketo, and Matt Zilli, VP Product Marketing, Marketo, closed out Monday’s exciting sessions, drawing cheers from a packed room of marketers as they unveiled Marketo’s exciting new innovations:
1. Platform updates: Big data architecture that’s all about listening.
People are bringing more data into Marketo than ever before. Our new architecture allows for faster execution to succeed in the engagement economy, enabling customers like Politico to deliver a relevant, responsive, and engaging experience at incredible speed — to over 80M customers on Election Night 2016.
2. System monitoring: A fitness tracker for your instance of Marketo—never again wonder what’s under the hood.
System monitoring will allow you to help run campaigns faster and find issues before they happen, including the ability to see Salesforce throughput over time, Smart List performance, and API usage.
3. Analytics: Empower your entire marketing organization with relevant and customizable dashboards. Marketo’s new dashboards will provide:
This full stack of analytics covers every role, from the everyday marketer to the CMO. Each will have actionable data to use in shaping their marketing strategies.
4. APIs
Get large data sets in and out of Marketo more efficiently with bulk APIs. Whether setting up Marketo for the first time, regularly importing customer data, or exporting Marketo data to your BI tool, you can now get data where it needs to go with ease.
5. Performance statistics: “What’s a good email open rate? Click through rate? Deliverability rate?”
We believe the platform should provide you with a competitive advantage—data that you can’t get anywhere else.
We’ve distilled data from the past five years into key benchmarks, to show you how you’re performing against your peer group and help you optimize for best practices.
6. Ad Bridge
With digital ad spend accounting for roughly 25% of marketers’ budgets, it’s possible to yield significant results with small improvements in ROI & engagement. LinkedIn lead gen forms now sync directly to Marketo. You can also target your audience on LinkedIn with incredibly personalized ads, and keep your ad data fresh with Ad Bridge list sync—automatically syncing Marketo Smart Lists.
7. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Give your sales team the best tools and set them up for success. Account Insights is a browser plugin that surfaces actionable insights to your sales team, so they can work with marketing to engage with accounts effectively. To provide actionable data, we’re also rolling out Auto-Synced Account lists that are in sync whenever changed within your CRM.
8. New UX
A new and personalized My Marketo experience, with a virtual command center for all things Marketo. Add customized widgets to tailor your user experience, then create multiple dashboards and easily switch between them. With updates to UI and functionality from the ground up in key areas such as smart lists, workflows, and nurture programs, this is the coolest and most modern Marketo yet.
Matt and Cheryl emphasized their excitement to deliver these amazing new changes to our customers and prospects and thanks for a being a part of the vibrant Marketing Nation.
And that wraps an amazing day 1 of the Marketing Nation Summit. We’re excited to see what day two brings. Make sure to check back here for a recap of the day two sessions and keynote. Did you hear anything that stuck out to you at Marketing Nation Summit? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
Live from Marketing Nation Summit: The Engagement Economy, Buyer Empowerment, and Authenticity was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
The post Live from Marketing Nation Summit: The Engagement Economy, Buyer Empowerment, and Authenticity appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
With the decline of traditional TV and the growth of social media, influencer marketing has become one of the fastest growing advertising mediums. A recent study by Mediakix found that Instagram alone is expected to be a $1.07 billion market this year and $2.38 billion in 2019.
In the past six months alone, Instagram added over 100 million users and growth shows no signs of slowing. With over 600 million global users and over 400 million of whom check Instagram every day, Instagram is one of the most far-reaching and highly engaged social media networks in existence today, according to Mediakix.
Though there is no official number on the size of the Instagram influencer market, the study tracked common sponsored hashtags, including #ad, #sponsored, #spon, and #sp. In the past year, there was an increase of 4.8 million uses of these hashtags over years prior.
In looking at a sample size of 500 recent sponsored posts, 58% were from accounts with more than 1,000 followers. The average follower size for accounts posting sponsored content was 32,000. Applying an average $10 cost per thousand impressions (CPM), an estimated $320 per post and an estimated total monthly spend of approximately $90 million resulted. This would put the overall total annual spend at over $1 billion.
With the current annual growth, the market could reach a $130M/month spend by March 2018 and up to a $200M/month spend by March 2019 (nearly $2.4B spent on influencer marketing on Instagram alone).
The post Instagram Influencer Marketing Expected to Double in Two Years appeared first on WebProNews.
IN THIS EPISODE: Marcus and George talk Impact Live, HubSpot Updates, & INBOUND Studio. Also, How do you create a community with video that people...
The post Hubcast 135: Impact Live, HubSpot Updates, & INBOUND Studio appeared first on The Sales Lion.
"Retail is not the same. Shopify is enabling merchants to do everything, from anywhere."
- Lynsey Thorton, Shopify Director of User Experience Design at Unite 2017 Conference
Shopify's newest product announcement by Satish Kanwar, VP of Product, can be described as their certainty of eCommerce and retail becoming one. The Chip & Swipe Reader will boost in-person selling for the eCommerce platform's over 375,000 partner shopping sites:
I'm incredibly proud to introduce you to our brand new,
-designed Shopify Chip & Swipe Reader! https://t.co/FHOhUpAn2X #ShopifyUnite
— Satish Kanwar (@skanwar) April 20, 2017
"Our product philosophy has always been to provide what most merchants need most of the time, and really rely on our partners and our ecosystem for everything else," Kanwar explained to Inc. "Over the years of POS growing [since 2013], it became obvious that the credit-card reader was something that everyone needed, all of the time, to get started in retail." The new device will have no up-front cost, and is available exclusively to users who process transactions through Shopify Payments.
"Looking forward, all small businesses are thinking multi-channel first. If someone is opening a store, whether online or retail, they're fundamentally thinking about the combined strategy," Kanwar said. "If I'm opening a retail store, I'm naturally now thinking about how I'm going to be promoting those products online. And if I'm opening an online store, I'm thinking about how I'm going to expand my business over time."
By contrast, Shopify envisions a future in which "retail" and "ecommerce" aren't separate endeavors at all reports Inc. "Looking forward, all small businesses are thinking multi-channel first. If someone is opening a store, whether online or retail, they're fundamentally thinking about the combined strategy," Kanwar said. "If I'm opening a retail store, I'm naturally now thinking about how I'm going to be promoting those products online. And if I'm opening an online store, I'm thinking about how I'm going to expand my business over time."
He added, "We most certainly do see, and are excited to invite, businesses that are starting retail-first, because we believe they need an online strategy at the same time. And what Shopify does is give them both out of the box."
“One of the overall messages we’re trying to push is that Shopify is getting serious about hardware,” said Shopify Prduct Manager David Seal to BetaKit. “We’re bridging the gap from being just a software company to also doing hardware, and we’re very much becoming a technology company. If you look at Google and Apple, who specialize in hardware and software, that’s where we’re headed too.”
Seal told BetaKit that part of the chip and card reader’s value add is that it deeply integrates with a merchant’s Shopify store, and supports over-the-air updates. Most brick-and-mortar merchants have ambitions to sell online eventually, and Shopify’s opportunity is in servicing both segments at a scale that other competitors may not reach. While merchants tend to think first about Square as a payment option, Shopify hopes that this will get more merchants identifying Shopify with payments.
Shopify also sees the device as a way for Shopify Shop owners to easily do business on the go, including pop-stores, city and farmers markets, events, etc.
All in all, it should be a great avenue for retailers and eTailers. Entrepreneurs are continaully looking to maximize every sales channel in today's ever moving, omni-channel culture. And Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told the Unite 2017 audience just prior to the product announcement that he's definitely on it:
"I made every decision based on a simple heuristic: Take the path that leads to more entrepreneurs." @tobi#ShopifyUnite
— Shopify (@Shopify) April 20, 2017
The wireless, pocket sized Chip & Swipe Reader will begin shipping in June and can be tried out on a 14-day trial.
The post Shopify Sees Future of eCommerce in Retail appeared first on WebProNews.
At this year’s Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference in San Jose California, the company announced their short and long term plans. The announcements ranged from updates to existing offerings in the short term and long term plans bordering on science fiction.
Facebook Wants to Read Your Mind
In a surprising announcement, Regina Dugan told the F8 audience about a project with two goals, typing with your brain and hearing with your skin. In a Facebook Post Dugan says, “Over the next 2 years, we will be building systems that demonstrate the capability to type at 100 wpm by decoding neural activity devoted to speech… We also described a system that may one day allow you to hear through your skin.”
360-degree cameras
Wednesday’s keynote from CTO Mark Schroepfer announced the second generation of its Surround 360 camera design. The Street reports, "The new cameras are called the x24, featuring 24 cameras on an orb, and the smaller x6, which features six cameras on an orb. Unlike the original Surround 360 camera announced at last year's F8 event, these cameras use six degrees of freedom (SDOF) to allow a VR headset wearer to move around in about a meter and a half of space to observe an object closer or to simply walk around a space. This effect allows users to feel more immersed in a scene. In addition, while last year's camera became an open-source project on GitHub, Facebook is planning to work with partners to manufacture the x6 and x24 to bring them to market later this year."
Beam the Internet from helicopter
CNN Tech reports: "Facebook said it's created something called a Tether-tenna, a small helicopter connected to an internet cable and a power source. In an emergency, the Tether-tenna would connect to an existing piece of fiber line and fly above the ground, becoming a tower that people can use to get online
This disaster zone tech is still a long-term plan. But Facebook says it could eventually be deployed for months at a time, providing connectivity while a community rebuilds itself."
Updates to Workplace by Facebook
TechCrunch reports: "Facebook announced updates to its Workplace by Facebook team communications tool, including a slew of new partnerships and new bot integrations, which all show a product that’s maturing to meet the needs of larger enterprise customers."
Updates to Facebook Analytics
Facebook’s VP of Partnerships, Ime Archibong, announced updates to Facebook Analytics as well as Facebook Login and Account Kit during his F8 keynote address. TechCrunch: “Analytics is getting greater customizability and a machine learning boost while Login and Account Kit are benefiting from additional transparency and accessibility.”
Facebook Spaces Announcement | F8 in Under 10 Minutes from Engadget:
The post Highlights from Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference appeared first on WebProNews.
IBM has announced new cognitive capabilities for IBM Watson Marketing Insights, IBM's cloud-based marketing and customer analytics platform that uses the Watson's artificial intelligence computer system to better examine and predict customer behavior.
Audience insights is a cognitive feature that reveals key predictors in customer data based on their interactions with the brand across channels including email, digital, social media and in-store, as well as customer attributes. This data is continuously updated, revealing new audience profiles and customer segments as the relative importance of their behavior predictors changes.
These insights are delivered to the marketing team via a visual dashboard that includes details of the context and reasoning behind the findings. With this information marketers can proactively target campaigns designed specifically to engage this group with a relevant offer and retain their loyalty.
“We understand that a customer’s journey has many touch points, and our clients want to make this journey seamless,” said Maria Winans, Chief Marketing Officer, IBM Watson Customer Engagement. “While every customer is different, they all have one thing in common- they are interacting with brands across multiple channels. With these new cognitive capabilities, we give marketers the audience insights they need to strengthen customer engagement and deliver better performing campaigns.”
The post IBM Puts Watson into the Hands of Marketers appeared first on WebProNews.
Google has a new look for blog searches. Searches for blogs now return carousels and rich lists of popular blogs.
The new feature which appears in mobile and desktop searches show rich results for queries about blog topics, like “cooking blogs” or “tech blogs.”
This is the carousel look for a cooking blogs search:
Here is the rich list style for a fashion blog search:
The rich results seem like a helpful feature for users wanting to find new content. For blogs, the feature may not be quite as useful. Clicking on the blog logos does not take the user directly to the blog but opens a search query for the blog name. With the extra step, this feature may not be a huge new traffic driver for blogs. It will at least increase visibility for blogs that make it in the rich results.
The post Blog Searches on Google Get Rich Results appeared first on WebProNews.
The results of a scientific media trial by YuMe examining the impact and value of pre-roll, mid-roll, outstream and social video across multiple screens, including mobile and PC, found that pre-roll is distinctly the most preferred video ad formats
Compared to mid-roll and outstream, pre-roll is considered the least interruptive across devices, with only 17% of mobile device users feeling the ad interrupts the content, compared with 60% on outstream and 72% on mid-roll.
54% of consumers found pre-roll ads on mobile engaging, compared to 37% on outstream and 44% on mid-roll.
"We are big advocates of marketers using a mix of video formats and strategies to effectively reach target audiences, but it also comes as no surprise that pre-roll remains a dominant cornerstone in a multi-format approach. This artful balance of formats meets brand objectives while delivering memorable experiences for consumers,” said Michael Hudes, Chief Revenue Officer, YuMe. “Through this trial, we’ve been able to clearly outline and reveal the power and impact of video formats across devices. This type of data and insights will prove invaluable for brands continuing to innovate in this space.”
Other key findings From the YuMe research trial of 6,864 users:
Pre-Roll
Despite being less intrusive than mid-roll and outstream formats, it achieves the greatest break-through (ad recall).
Even with pre-roll being such a strong format, the multi-format exposure of a pre-roll ad followed by an outstream ad performs equally as well as 2 pre-roll exposures.
Mid-Roll
Consumers have mixed attitudes about mid-roll. It feels most intrusive, but consumers were less likely to want to close out the ad immediately compared to the newer outstream.
Mid-roll communicates brand messages particularly well on larger, more TV-like screens.
Mid-roll ranked higher in message recall for desktop viewers at 27%, compared to 8% for outstream.
Social Video
Social video offers a unique environment on mobile, allowing ads to feel the most integrated with the content.
67% of viewers agreed that social video did not disturb their browsing experience compared to 53% who agree for pre-roll.
Outstream
Outstream is rated much more positively among those who complete the video, indicating targeting is key.
When consumers complete the oustream video, they are about 3x more likely to remember the ad.
The post Pre-Roll Most Informative And Engaging Video Ad Format in Study appeared first on WebProNews.
"Retail is not the same. Shopify is enabling merchants to do everything, from anywhere."
- Lynsey Thorton, Shopify Director of User Experience Design at Unite 2017 Conference
Shopify's newest product announcement by Satish Kanwar, VP of Product, can be described as their certainty of eCommerce and retail becoming one. The Chip & Swipe Reader will boost in-person selling for the eCommerce platform's over 375,000 partner shopping sites:
I'm incredibly proud to introduce you to our brand new,
— Satish Kanwar (@skanwar) April 20, 2017
"Our product philosophy has always been to provide what most merchants need most of the time, and really rely on our partners and our ecosystem for everything else," Kanwar explained to Inc. "Over the years of POS growing [since 2013], it became obvious that the credit-card reader was something that everyone needed, all of the time, to get started in retail." The new device will have no up-front cost, and is available exclusively to users who process transactions through Shopify Payments.
"Looking forward, all small businesses are thinking multi-channel first. If someone is opening a store, whether online or retail, they're fundamentally thinking about the combined strategy," Kanwar said. "If I'm opening a retail store, I'm naturally now thinking about how I'm going to be promoting those products online. And if I'm opening an online store, I'm thinking about how I'm going to expand my business over time."
By contrast, Shopify envisions a future in which "retail" and "ecommerce" aren't separate endeavors at all reports Inc. "Looking forward, all small businesses are thinking multi-channel first. If someone is opening a store, whether online or retail, they're fundamentally thinking about the combined strategy," Kanwar said. "If I'm opening a retail store, I'm naturally now thinking about how I'm going to be promoting those products online. And if I'm opening an online store, I'm thinking about how I'm going to expand my business over time."
He added, "We most certainly do see, and are excited to invite, businesses that are starting retail-first, because we believe they need an online strategy at the same time. And what Shopify does is give them both out of the box."
“One of the overall messages we’re trying to push is that Shopify is getting serious about hardware,” said Shopify Prduct Manager David Seal to BetaKit. “We’re bridging the gap from being just a software company to also doing hardware, and we’re very much becoming a technology company. If you look at Google and Apple, who specialize in hardware and software, that’s where we’re headed too.”
Seal told BetaKit that part of the chip and card reader’s value add is that it deeply integrates with a merchant’s Shopify store, and supports over-the-air updates. Most brick-and-mortar merchants have ambitions to sell online eventually, and Shopify’s opportunity is in servicing both segments at a scale that other competitors may not reach. While merchants tend to think first about Square as a payment option, Shopify hopes that this will get more merchants identifying Shopify with payments.
Shopify also sees the device as a way for Shopify Shop owners to easily do business on the go, including pop-stores, city and farmers markets, events, etc.
All in all, it should be a great avenue for retailers and eTailers. Entrepreneurs are continaully looking to maximize every sales channel in today's ever moving, omni-channel culture. And Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told the Unite 2017 audience just prior to the product announcement that he's definitely on it:
"I made every decision based on a simple heuristic: Take the path that leads to more entrepreneurs." @tobi#ShopifyUnite
— Shopify (@Shopify) April 20, 2017
The wireless, pocket sized Chip & Swipe Reader will begin shipping in June and can be tried out on a 14-day trial.
The post Shopify Sees Future of eCommerce in Retail appeared first on WebProNews.
Author: Marissa Lyman
Bolder, better, and BIGGER than ever before.
These are the themes you’ve been hearing tied to next week’s Marketing Nation Summit, and I can definitively attest to the fact that they are SPOT ON. As we aimed to “up-level” our content and shape Summit into a true industry conference, this year Marketo has joined forces with one of my favorite publications to create a content series entirely focused on one of marketing’s most exciting trends: the convergence of advertising technology and marketing technology.
In partnership with Adweek, we’ve convened top marketers, leading agency executives, and companies at the forefront of the AdTech-MarTech collision to bring you everything you need to know to navigate this exciting trend.
But don’t just take my word for it. I’ve created a handy preview guide to all the content below. And if you won’t be making it to San Francisco, be sure to register for the keynote livestream to check out our CMO panel during Day 2. Let the convergence commence!
What do marketing executives from Taco Bell, Time Warner, Visa, and Zappos have in common? They’ll all be on stage during Day 2 of the Marketing Nation Summit in a panel moderated by Adweek’s editorial director, Jim Cooper. These brands are leading the charge as their organizations navigate technology, creativity, and, of course, engagement. While these leaders will not be showering the audience with high-speed internet bundles, credit cards, shoes, or even chalupas (I was pulling hard for that last one), they will be talking about how they build the teams of tomorrow, what marketers can do today to get ahead, and how they define success.
There are a lot of ways to define who your customers are. It could be the content they read, the products they buy, even how often they ask for a discount. But do any of those single views really provide an accurate description of who they are? The smarty-pantses over at Deloitte Digital and Google Cloud are going to give us a look at how the definition of your customer and even yourself changes from minute to minute and location to location, in an amazing Ted Talk-style session on marketing sciences and—everyone’s favorite buzzword—machine learning.
In a past life, I was lucky enough to work at Ogilvy, the agency founded by the original Mad Man, David Ogilvy. But it doesn’t take a marketing genius to note that the advertising agencies of today look MUCH different than they did in the middle of the 1900s. How do firms navigate these challenges, provide what CMOs need to succeed, and what can marketers do to work with agencies and tackle our digital age? This session features executives from iconic ad agencies such as AKQA, Essence, Lippincott, mcgarrybowen San Francisco, MEC, and—of course—Ogilvy.
To tie it all together, we’ll hear from brands and vendors who are pushing AdTech to new heights. Whether you view the relationship between AdTech and MarTech as a collision, convergence, or perfect marriage, this interactive panel will examine the growing reliance on these technologies and surface important innovations and teachable moments as these two worlds merge. That’s right—I said interactive panel. If it’s always been your dream to be on stage at Marketing Nation Summit (I mean, for me, that comes just after my dream to fly), you can submit your name at the beginning of this session for a chance to join our panelists from AdRoll, Box, and next-generation UX analytics platform ContentSquare. How cool is that?
I sure am! I’ll be living at Moscone for the next five days, so if you see a small blonde girl curled up in a corner, feel free to drop off a Red Bull and back away slowly…kidding. Please say, “hello!” so I can give you a big hug and thank you because it wouldn’t be Marketing Nation Summit without YOU! Still haven’t gotten your ticket? There’s still time (online registration closes 4/21 at midnight Pacific Time & opens onsite at the event)!
Everything You Need to Know About AdTech & MarTech in 4 Sessions was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
The post Everything You Need to Know About AdTech & MarTech in 4 Sessions appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
