Marketing Trends

There is an old saying that in every tragedy there is an opportunity. Sometimes it’s our darkest moments that we find a way to make the world a better place, and that’s exactly what Christine de Wendel, Co-Founder and CEO US Sunday sought out to do during the pandemic. Today marketers are all trying to create a frictionless experience. Or simply, a better buying experience for the consumer. But what is less seamless than waiting on the person to bring you the bill? Sunday sought to rectify this, and they did. “We said, if we want to get to market really quickly and take advantage of this incredible wave, and this opportunity that has come out of the COVID pandemic, we need to make [payment] really easy. And so our solution is we put a QR code on the table. We map it to the point of sale system. It allows you as a consumer to scan the QR code on the table, see the menu, order like many restaurants already had, but then pull up your bill and pay. And so we're transforming something that used to take 15 minutes and we're turning it into a ten second experience” Sunday’s technology is simple, but has innovated the restaurant industry in ways that has staying power.. Not only is it creating a smoother process for consumers, but it also has the possibility to give businesses a better sense of who they are working with while also creating more personalized experiences.. On Marketing Trends, Christine takes us through the process of jumping on an opportunity, how to scale quickly while finding good candidates regardless of market, and, the importance of a strong central branding and so much more on this episode of Marketing Trends.Main TakeawaysQR Codes should be an important part of your business.They help make payments smoother for your consumers.It’s important for a start up to over invest in brand identity.Hiring local experts when expanding globally is important to understand the culture and mindset of customers.It’s important to have a strong central brand, but allow for flexibility in local markets.When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to have extreme emotional highs and lows as you see your idea come to life.Key Quotes“We said, if we want to get to market really quickly and take advantage of this incredible wave and this opportunity that has come out of the pandemic, we need to make it really easy. And so our solution is we put a QR code on the table. We map it to the point of sale system. It allows you as a consumer to scan the QR code on the table, see the menu, order like many restaurants already had, but then pull up your bill and pay. And so we're transforming something that used to take 15 minutes and we're turning it into ten-secondnd experience”“As an early stage startup, you over-invest in brand.”“We've had great traction and great partnerships with most of the point of sales because they realize that it's a very fragmented market and that working with us means that we're really building something that's going to address 70, 80, 90, 100 percent of the market, as opposed to just their customer base.”“Entrepreneurs will tell you this every day, it is full of challenges and the ups and downs of building a company like this are incredible. Seeing your product live is so rewarding and the stress and the anxiety of making sure that you're building a really robust product that won't disappoint is also extremely nice. I love the enthusiasm we're getting, and am extremely appreciative of my teams because I never thought it would be such a roller coaster in terms of emotions. It's really a call out to other entrepreneurs that this is exciting, but this can be so hard. BioChristine de Wendel is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday, a QR-based payment platform that improves the ease of the guest checkout experience. Prior to Sunday, Christine became an expert in European E-commerce. Between 2020 and 2017, Christine was Chief Operating Officer of ManoMano, one of France’s fastest growing tech companies and Europe’s leading online platform for home improvement. Prior to joining ManoMano, Christine spent seven years at Zalando, Europe’s largest online fashion retailer, where she built up the Paris office and managed Zalando’s French business. Christine began her career as a consultant with Bain & Company in Paris and New York. She is currently working on a new venture.Christine holds a BSc in International Affairs from Georgetown University, an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and an MBA from INSEAD. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Christine has American, French and Austrian citizenship. She currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and three children after spending 15 years in Paris.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce.

Technology has been disrupting the journalism industry to its core for decades. As younger generations come of age, the need to keep them informed in ways that reach and speak to them requires moving into new verticals, and maybe even thinking about who your competitors are differently. After all, what is news today? How is it consumed, ingested, and most importantly where is it coming from? Mayur Gupta, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Gannett, knows this because he’s living it, and if there on thing he’s focused on now, it’s reaching that younger generation.“We want to continue to index younger and younger. That's the growth segment we want to penetrate. So we are evolving and making a lot of investment in evolving our experiences, our content, the verticals. We are using a lot of those signals to identify what are the types of content? What formats, what type of experiences should we mark premium? At the same time, what does a premium experience look and feel like? And we know that as a user, you are living in this world where there's no dearth of great content. We don't compare ourselves with other journalism brands. We compare ourselves with the Netflix’s, the Apple’s, the Spotify’s of the world because in the end, it's all content. Their world perhaps begins and indexes more on fiction. If you ask me in one phrase, my vision for the company, me personally, I would love to build a Netflix for non-fiction content which is the premier source and destination.”Building a new brand identity in an established empire like Gannett is no small task. Mayur, listed as one of Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs, explains how he taught marketing to himself while on the road for another job. In this episode he shows how he’s taken the helm at one of journalism’s most respected brands, and is driving the company towards reaching younger audiences as a growth strategy. He gives some insight into his strategy on unifying large and non-monolithic systems that have been in place for years. Plus, he shares some of the big lessons he learned at companies such as Freshly, and Spotify. All this up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Index to a Younger Crowd: One of the best places to go when thinking about growth, as a legacy brand, is thinking about how to reach a different demographic or population with your product or service. Change the format, the style, the content itself, and then begin testing and looking at the numbers to find what’s working. Get creative with how you see yourself as an organization to open yourself up to more opportunities for expanding into new verticals. Building a Strong Brand: Also a unique challenge for legacy brands is thinking about how to quantify and show the metrics on an audioce that’s been following you for decades, and that you’ve never-before had this kind of understanding about. You just need to get creative with the numbers to help show the ‘top of funnel’ investment impact on efficiency of your growth marketing efforts. The Challenge of Unifying a Non-Monolithic System: One of the challenges in working with a company that has over 100 years of brand history and legacy also means that there might be a lot of piece-meal tech in place that you have to address. Updating the infrastructure for content management, and implementing a universal tech stack for the data ecosystem might be the best first step to take in order to have trust and confidence in your data moving forward. Key Quotes:“There was no marketing for dummies. I would go back because I would be into so much pressure talking to these guys who build these ad servers that are serving hundreds of billions of impressions. And they're talking about pixels and encryption, I had no clue. I didn't even know what a publisher was, what a target is, what a venue and a placement is because I'm coming from a totally different world. So I would go to Wikipedia. I would go back to my hotel, and I would understand, ‘oh, this is what they mean.’””There is something inherent for kids at least in my time who came from countries like India and many more where you have way more number of people and applicants than the opportunities that are within the ecosystem where when you get an A your parents don't get a back then the parents would not get excited. You got an ‘A’ grade. They want to know who else got an ‘A plus’ because [unless] you are coming first at something, you don't really have a shot at getting anywhere because they're just not enough resources.”“It’s an unusual challenge and a role that I took on and feel very grateful and fortunate to have been given the opportunity. It's an evolution from a hundred-year-old legacy advertising-led media business that has been typically obsessed with eyeballs and traffic to now fundamentally pivoting, to becoming a subscription content business that needs to be obsessed with user value and no longer eyeballs. That's a 180 degree turn all the way from what data you store and what KPIs

Your employees are arguably the most important part of your business. Giving them a good employee experience means keeping up-to-date on important HR deadlines and notices, such as giving raises, as one example. Amy Frampton, Head of Marketing, BambooHR, wants to help both parties, employers and employees, navigate the sometimes frustrating process of onboarding and managing staff. “Everyone's worried about onboarding now. Folks who are in construction or retail may be worried about onboarding remotely, and on-site versus in a home office. We break it down into [questions] What are they most worried about? They're worried about their culture. They're worried about their experience, and people being connected. They're worried about things that are just mandatory to get. Making sure people get their time off and making sure they get paid well, and all those things are pretty consistent.”Keeping your employees happy and feeling valued will keep them around longer, and that’s good for the bottom line. In this conversation, Amy goes over her thought-making process behind its current channel mix, and how she thinks about aligning her strategy to customer signals. How BambooHR is getting creative with the nudges they’re able to program into apps such as Slack to improve employee experience. Think more about how you might be able to relieve onboarding stress at your business for both your employees and your managers in this conversation with Amy here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysBots at Their Best: A.I. can be used in a variety of ways. One such use case is to nudge employees and managers to help them stay on top of their game on HR tasks, thereby creating a better employee experience. Making those important connections about pay, benefits, or time-off is easier when you don’t even have to remember to set a reminder. Onboarding Overload: The workplace has changed for many the past year and a half and as many companies are staffing back up in a big way, fears about onboarding new staff are mounting. Each industry has its own concerns about best practices around even just the most simple things, such as staying up to date on benefits and time-off.Notice Shifts in Your Customer’s Patterns to Keep Providing Value: The best brands and marketers stay agile because people are always evolving and changing themselves. To serve their needs, you need to think about the ways that major world events are impacting their lives and the ways they interact with your content. Key Quotes“We're looking at how we think about nudges employee experience is the ultimate goal of those that use Bamboo. My company's growing super fast. I need a great employee experience. We know there's the ‘great resignation’ going on, but we also just want a great employee experience better for our teams, better for our customers. So we are looking at A.I. nudges right now within slack and in other places where we can say things like, ‘Hey, did you know, so-and-so hasn't had a raise in a year. You might want to look at that; or [they] haven’t taken time off or, ‘Hey, I saw you just got a raise. You might want to look at your 401k contributions.’ Automating some of those nudges so that it gets easier and easier to make those connections.”“Our partnerships are super important. Our HR users can do everything they need. Our payroll is U.S.-only so we've got great partners in Canada; we've got great partners in the UK etc. We've got a hundred partners in our marketplace through API and they can basically build a custom platform for their country.”“Everyone's worried about onboarding now. Folks who are in construction or retail may be worried about onboarding remotely, and on-site versus in a home office, but they're still worried about onboarding and we break it down into [questions] What are they most worried about? They're worried about their culture. They're worried about their experience, and people being connected. They're worried about things that are just mandatory to get. Making sure people get their time off and making sure they get paid well, and all those things are pretty consistent.”“You have to think about what little nuggets can you give people during their day to allow them to engage with your brand without assuming that they're doing all the things they used to do. [For example,] right now I personally love a shorter podcast because I'm not driving to work. I used to drive an hour and 15 minutes each way.”BioAs head of marketing at BambooHR, Amy focuses on creating compelling marketing experiences with the product, people, and brand together. Amy joined BambooHR in April 2020, bringing with her almost 20 years of marketing and leadership experience at several companies including Smartsheet, Microsoft, HPE, and Vulcan.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And

Marketing leaders are faced with a litany of challenges, an ocean of tools, and seemingly infinite amounts of data, which can all get a bit overwhelming. Ingrid Burton, CMO of Quantcast, is passionate about the industry and on Marketing Trends she discusses with me some of the obstacles the modern marketer faces. “The challenges of today's CMO are very different than the challenges of even five years ago, 10 years ago. It is such a fast-moving space and CMOs have to be well versed in strategy and data in understanding the market. It's such a big job now. I wonder how my fellow CMOs are doing, because like I said, I started my day at four-thirty this morning because I lay awake at night with all these asks and I [wonder] how am I gonna get it all done? Do I have the right team on the field? Can we really execute this? Can we measure our results and make sure we're getting the attribution that we need. We need to be thinking about how we make sure CMOs don't burn out. How do we make sure CMOs are able to lead through this? And how do we make sure that the expectations are realistic?” There will never be an end to all of the additional things a marketer does, another channel to add to the mix, but be careful not to push yourself or your team beyond your limits. In this episode, Ingrid unpacks what they mean at Quantcast when they talk about providing a free and open internet. She delves into her passion and in-depth knowledge of machine learning, and how marketers can best utilize their endless amount of tools. She also explains why ESG is going to be a main driver for them next year and how they’re ensuring true Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. There’s so much to enjoy, up ahead with Ingrid here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe Challenges of the Modern CMO: The rapid pace of the software-driven industry is a lot to keep up with. Getting more data and analytics capabilities has driven a lot of growth in the last 5-10 years. The constant rush of information combined with the constant demand to put information out can lead some of even the most passionate marketers to burnout. Guarding against that is going to be what separates the leaders of the future. The expectations of many CMOs and marketing leaders are very high. The Value of a Free and Open Internet: The value of having clear and factual information widely acknowledged and accepted in culture is essential for unity. The internet disrupted the journalism industry, and this change has brought about the conversion to subscription fee-based models over the traditional ad-based mode. This means that some people don’t have access to the factual information they could be learning their news from. Machine Learning - The Power of Noticing Patterns: Pattern recognition is one of the most useful tools in leadership and in scaling business. Machines that can be taught to recognize certain patterns can do so and scan the entire database instantaneously. If you can notice patterns in marketing that can help you predict what your customers may be interested in or looking for at certain times of the year, times of day, devices, or locations. The power of machine learning in marketing is just in the early stages.Key Quotes“Hopefully I don't say ‘I’ too much. I always want to say ‘we’ - We did this. We did that. I'm just the guide; here's the north star we want to take. Or as I put it, here's the mountain we need to take. I put that out there very early on. I think my team here was very surprised. And when I showed them just a few baby steps of how you're gonna climb small hills to get to the top of the peak, they saw that they could do it. They accomplished it. Some of it's confidence-building and having them believe in themselves.”“Who can afford to subscribe to all these news publications. There's gotta be a different way. I'm afraid for a society that if we charge for every piece of content, what's going to happen to people that can't afford it [is that] they're gonna be left behind. They get left behind because they're not getting the right news. The internet is a great equalizer and we need to make sure that it's not a fee-based internet.” “One of the things that's unique about Quantcast is we have this unique, real-time data set and it's one of the largest in the world behind Google and Facebook. Since we started the company, we have established a relationship with all the publishers out there. This is Hurst which is huge, Conde Nast...we have a hundred million websites. Their data is feeding into this anonymized data set. That is one of the largest actually running in the Amazon cloud, one of the largest that they have. We're using machine learning to find patterns and make predictions about the behavior of what's happening in this data set.”“The challenges of today's CMO, are very different than the challenges of even five years ago, 10 years ago. It is such a fast-moving space and CMOs have to be well versed in strategy and data in understanding the mar

Bringing new people into your business is exciting and it’s important to get the right match, all the way down to someone who fits that stage of the company. Through experience building great teams in her career, Amanda Malko, now the CMO at G2, knows what to look for in job candidates. Going beyond assessing their ability to complete tasks and looking for a future team member who is right for this stage of your company. High-performance team building takes an added layer of thoughtfulness as she explains.“I look for people who are right for the stage of the business are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”Not everyone who’s good at working at a corporation is good at working in a startup environment, and the sooner you find that out, the better! In this episode, Malko, an expert in the world of martech, gives insight into how she thinks about testing new tools, and the way she determines usefulness. She shares great insight from personal experience about how to get the survey results you need to make the best choice for your business. Get a pen, and get ready to take some notes on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Over-Indexing on Immediately Gratifying Ad Spend to Your Detriment: Keep your marketing budget diversified across channels, resisting the temptation to over-index on the immediately gratifying or easy to measure. It is easy to get drawn into the depths of marketing analytics because that is important and essential to running a good marketing team.Every Detail, Down to Word Choice Impacts Survey Results: Direct communication with your customers is the best way to know what they want from you and your product or service. Running a useful and accurate survey is more complex than dropping some questions into a Google Form and blasting that out to your email list. Every word that you use in your questions, the way you order the questions, and the format you choose to allow your respondent to select will all impact the data that is generatedRetention of Customers is Essential for Growth - Don’t Over Invest in Acquisition: Especially as a new business or brand, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle for new eyeballs. Even as a newer company, you should have already been thinking about what is going to keep people around. The value of a returning customer is the foundation for a strong business and for the growth of the company.Key Quotes:“We hear a lot about sales and marketing fighting for credit. It's really hard for that to happen if you have shared goals if you're both driving towards the same pipeline of revenue goals and you're getting at it in complementary ways, but if you each have your own targets and they don't align at the top that is where you get a lot of that.”“Because more things are going digital and you can measure more. As a result, we tend to over-index in what's measurable and immediately gratifying. That's true to who we are as humans. Social media is instantly gratifying and that's [also] true with our budget. You put a dollar in and within three months you see the dollar out, who doesn't love that?”“I really look for people who are right for the stage of the business and are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”“A lot of software businesses are waking up to [the fact that] retention is sort of the foundation for growth. If you over-index on the acquisition, you're going to find that in a couple of years, (maybe even in a year) you've got a leaky bucket. Make retention the number one metric, if you put those acquisitions. And so we do; retention is our number one metric, followed by acquisition.” “Some best practices [for surveying] are: Be focused on what you're trying to achieve. In surveys the longer the survey, the less likely are you to get [a lower] number of participants, but [also lower] quality of the feedback. Be really clear about what's essential and what's kind of nice to have. Definitely know how you're going to evaluate it cause that'll inform what tool you use. Ask the right questions.” Bio:Amanda Malko is the CMO at G2. She is a go-to-market leader who thrives on leading high-performing, cross-functional teams. Her career focus is on hyper-growth companies working at the intersection of marketing/creativity/technology.Formerly she was the lead of the

The next business frontier, in terms of physical spaces, is not one you can physically walk on. I’m talking about outer space, and I’m talking about it today with my friend, Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics. I got to know Jason a few years back by chance, and immediately was captivated by his story, his passion, and his ground-breaking work in the space industry. Based in Boulder, Colorado, and in Sydney, Australia, Jason and his team are creating access to new areas of the space industry through better game-like user interfaces. Navigating business ‘friendly-enemy’ relationships in the industry and operating in the complex world of business to government relationships is no small feat, but Jason saw an opportunity as a new graduate and couldn’t say no. “Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.”Lowering that financial barrier to entering the space industry was all it took for Jason to dive in. In this episode, he walks us through his process of disrupting the space industry by creating Saber Astronautics. He talks about the complexities of their business model working with both governments, and businesses. Jason shares about how their innovative PIGI software was created, and the rise of downstream space industry service companies and micro-industries like this. He’s predicting cool things for the future in space - all this up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Business to Government Model: It’s not one talk about a lot on this show but it creates some fun challenges in every aspect of the business. Biggest words of wisdom are, be ready to fight. The contracts are lucrative which means there’s some fierce competition for them. When you get into government contract work, know that the voices of doubt won’t just be coming from inside of your head; the government contracting industry is cut-throat. Space Traffic Regulation Is Coming: The amount of space debris, and operating satellites spinning constantly over our heads is increasing every day, and therefore so is the need for regulation and safety policies. Who should set these, what exactly they should be, and how they would be enforced are all up for debate in the community at this point, as companies and governments alike race to capitalize on the next ‘gold-rush’ of business opportunity. Space For All: What Space Democratization Means: For the space industry, and for business, the creation of CubeSats removed a massively prohibitive cost barrier to both businesses operating in the industry and students learning how to work in it. Companies like Jason’s could raise a normal business-sized amount of capital to start building out software, which they have done. Key Quotes:“It was a fistfight. We competed against companies that were 20 to 100 times our size, two of the largest defense contractors in Australia were our primary competitors, and they led up to, everybody said we couldn't do it. I was getting calls at two in the morning from our competitors saying, ‘what are you doing? You're never gonna make it.’ And we persevered and we made it there. “We have a very strong product and very strong brand in that part of the world and everybody recognized that. We were told by the companies we were talking to that we had to prove that we were good enough and that's how the conversation went. So there wasn't a lot of incentive for partnering in that case. The other part was we started getting a lot of calls from people asking us if we were bidding. The volume got high enough and we said, let's go for it.”“Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.“Historically space to

Mentorship is a sexy topic that gets thrown around in a lot of interviews, but this week’s guest does more than just talk about it. We caught up with her JC Lapierre, the U.S. Chief Strategy and Communications Officer at PwC as she was wrapping up with a regular mentorship session that she offers to her team. If you really want to see change, make some changes to your schedule; allocate time to things that you say are important, such as molding a younger generation of leaders and do something about it.“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” JC leads by example through active listening to her team and their clients, and she does that through her actions as opposed to just rhetoric. In this episode learn more about the ways JC is focusing on stakeholder and audience personalization, a bit about the new partnerships at PwC, the need for good communication in a large organization, the shift in the ways that people are consuming media. Plus, JC provides us with an update on PwC’s new strategy more than six months into its launch. Hear more from JC and PwC on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go! Main TakeawaysWe have Lost Valuable Strategic-Friction Time in Our Day: Amidst all of the disruption and change in the past couple of years, one of the things many people have lost is their commute time, whether that be flying to meetings in other states, or just driving or walking to the office. That friction in your day, used to allow you to reset yourself a bit in-between parts of your day and parts of your life. Having lost that means losing valuable time to be quiet, and think, and it’s important to realize this loss and create intentional space in your day to let your brain wander.Focusing on Stakeholder and Audience Personalization: Stress less about making sure that every single media channel is broadcasting the exact same message. The more you can personalize your messaging for individual stakeholders and for individual audiences, the better. When we talk about personalization, it can mean swapping a customer’s name into an email, but really you need to be going much deeper than that. Curating messages for customers and segments of your audience based on their other interests is the best way to get attention.Evolving Channel Landscape and Consumption: As things change rapidly on the media channel front, it’s important even as a large company to stay nimble and willing to try new things and experiment in channels that you are not as familiar with. You can read stories and reports about what the best new tools to use are, but testing it out is the best way to find out what works for your own brand and message.Key Quotes"It all starts with listening, no matter what role I've been in. A I've had like nine lives, nine careers in my time at PwC, but one of the most important things anyone can do in any relationship, personal or professional, is to truly listen and to ask really effective open-ended questions, without judgment, questions without assumptions, embedded assumptions, and to really try to understand what is it that you aspire to do? What are the impediments or obstacles to getting there? What's the opportunity? And then when you've listened to a whole bunch of different data points and a whole bunch of different perspectives, you can start to build.”“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” “We call this the ADAPT framework. There's five forces that are pushing on the world in significant ways. First is Asymmetry. We see asymmetry primarily in the income inequality gap, but you see it in other ways in which you see haves and have nots. D [stands for] disruption that gets at both technological disruption, as well as climate disru

Taking the plunge into unfamiliar territory, such as investing, can not only be a difficult fray to enter, but scary at the same time. When should you buy? Should you sell? What is the right stock for you to buy?. The world of finance and largely, participating in investment has long been the domain of the few and privileged. Now, thanks to the companies like Robinhood, becoming a part of the finance world is as easy as downloading an app from your favorite app store. The challenges of communicating with this new class of investors excites Rashad Drakeford, Head of Content Marketing at Robinhood. And Rashad told me all about how e knows that asking the right questions of his audience will help him to guide them through the process of investing, and to their goals. “What we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is: how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone?” This future-focused mindset, paired with an incredible background in politics and entertainment, gives Rashad a unique perspective as a marketer. Whether it’s been through his time working on the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign, or from his experience at Apple, and working on Beats by Dre Rashad’s experience has touched multiple industries and he shared his wealth of experience with me. In this episode, Rashad and I dive into the way he thinks about his influencer marketing strategy, he speaks about some of the incredible leaders he has been influenced by, and you’ll hear about what makes the most compelling content marketing campaigns. Get ready to enjoy all that Rashad has to share on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysLeverage What You Have: It can be discouraging as a small business marketer to look around and see all of the cool campaigns with fancy bells and whistles that big companies with massive budgets can produce. The key to getting the most out of your own brand and budget lies in the quality of the stories you have to tell. Good stories resonate, and a good story can help you compete with the likes of fancy, high-dollar productions. The human touch of a great story can have just as much impact with your audience as some fancy production elements. The point is to lean into your strengths as a business and lean into your strengths as a marketing team to compete against bigger players. Picking the Right Influencer: When thinking about your own influencer program, bigger numbers are better, but there are some additional factors you should be considering to make the best partnership decisions. The quality of their audience engagement is critical and the overall alignment of their mission with yours are two of the factors that, when aligned, will serve both parties well. What Does a New Class of Investors Need? The opportunity to reach a new audience is one that excites a creative marketer. First, the challenge is to educate and inform. The best way to do that, to draw in a new audience, is by asking them the right questions. Seeing things from their perspective will help you to craft your message and really connect with your audience. Key Quotes“The way we leaned into our ability to create branded content across social and digital; We were doing virtual reality concerts. This was back in 2013 [when] no one was really doing that. If MTV is able to create interstitials and vignettes that live on linear TV because they have 80 to a hundred million households, what's our value prop? What we landed on was, we have phenomenal storytellers. We have great content creators. We're going to go and create content for brands that we'll use across all of our social media and our digital and linear. And on top of that, we'll white-label it and give it to you to use however you want across your channels. And so we were able to really be innovative in that, in that space.”“Robinhood really did lower the barrier of entry and democratize information and democratize people’s [ability] to participate in the wealth generation process, especially for folks that have been historically, and systematically left out of financial empowerment in this country. I felt like there was an incredible opportunity to come here and help tell stories, to help inspire people to get involved in their financial health and wellness.” “hat we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone? “The way I have t

As the methods of communicating messages of love, sympathy, celebration, or holiday cheer have evolved in the last 100 years, the 20 billion-dollar greeting card industry continues to adapt to serve multiple generations of ‘caring-connectors’. This term ‘caring-connector’, used by Hallmark CMO and SVP, Lindsey Roy, to describe Hallmark customers of all ages and demographics, is an illustration of the relational way they think about their consumers at this legacy brand. For more than a century, Hallmark has been giving consumers the tools to make holiday moments of gift-giving and connection unforgettable. Lindsey Roy, CMO and SVP, Hallmark, brings two decades of experience as she helps people connect with each other in meaningful ways. “If I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's consumers wanting flexibility. You think about 10, 15, 20 years ago, you played the game as the manufacturer, or retailer. [But now ] ‘I want it how I want it, when I want it, where I want it.’ Whether it's grocery shopping, or buying your presents for Christmas, whatever it is, people are completely demanding flexibility. That's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.” Giving your customer that flexibility they demand for when, where and how they want you, whether that be via the tap of an app or at a retail location, shows that you’re truly listening to and serving them. In this episode Lindsey and I dive into the role that data plays in every aspect of Hallmark’s strategy including innovating; the ways and thought processes behind Hallmark’s testing and uses for A.I.; how Hallmark’s data strategy is redefining and its rewards program, and a bit about Lindsey’s leadership style. Excited for you to enjoy this conversation I had with Lindsey on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go!Main TakeawaysHiring Smart People with Agility over People who Only Check the Right Boxes: Sometimes when it’s time to hire, your team might already have a great need to be filled, but don’t be tempted just to hire the candidates who look good on their resume. Get to know your new hires and focus on finding people who are flexible and open-minded team players. You can always teach people how to use new tools and software, but you can’t teach passion and dedication to the mission. Allow for Your Vision to Iterate and Morph in Practice: When you spend so much time and effort building a particular marketing strategy, it can be easy to over-commit to certain elements or aspects of that original plan. Don’t get too caught up in the details, though. You need to stay agile and be willing to iterate and try new tactics as the data informs, so that you can react to data about the way that your message is being received by the audience. The quicker you can course-adjust to a more connected message, the sooner you can fill the needs of your audience. Addressing Consumer Needs Across Multiple Generations: When you’re a brand that serves everyone, looking across generational needs is important when thinking about where and how you’re going to reach your customers. The new modes and methods for connecting with Gen Z are going to be quite different from those you’ve traditionally used for the Baby Boomers, for example. New social media apps drawing the attention of younger audiences, compared to older generations that may be more prone to read a longer email, for example. Key Quotes“We care about getting people with diverse perspectives. We try to have people with short tenure, long tenure, people who've been in the agency world, have been in the brand world, everybody from the college intern, to somebody who has 25 years of amazing experience, different backgrounds, et cetera. We are very purposeful about that. I'm a believer in hiring good, smart people with learning agility. Sometimes that's more important than ‘check these three boxes. Have you done X on Salesforce? Have you done Y on Adobe analytics?’ I think [when you hire] good smart people that want to learn, and can learn, you can't go wrong.”“From my vantage point, if I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's that consumers want flexibility. About 10, 15, 20 years ago you played the game as the manufacturer or the retailer. Now [it’s about the consumer] ‘I want how I want it when I want it, where I want it.’ People are completely demanding flexibility and that's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.”“[When you ask] what are your perceptions of cards? You learn a lot of amazing things. There are what we would call the ‘caring connector’ archetype: that person who believes that the world is inherently good, that person that believes that relationships are the glue and they're willing to put in the time and effort. These people exist at 12 [years old] and they exist at 9

Content is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and the truth is, today it is easier than ever before to create content. A big reason for that is thanks to companies such as Røde Microphones, which create budget-minded products that constantly push the industry forward. For Røde, innovation is the name of the game and no one knows that better than Damien Wilson, the CEO of Røde Microphones. Damien has been with the company since its early days, growing into his leadership role and scaling the business in a rapid timeframe. But even for him, despite the success, the last decade has been a wild ride.“I'm a kid from the Western suburbs, which is not necessarily a nice area and I never thought I'd be sitting in New York doing business, or sitting on a couch with Guns and Roses. When I walk into Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and I see a Røde product, I get excited because I listened to that music of the eighties where Sunset Boulevard was the place to be.”The transformation of the audio industry has been accelerated because of the way companies such as Rode have democratized audio equipment. It no longer takes a fortune and an entire studio build-out, to get professional-sounding content. On Marketing Trends, Damien took me through how Rode has muscled it to the top to compete with legacy brands within the space. He also touches on the unique hiring challenges that Røde has been facing in Australia during the past 18 months, and how the company has been able to pivot through innovating in their use of manufacturing equipment. He also discusses how Røde handles customer feedback to ideate its product line, and how influencers can push your products further. I’m excited for you to enjoy and hopefully learn from this conversation with Damien up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe Secret Sauce: Innovating with Product Manufacturing Equipment: More than ever, supply chain management and sourcing are critical to the success of any business that sells products. Finding the best, most cost-effective tools to build your products might not be created for your industry. You may have to think creatively about what other industries use similar manufacturing equipment that can be modified to build your goods.It Takes Educational Background to Create Great Content: Having an education-focused mindset is a foundational part of good content creation. When you create materials that educate the consumer on products, even if they are not your own, you're building trust with the consumer. This kind of content helps build a community which helps to further push consumers down the funnel.Where to Look for New Product Inspiration: Assess all the other products, aside from your own, that your customer also uses to see where to expand product offerings. Other tools and tech they use to create their finished product could also be an area for you to cross over into. Key Quotes“One of the things that I brought immediately to the company was that style of video-based education, style marketing. Because one of the things that I thought was the big problem with audio brands, especially anything music-related, you needed to sort of teach people how to use the product and that gave them the ability to purchase.”“We have a machine that is specked for making parts for watches. Every high-end Swiss watch manufacturer will have one of these machines. It's the same machine made by Citizen, but we use it to make backplates for the microphones because the precision and the tolerance is so insane. They're making a hundred thousand dollar Rolex's, but this is for a $200 microphone. Other mic manufacturers are not thinking in that regard; they're not thinking about how we can take that machine out of that industry, put it into our version and then create a product around it. That's really the secret sauce.” “One of the things that we did a few years ago was look at our ERP system and look at how we were running the business end-to-end, and sit there and go, ‘Okay, what are the improvements? What process improvements do we need to put in place right now?’ And before we didn't have a mature supply chain team in house, but we grew that super quick. And it was just at the right time, because then COVID hit [and] we started to see some interruption in supply chains. We had the ability to be able to pivot into making things that were completely available to us onshore in Australia. That meant you needed to have the right amount of raw material and all those bits and pieces, which was a testament to the supply chain team getting an AI pay system up and running quickly.”“What we're looking at now is adjacencies that we can move into. We look at our customer and say, ‘What is our customer's workflow? What are they doing?’ They’re podcasters; they’re content creators. ‘What sort of equipment are they using?’ Oh, they're wearing headphones, and those headphones don't say Røde. So maybe we need to work into that adjacency.” “Where Røde has risen to the t

A good customer experience requires more than just making the sale. It’s taking a look and analyzing every little detail that pushes them further and further down the funnel... If you design it the right way, the customer experience should be serving the customer first while giving you the conversions you desire. As an experienced marketer Jonathan Rowe, the CMO of nCino, a cloud banking solutions company, has welcomed the challenge of working in a highly regulated industry, servicing big banks. “From a customer perspective, make sure that they're getting the most value from what they purchased from your product. That's being proactive and giving them that information. It's making sure you can add. We work with our institutions. I've had marketing conversations with CMOs of banks, just because they want to learn some of our best practices. [Think] how can your organization go above and beyond. And then help infuse your brand with your customers; make them help sell your product.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Jonathan looks back at the exponential growth that he experienced at nCino. He looks back at his academic roots that he says laid the foundation for him that helped spur that growth. But behind the numbers and metrics, what separates nCino and its marketing department from its competitors is its company culture, and Jonathan and I dive into how he’s built a culture, what pillars he leans on and how he thinks about hiring and recruiting talent. Learn more about the way he approaches team building, thought leadership, and good communication up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysTransitioning from Academia to Marketing: The skills that it takes to be a great academician are more transferable to a career in marketing than you might first think. When you look at marketing as ‘education’ things begin to fall into place. Even if you’re not in academics, looking at the craft of marketing from a slightly different perspective, instead of just focusing on converting customers, maybe a focus on educating them will actually drive more conversions.Looking Like a Billion-Dollar Brand: Even if you’re at the very beginning of your business journey as a start-up, fake it till you make it! Presenting your brand like a top-dollar player from day one sets a tone of excellence for your team, your business, and your customers. Everything you do, every piece of communication, marketing materials, conversations, and attitude all should reflect the top-dollar attitude you want at your company.Use the Channels and Communication Styles your Customers Prefer: Maybe long emails don’t perform well anymore by marketing industry standards, but maybe your customers, in your niche market, still like to receive and read longer messages in their inbox. Adapting your marketing channels and even messaging for your audience shows them that you’re listening and will only enrich your interactions with them.Key Quotes“'I never expected an academic background to transfer to a startup and now high growth company. But marketing is really about educating, right? You're educating a lot of stakeholders, whether it's partners, whether it's potential clients, whether it's customers, whether it's investors, whether it's your employees. And so that to me was a very early realization that really it's about education.”“First and foremost, who are you selling to? Make sure you understand your target market. It sounds so simple, but when you understand who you're selling to, you can then ask yourself the next two or three questions, which is, ‘Where do those people go? What do they look at? What are their interests?’ And that's even before you get to, ‘What is your message?’”“‘Everything we do represents a billion-dollar brand.’ I literally put that on the wall because I think this is true of anybody, even if you're a small business. What do you aspire to be? How do you want your employees thinking about every day when they walk in or take a phone call or make a product or do a service delivery, how do you want them thinking about your business? One of the things you realize in marketing is you don't own the brand. You’re a steward of the brand. You may help set direction for the brand, but your employees own the brand, your customers own the brand. All your partners are invited like all these different people. In those early years, I wanted us to look and feel like a billion-dollar company.” “[Go] back to understanding your audience, what channels do they engage with? In a lot of industries, you may say, ‘I'm not going to write a document that's longer than two pages because nobody's going to read it.’ That's true universally, but I think in banking, folks are still reading a good deal of information. They also like research; so for us, from a customer perspective [how can we] be a thought leader. It's really understanding our ability to not go to a bank and say, Hey, we know how to do things better than you, because obviously you never want to

The opportunity to work from home may be taken for granted a bit more within the last year and a half, but for years Rev.com has been providing opportunities for tens of thousands to work from home. Adri Nowell the VP of Marketing at Rev, came to our studios in Austin, Texas to talk about what it means to her to see so many people able to work from home with Rev. Adri’s experience as a marketer and a leader gives her a unique ability to serve both the Rev customer, as well as the tens of thousands of transcriptionists that Rev employs in a massive remote workforce. “We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital who are transcribing at the foot of a hospital bed. Being able to put your child first and be able to provide that type of love and compassion and care for your child while also being able to make a living. Those moments make me so proud.” Learning how Adri runs an ABM campaign, what skills she uses as a leader, and how she thinks about scaling her team will give you great insight into your own exciting growth and leadership. It was so great to speak with Adri in person about her experience in marketing and how they’re growing at Rev. Get inspired with Adri, up next here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe transition from Doer to Leader: When you’re in the trenches doing the actual work, your actual day-to-day responsibilities are different from those of the leadership of your marketing team. Transitioning to leadership isn’t for everyone; some really enjoy the work of making the campaigns happen. When you’re the leader you have to rely on the savvy of the marketers on your team and give them the tools that you know work and watch them make it happen! Account-Based Marketing Challenges: One of the biggest challenges of running a successful Account-Based Marketing or ABM campaign is getting the structure of the accounts right. Define what a segment is, define who your tier one in the funnel is; define what an account is. If you go through this legwork and really take the time to build a good foundation, you’ll have set yourself up for a great campaign. Working with Speed and Excellence as You Scale: When your company is experiencing massive growth it’s tempting to just start moving really fast and being okay with things breaking. If you can take a little extra time to make sure that you don’t go too fast and make needless mistakes, that is way more profitable in the long run. You need to quickly automate whatever you can when you’re in a high-growth environment so that you can leave that task with confidence as you go to solve the next big problem. Key Quotes“Now that we're going after [more] market segments the marketing responsibilities are going to shift around. We generally test everything that we can; learn quickly; fail quickly; fail cheaply, and for the things that work, invest in them. When you have that type of mindset, you get scrappy marketers that are willing to tackle new challenges, and test new channels or test new tactics.“People get really nervous [about transitioning to leadership]. It's an emotional thing. It's a natural, emotional reaction. And Molly Graham actually describes this really well. And she talks about this concept, this emotional rollercoaster that people go through during these transition periods as she uses the metaphor of building a LEGO tower and then giving away your LEGO tower, which is so relevant. You have all these smart marketers that can jump in and they can tackle a challenge. And they built up their Lego tower and made it successful and then they have to hand their LEGO to the next person coming in. It can be really nerve-wracking. ‘What if someone breaks the LEGO tower? What if they build it back up in the wrong way, or maybe they don't expand upon it in the right way?’ And I've found her description of this to be really relevant and taken her advice to talk about it." “Marketing is never settled. You're never done in marketing. Consumer behaviors are always changing. You always want to go back and retest or test different variations. We measure [our success] by getting people to respond. ‘Are we getting them to the next action?’ Whether that's actually converting into a paying customer or taking the next step with us in their journey… and when new channels work, we expand them; when they don't, we abandon them. [We’re] constantly just exploring new outlets.”“We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital

If you’ve ever been to Times Square, you can conjure up memories of how chaotic and bustling that vibrant hub really is. This is the mecca of OOH or Out-of-home marketing. Thousands of individuals packed into a confined space with endless advertising opportunities. Norm Chait, Director of Out-of-Home Product and Sales at Quotient Technology, regales us with the tale of his work on a campaign for Microsoft that hit the big city. But, more importantly, he has a career’s worth of insight about OOH and exciting details about the ways that data is changing the game in OOH. “We did a PR program a number of years ago introducing the next operating system for Microsoft. It was the largest consumer event in the history of New York City. The ability to take over Times Square, the ability to own every screen in the square (40 plus screens) all sync together, having the physical on-the-ground experience of, um, all the, you know, the different hardware displays...I was like, this is what I do. This is what I love to do. It's bringing a brand experience to life in a unique way.”There is a lot of value for companies especially in the CPG space to consider Out-of-Home advertising, no matter the size of the business. There’s so much happening in the world of Out-of-Home and Norm has the insight. Main TakeawaysProgrammatic Adaptations in the last Year Plus: The market has shifted in countless ways in the past year-plus, and the way that programmatic marketing can step in to help marketing leaders be more nimble is proving invaluable. Getting a faster sense, with data, of how things are performing across campaigns can lead to faster decisions about shifting budgets to markets where they’d see higher ROI. Data Driven OOH in the CPG Space: Out-of-home has a sweet-spot with CPG businesses because of their D2C model. They need to be out in front of the right people in direct ways. When you’re marketing directly to consumers you’re up against huge budgets of mega-corporations that can crush you. You need tech that can inform you about where your best customers actually are so that you can focus your resources on them. The Steps to a Successful OOH Campaign: In order to have a successful Out-of-home campaign you don’t necessarily need to be a mega-brand. What you do need is a plan that includes a few key elements. First, define the category. Next, define the product buyer. Third, identify the buyer’s behaviors and location. These three elements will help you generate the conversions you desire. Key Quotes “I think what was happening over the last 18 months or so [is that] [the pandemic has] changed the way people go to market; it's changed the way people physically leave their homes and where they go and where they visit, all of those things have dynamically changed. So how does Out-of-home now start to play a role? The pandemic has, in some ways, allowed us to fast forward what programmatic can do. [For example] the spikes we saw in one market allowed us to shut things down there and move things to other markets. Being able to be more nimble like that is what we're starting to see.” “We did a PR program a number of years ago introducing the next operating system for Microsoft. It was the largest consumer event in the history of New York City. The ability to take over Times Square, the ability to own every screen in the square (40 plus screens) all sync together, having the physical on the ground experience...I was like, this is what I do. This is what I love to do. It's bringing a brand experience to life in a unique way.”“CPG is a sweet spot for us. We do work across lots of different product categories but our ability to come back to the notion of accountability and confidence using data to show exactly where people are spending their time. Here are the products and categories that they're buying. We see week over week trends. [This means our] ability to see real time trends and then tie that back to physical inventory is what our clients are excited about. Our ability to guide them as to where people are going, what they're buying, and the trends that we're seeing help them [see the need to invest.]”“Everything we do starts from planning as [first] priority [to] understand what the category is, who the product buyer is, what are their behaviors, and then let us help you identify where they are. [We’re] looking at the entire ecosystem of available assets and scoring (physically) every piece of inventory against that behavior. It starts with an audience. Whether it's a haircut purchaser, frozen pizza buyer, Honda driver or whatever it might be, we start with that.”BioNorm Chait is the Director of Out-of-Home Product/Sales for Quotient Technology. Throughout his career, Chait has demonstrated a keen ability to deliver client solutions by connecting the physical world with the digital world. Prior to joining Quotient Technology, Chait served as the Head of Practice for Ubimo where he spent almost three years. Before joining Ubimo,

You may not need to invest any marketing dollars in a new Tiktok channel. If you’re like Nico Dato, the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Podium, you’re thinking about the best ways to not only get the attention that those new well-known channels bring, but also gain the trust of SMBs in order to win them over as clients. But the reality is, there is no right or wrong answer to where you spend your ad budget. The truth is, the only thing that actually matters is what’s performing. The channel mix is evolving every day and it’s important to think about where your clients are and develop a relationship with them, and second, stay abreast of third-party apps that are emerging as new marketing platforms in the U.S. “We do a ton of trade shows, which is something that not a lot of people do. We do a lot of direct mail. We do radio; we do everything you can imagine. For us, it takes three or four touches on average to get someone's attention in the way that we want. A lot of times that comes from a combination of digital, traditional, radio, print… We're marketing and selling to plumbers, insurance agents, car dealers, and, and people who are out there physically working in the real world all day long. Like what a lot of people don't realize about Podium is, if I'm selling to an HVAC contractor, like most times they're like checking out Podium at like nine 30 at night, because they were fixing air conditioners all day, or unclogging toilets, Making sure we get that right channel mix is critical. [Conversions are] They’re not always going to come via Google search.”In this episode of Marketing Trends, Nico and I unpack the best way to grow a team from seven to over 1,000 and peel back the curtain into how Nico has transformed himself from a marketer to a marketing leader. Staying on top of all marketing channels, new and old, is how he stays on the cutting edge. All this next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysHire for People not just for Needs: When you grow and hire, sometimes there will be a temptation to hire quickly, and in your rush, you may be thinking more about hiring candidates who can help stop the bleeding, so to speak. Instead of hiring for the task you need to be done now, you should be hiring the individual who can best contribute to the company overall. Find someone who can grow with the company, that fits into the culture, and it just might take a couple of extra weeks to find them and train them up. Gaining Trust of SMBs: Small and Medium-Sized businesses are usually the subject matter experts in their communities. For example, the dentist is trusted, personally, by the people that he services. That dentist and his front office staff likely aren’t marketing experts, and it takes an understanding of the trust that they themselves garner, in order to understand the level of trust you need to build with them. Their business is a passion and they need to know they can trust you to be on their team. Increased Utilization of Third-Party Apps in the US: Third-party communication apps like Whatsapp are being used with ever-increasing frequency in the U.S. which is arguably behind this trend in other countries like Brazil, and Japan. This is a whole new channel for marketers to tap into and add to their mix. Key Quotes“I've been super fortunate to learn on the fly. I didn't necessarily have all of this classical training in how to run a marketing team and how to build a comms function and a product marketing function. I've just been so fortunate that my career has just kind of snowballed. [Going from a marketer to a marketing leader] is a huge transition. When you're an individual contributor, you have control over the destiny of the thing that you own. And it’s up to you to work as hard as you want, to strategize as much as you want, to learn from outside sources as much as you want. [Then] all of a sudden you're having to guide a team in doing that one thing that you think you can do really, really well. The secret is that oftentimes they know how to do it much better than you do.”“[The] transition [to leadership] was really hard. I'm not perfect at it by any means, but I think I’ve grown by way of leadership over the last couple of years. It’s a transition that you don't need to make unless you really want to make that jump. t's not easier. There are great career paths in any of these disciplines that don't necessarily mean management.”“[Marketers] are worried about SLS. You're worried about contracts with your customers. You're worried about all of these things. The thing that our CEO has done a really good job of is that, he's tried to keep us focused on the things that matter most. As you're scaling quickly, [identify] the five priorities to align with and get all of the subsequent teams to also align to, in order to make sure that those things are perfect.”“My hiring mantra has always been to hire people, not for the role, but you need to find the right person. I would rather take a longer a

Predicting exactly how much growth to expect (or strive for) in your business can be tricky to forecast. This week we look to Amy Cook, CMO of Simplus, Amy has grown, scaled, and been a part of many merging teams throughout her career. Their growth has been rapid and expansive, which definitely required great leadership. “Simplus was doing a few million and had just barely done a series A. [We had] a growth rate of over 300% year-over-year. I attribute so much of that to our CEO who really empowered each team member on the executive team to do the very best that they could. And then he kept it all together with his vision and focus on culture. It was really an amazing opportunity; since then [in] the past 18 months we've been acquired by Infosys. That has been another humongous learning curve to learn how to be part of a massive organization of 250,000 people.”Regardless of the size of the team or the title on your email signature, Amy is all about finding the best marketing solutions to her questions. Her success in marketing can be attributed to her openness and collaboration. In this episode of Marketing Trends, Amy dives into, scaling and growing a marketing business to enterprise size, and as a part of that keeping the marketing part of the business integrated with the whole organization. Prepare to benefit from Amy’s optimistic and collaborative attitude about growth and best marketing team practices up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysScaling Well and Growing to Enterprise Size: Focus on culture when merging two companies; the larger the company, the more important being able to integrate both teams becomes. Keeping a strong line of communication to the whole organization about the mission and vision is critical to help everyone work together more effectively. Looking around to see what other companies of the same size are doing can be helpful. Replicating the best methods and practices you see in their organizations is a big time-saver. Agencies Can Help if you’re Struggling with Retention: If you lose someone on your team, or can’t scale the team as quickly as you need, agencies are a solution to your problem. It’s still best to keep the heart of the marketing department in-house, but farming out smaller portions of the marketing mix that can be executed by an agency can help you address bandwidth issues on your team. Marketing as an Integral Part of the Whole Organization: It’s important to stay closely connected with the rest of the company in the marketing department. Alignment across departments spans more than just sales and marketing. Siloing yourself off in a bubble will keep you from valuable insights that the rest of the team could impart. Building relationships at every level internally and externally can help you reach more customers with a message that solves their problems. Key Quotes“Simplus was doing a few million and had just barely done a series A. [We had] a growth rate of over 300% year over year. I attribute so much of that to our CEO who really empowered each team member on the executive team to do the very best that they could. And then he kept altogether with his vision and focus on culture. It was really an amazing opportunity; since then [in] the past 18 months we've been acquired by Infosys. That has been another humongous learning curve to learn how to be part of a massive organization of 250,000 people.”“ [Agencies] work really well if you're having trouble retaining people, then an agency can give you that unlimited support. You can fire your agency at any time if they're not performing well for you with no consequences. At the agency, we go by the hour. And so there's a hundred percent utilization out of your team. So if the price is low enough and the utilization is a hundred percent, there's a really good case to fill in some of those gaps“When marketing [takes on] more of an ancillary role, then you lose a lot of the positivity that you can have from marketing. I have finance meetings with the team each week.. Not only do you have to connect internally [with teams], but you also need to connect with your partners with your customers and do joint co-marketing with your partners to reach the same customers. It's a whole lot of relationship-building, even more than I would have expected when I just started doing marketing deliverables all those years ago.” “I know that I'm only going to get event ROI if I empower sales leaders to lead the event. And [sales] knows that [they’re] only going to get marketing support if those salespeople [are] accountable for the event. So there's a really great understanding of each other.”“Every sales leader is a little bit different and you have to be adaptable. Marketing has to take a support role, aligned behind the sales leader, and say, ‘I'll use your playbook. What does your playbook look like?’” “I approach marketing [believing] everybody's got good ideas; the delivery team's got amazing ideas; our legal department gives us

Let’s go to the moon!’ ...is a great and lofty goal, but it doesn’t mean much if you or I say it. Why? Because, just guessing, you don’t have an actual plan for how to do that, or the means, for that matter. Point is, you need an actual plan, with real numbers and defined goals, and set time frames in order to achieve your goals. My guest this week, the CMO of GTMhub, Jeremy Epstein gets this and is passionate about the usefulness and importance of OKRs in the marketing department to help teams build plans to get them to where they want to go“Google is usually held up as the poster boy/girl/non-binary person for OKRs, because in the in the Bible of the OKR industry is what's called ‘measure what matters.’ John Doerr introduced OKRs to Google. OKRs have this deep history going all the way back to Andy Grove at Intel, based on Peter Drucker. By my calculation, OKRs will be embedded in every successful organization in some form or format by the end of this decade. They are that game-changing capability-wise from a strategy execution perspective.” And changing up the game is exactly what Epstein is best at. In this show we’ll get into some of the lessons Epstein learned during his time at Microsoft and Sprinkler, discuss some best practices for managing a remote workforce and unpack some key principles of great leadership in marketing. Don’t worry, we’ve already invited him back on the show. I can’t wait for you to enjoy this episode about the simplified and data-driven marketing methods of marketing guru, Jeremy Epstein.Main Takeaways:Evolving Leadership Process: A great leader is one who can take feedback and alter course to stay on the best track for the business. Becoming a leader will demand a new skill set and an ability to look at the bigger picture. Thinking about the work and the mission with a broader perspective will help you keep everyone moving in the right direction. The Role of OKRs in Business: Companies in the future will all use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. This method of precisely defining the goals and providing clear data is maximally effective. Setting forth a simple and easy-to-understand plan to accomplish a difficult mission is the first step to succeeding, and that’s what an OKR does. Future of Blockchain in Marketing: The Apple cut-down on cookie use is just the beginning of the end of marketing with PII or Personally Identifiable Information. When more and more people get on and start using and trading in new markets, and for different purposes, you’re going to need to find a way to reach the right people. ‘No more cookies,’ is the way of the future. Document Processes: If any aspect of your business hinges upon one link in the chain, your whole business is at risk. Every role should be so well documented and laid that a new hire could come off the street with no prior knowledge of your business and be able to understand the job. Also, when you have everything written, there is a source of truth. Things get said in meetings and promptly forgotten. Documenting what was said in a meeting and immediately sharing that with the attendees can help move action items forward and create productive meetings. Key Quotes:“I got some really, candid feedback along the way from that my style for a lot of people was not working. It was too micromanage(y). It was too overbearing and people didn't like it. The best player doesn't always become your best coach. I needed to make that shift from player to coach. And I had to think about the game if you will, in a very different light. It's still a learning journey. And fortunately, I've had some great teachers along the way and most importantly, I tried to create an environment where my team feels safe and comfortable to tell me what a total screw-up I am on a regular basis.” “Marketing is all about differentiation. hat's the core, the single best book I've ever read about marketing is called ‘Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd Book by Youngme Moon’. It's about being different. My CEO at Gtmhub said it to me best when I came into the role he said, ‘You have to have infinite patience with people.’ If you get 1% better every day, by the end of the year, you're going to be 97xs better.”“It’s not about me being ‘the chief’. I almost reject that name. I’m the marketing enabler. I'm just trying to support everyone and make everyone better. I've asked almost everybody on my team, ‘what's your long-term career goal?’ And I view it as my responsibility to help them get further.”“Google is usually is held up as the poster boy/girl/non-binary person for OKRs because in the Bible of the OKR industry is what's called measure what matters. John Doerr introduced OKRs to Google. OKRs have this deep history going all the way back to Andy Grove at Intel, based foundationally on Peter Drucker. So, yes, I have skin in the game but by my calculation, OKRs will be embedded in every successful organization in some

Do you notice the minutiae details in everyday life? For example, have you ever recognized the way that other people hold their cell phones? If you do, your mind works similar to that of Jeffrey Nicholson, the CEO, and Co-founder of Tracer. This level of attention to detail has helped him throughout his career, particularly when it comes to picking up some of the latest trends, which he told me about in this episode of Marketing Trends.“I start with natural curiosity. I still, to this day, will do my own research and Google brands, and go through their experiences, and understand what other people go through. When you look at the consumer research on people, they use eight apps or less; they [have] very specific behaviors. I used to look at people's phones and [could] tell very quickly just on their layout, how they operate with phone position and thumb position. You have to start with curiosity, no matter who you are, from analysts all the way to CEO. You've got to know what's going on.”Under the tutelage of media giant, Gary Vaynerchuk at VaynerMedia, Jeff and his co-founder Leighton Welch, built Tracer with the plan to launch separately once the development was complete. Leighton developed the structure of the software while Jeff was operating the customer-facing side, servicing Vayner clients and using the software. VaynerMedia is still a client of Tracer and more companies every day are realizing the value it offers in solving complex data equations. Excited for you to glean some real nuggets of wisdom from this marketing leader. Up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Developing Good Talent on your Team is Exponentially Beneficial: As your team grows, the more people you have that are closely aligned with your business mission, vision, and execution expectations, the better that will help everyone stay on the same page. Scaling a team up in the right way might take a little extra time, but the investment upfront will pay dividends later. Curiosity Leads to Excellence in Business: As a CEO being curious is critical to keeping a good view of the big-picture. Developing a natural curiosity around your work can lead to you discovering some basic but important ways you can improve your business operations. As you go through the customer-facing experience of other brands and products, notice the sticking points, the areas you could improve upon, and learn some potentially hard lessons the easy way. Designing Teams around Individuals with Various Skill Sets: Every member of your team brings a vast array of talents and skills to share with the company. Think about who you already have on your team and what other roles you could use support for when hiring to build out the most complementary team. Key Quotes:“I start with natural curiosity. To this day, [I] will do my own research and Google brands, and go through their experiences, and understand what other people go through. When you look at the consumer research on people, they use eight apps or less; they [have] very specific behaviors. I used to look at people's phones and [could] tell very quickly just on their layout, how they operate with phone position and thumb position. You have to start with curiosity, no matter who you are, from analysts all the way to CEO. You've got to know what's going on.”“I'm a big believer in talent and making sure that talent breeds talent and I think about it as a pyramid. Typically you're starting with your co-founders. The reality is that every level of that pyramid is imperative to the success of your business. I'm a big basketball guy. You need a power forward, you need a shooting guard, you need everybody to have different skill sets. That's going to be complementary to make you win. So you're a good communicating and functioning team… I've spent probably more time than most of the people I know in regards to just recruiting and retention because I do believe that, you know, people are the difference between winning and losing.”“I underestimate how difficult it is to be responsible for other human beings. As an early manager, I got some good advice and bad advice and you're just learning on the fly. I think now I feel a lot more comfort in being a leader in dealing with things.”“I spend a lot of time on [my work] because I care and I want to win. And honestly, I want to make sure I don't let anybody else down on the team. It's an easy motivation to keep yourself motivated, to make sure that we make the right decisions and spend as much time as I can researching and recruiting and, and doing the things.”Bio:Jeff Nicholson is the CEO and Co-founder of Tracer. Nicholson has been innovating in the media and tech space for 15 plus years. Before joining Tracer, he was the first Chief Media Officer at VaynerMedia, where he spent five years scaling the business globally. He has also served as the Head of Ads at SocialCode, which was the largest spending agency on Facebook in North America. Prior to that, he was VP of Ads

When there’s a problem, the sooner you know about it, the better. And this doesn’t just relate to high-level problems. The quicker you can identify that something is an issue and rectify it, the quicker you can get to making a meaningful difference towards your end goal. This is the case for email marketing. If the subject line of your email is causing a trend towards a lower than usual click rate, you’ve got to improve that in real-time. To do this, Cynthia Price, the VP of Marketing at Litmus, focuses her attention on good content marketing. How does she do this, by analyzing and reacting to data based on real-time campaign performance? The end result is a content marketing campaign that originates from high-performing blog posts.“Over the course of the past three months, that campaign that started as a blog post turned into a giant revolving door of great content. We've now done two webinars that map up to it. Sales is consistently sending updates to prospects. We hope everybody who touches that content becomes a customer, but ultimately we see the value in sort of the bigger picture of just providing something to the industry that is hard to untangle in order to figure out.” Untangling complex email campaigns and getting the most you can out of them is imperative in today’s marketing world. In this episode of Marketing Trends, Cynthia explains to me why email continues to prove its value in the marketing mix, how marketers can maximize its ROI, and you can turn those declining open rates into success. I’m excited for you to learn more about how to stay on the cutting edge of email. Let's get to it!Main TakeawaysContent Marketing and Thought Leadership: If you can put your mind to the task and address the new problems that no one has addressed before you can assume a role of thought leadership while focusing on some of the broader issues the industry is seeing. Don’t wait for someone else to be the leader on how to address new industry changes, industry regulations, and any unforeseen circumstances. Outline a reasonable roadmap of solutions and create an entire content campaign around it to achieve the ultimate marketing goal, giving real value to your audience.Strategic ABM Marketing: If you’re going to try to tap into the powers of ABM marketing you need to be very selective about the scope of customer you’re targeting. Use data, not feelings to make the best list of prospects. It’s okay to have lofty goals on your client prospect list, but stay focused on the size of businesses that you can best serve. You’ll both be getting the maximum benefit out of this relationship.Bringing Community to the Scattered Email Marketing World: If your company can be a leading voice in your industry, that’s a big win. The way things were designed for email marketing campaigns wasn’t like the way they’re done for web pages or really anything else. The email world was a bit scattered before Litmus brought marketers together, creating community, bringing resources, and giving a definite answer to things that there was a lot of confusion around before.Key Quotes“Over the course of the past three months, [this] campaign started as a blog post; it wasn't really a campaign per se. It turned into a giant revolving door of really great content where we've now done two webinars that map up to it. We've got a big downloadable piece of content and sales is consistently sending updates to prospects. hen we can react to what's happening in the world around us and really provide some value, we certainly hope everybody who touches that content becomes a customer, but ultimately we see the value in sort of the bigger picture of just providing something to the industry that is hard to untangle in order to figure out.”“One of the reasons I joined Litmus is that Litmus did a really good job over the years before I was here of being a leader in the space and being a voice. Email marketing is such a complicated, weird world to live in because the people who are designing emails know this inside and out, but mail designed for email is different than designed for the web. It's somewhat archaic. There are over a hundred email clients that they're trying to design for. There's just all this confusion. Litmus had done a really good job over the years of finding a place for that community to gather together both virtually and in live events, finding resources for them that really speak to things; there wasn't a definitive answer on a lot of these things out there and let us sort of help ‘uncloud’ some of the murkiness there.”“We went back to the drawing board and let the data inform who should be on that list [of prospects]. You look at your close one report from the last year, and we're only going after those industries. We're only going after those size companies. Start really small, as small as ABM will allow you to go and then build from there and, and still have some of those wishlist customers on the list, but the bulk of the list needs to

A good company is built with good people and as simple as that sounds, when it comes to finding the right person for the right job, sometimes you have to look beyond what’s written on the reume.. With her decades of experience at companies such as eBay and Skype, Michele Don Durbin, now the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Evernote, knows how to get the most out of herself and her team and that all stems from her emphasis on culture building“You're certainly going to be judged on what you get done, but how you get it done is just as important. When you spend your time, your career, surrounded by driven ambitious people who are always trying to do more and have the next best idea and make more money, whether it's self-imposed because they're real smart and ambitious, or it's part of a larger culture, there are some people who will use, I don't know, less than ideal tactics to get things done. And I really appreciated the idea that eBay said, ‘It's not just what you're getting done. It's how you're working with others. It's how you're taking the community to account, it's what your colleagues think of you and how you're really helping the business overall.” On this episode of Marketing Trends, Michele gets into all things marketing and takes us on a deep-dive into her strategy for hiring, she also unpacks the paid media strategy at Evernote, and shares a fun story about her work launching Skype with Oprah Winfrey. This episode is packed with great advice from an engaging leader. I know you’re going to enjoy this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysA Good Team and Culture Lead to Good Idea Execution: Good ideas abound, at least until you put them to the test. It takes a team that can implement good ideas well to succeed. You need a team of doers around you, not just high-minded theorists. The people that you hire and work with on your team need to be the kind of people who can show up every day with enthusiasm to get things done. The energy and power of a good team isn’t just setting the company culture, it’s setting yourself and your company up for success. Flexibility over Plans: You need to read the data, and decide from there what your plans are, but always remain flexible with your marketing campaigns. There is real value in being able to shift, pivot and adapt to new data, and reactions to ongoing and new campaigns. Re-Focus Your Attention on Customers Already in the Funnel: Sometimes we get so excited and focused on getting more emails in our systems that we forget to maximize the spend of all those contacts we already have. Focusing on serving your customer base can lead you to innovating new products and solutions for them, also driving outside buy-in to your product. Key Quotes“There are two things that jump to mind immediately that I remember from the eBay days. The first one is that nothing got funded without data. We had an incredibly efficient process for prioritizing resources. Ideas are great and people have ideas all the time, but the team allocating the resources wouldn't even consider something until a reasonable set of assumptions, for a clear understanding of what success looked like was presented. And that is really important because ideas are one thing, but if you have no way to execute those ideas and you don't know what success looks like, you don't actually know when you've arrived and you don't know when you failed and getting the funding for something meant pulling together that use case that business case what you expect it to happen. And it's a good exercise that I continue to ask all my teams to do today.”“I was tapped to move over to Skype; it was an internal transfer at that time and I started helping run the marketing team. We had only 13 people to run all of the Americas. The things that we got to do were, as you said, in the beginning, I was very lucky to be at the right place at the right time, because it was just outstanding.”“You're certainly going to be judged on what you get done, but how you get it done is just as important. When you spend your career, surrounded by driven ambitious people who are always trying to do more and have the next best idea and make more money, whether it's self-imposed because they're real smart and ambitious, or it's part of a larger culture, there are some people who will use less than ideal tactics to get things done. And I really appreciated the idea that eBay said, ‘It's not just what you're getting done. It's how you're working with others. It's how you're taking the community to account, it's what your colleagues think of you and how you're really helping the business overall.” “It all comes down to this idea of a foundational marketing principle that great ideas don't really mean much without great execution. So it's not that I don't value ideas, but I don't worship them. I think I'll get more out of a good idea, executed ruthlessly than a great idea that's executed adequately.”“It’s about being flexible in what you think

You may have some fear or feel a sense of resistance when you hear the phrase “affiliate marketing.” Especially if you had ever been burned by this form of marketing in the past.. Like most sectors, a lot has improved in the affiliate space and that development has stemmed from the creation of tech tools. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kevin Osborne, the Senior Vice President of Client Strategy at Acceleration Partners, gave us the low-down on how affiliate partnerships can be thought of as more than a last-ditch effort to milk remaining dollars out of the market. Management, implementation and fraud resistance are all areas of modern affiliate marketing that have vastly improved as of late. “People tend to pigeonhole “affiliate marketing” as the last mile. Get that last click drive, that last sale. But again, we really encourage these bigger brands that have a broader perspective on what this channel can do and how it can operate across other traditional media channels already running.” But a successful affiliate marketing strategy is’ more than just having the right tools, or the best new gadgets. A big part of the value that Acceleration Partners brings to its customers is by providing guidance on best practices as you roll out your program. Kevin and I dove into how using data, tapping into tried-and-true marketing channels, and reducing friction on the back-end have given modern affiliate marketing the power to be a key tool in your marketing mix, not just an afterthought. Main Takeaways:Old School Affiliate Marketing Systems are Out: The time and labor intensive old school model of affiliate marketing was a big lift, even for bigger companies to pull off successfully. Now with evolving technology, the launching and management of a profitable affiliate marketing program is much more cost effective and less staff intensive. The affiliate system is now more efficient and scalable. Direct Mail can be an Affiliate: Don’t limit yourself to the old way of thinking about affiliate partnerships, even in terms of where that initial impression comes from. With some businesses, such as the restaurant industry, direct mail can be the most effective affiliate lead tool. Re-engaging with existing customers: As you think about reigniting that affiliate marketing program, look at your existing customer base as the first well to tap into. Re-engaging with existing customers through affiliate marketing can bring them back to new products or services you offer. Key Quotes:“We look at brands that are trying to acquire subscribers, sign ups, sell shoes, whatever it may be, and at the end of the day, affiliate is simply a channel that's able to pay partners once an outcome takes place. Once a sale takes place at the end of the day, I think a lot of marketers are trying to get to that final accountable metric, which is, ‘does this drive sales?’ “You could use this tool, partnership marketing and the different players that are involved in it to drive any part of the consumer journey that you want. You can drive awareness, you can drive engagement, you can drive conversion.”“People tend to pigeonhole “affiliate marketing” as the last mile. Get that last click drive, that last sale. But again, we really encourage these bigger brands that have a broader perspective on what this channel can do and how it can operate across other traditional media channels already running.” “There's some sophisticated technology platforms out there that are great at looking at these deeper analytics. Whether that's attribution, whether that's certain measurement systems based on the partner type, whether it's different commissions based on the interaction that a customer has with the brand, that technology enables us to actually push forward a lot of these new strategies that encompass broader marketing.”“One of the key elements of our services partner development. We have guys that are going out there and forging new relationships based on a brand strategy. We worked with a food delivery app that was trying to acquire new restaurants. There's certain ways that those restaurants engage with media and take action, and direct mail was actually one of those. So working with direct mail service to actually get that brand's message in front of those restaurant owners was really effective.”“One of the spaces that's most interesting, that's been growing the fastest, is B2B, especially the SMB. They have these teams that are business development teams and business development. And that universe is pretty old school, right? It's guys with a Rolodex that are calling up certain partners or certain individuals that might run an accounting firm that are trying to get people to sign up for QuickBooks. And it's pretty disjointed and it's a big world, right? Some of these firms have 20, 30 people on these business development teams and they're willing to invest because they're really efficient, right? These partners can really drive a significant amount of

Through time, some of the strongest relationships have led to the biggest successes. Cory and Shawn from Boy Meets World were a dynamic duo, Turk and JD from the television show Scrubs are the traditional sitcom-bromance most friends envy. But what happens when friends become business partners? A powerful co-founder relationship is not just needed but relied on — especially when you leave a successful career to do your own thing. You need someone you can lean on, trust, and go to when things are rocky. That’s what Courtney Baber did when she launched The Route Beauty with best friend and now co-founder, Nancy Pellegrino. Courtney left a successful career with some of the biggest beauty brands in the game, Sephora, L’Oreal, and Urban Decay to bring her own skincare solutions to the counter in a big way. “When Ulta said, ‘yes, we want to launch you.’ I can't explain that feeling. I just laid down on the floor of my daughter’s room and just started gyrating, I don't take anything for granted. I built strong relationships in my career and people believe in what I can do; it's all about working hard and giving the retailer and the customer something that they need and they want.”Featured on Oprah, promoted by Khloe Kardashian, and sold on HSN, The Route Beauty is making big moves in the beauty world, now available on the shelves of big retailer, Ulta. I’m excited to bring you the story behind Courtney and Nurse Nancy’s beautiful and thriving partnership as co-founders of The Route Beauty, up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Test out New Tools: There are so many new marketing tools and channels to get your message out there to the right people. Be creative by testing out new platforms. Not all of them will be here to stay, but the opportunity to be first on a new platform could be a great advantage for an emerging brand.Pivoting to Fill the Needs of a New Business: Think through all of your business options and have a sense of where you can take things if something happens to plan A. For example, you may find yourself needing to shift your plan from selling or marketing B2B to D2C suddenly, or retail to online… complications occur for a multitude of unforeseen circumstances. Sometimes you get caught behind some insurmountable roadblocks and you’ve got to have a sense of where you can turn to keep the business thriving.Getting It Perfect: Especially as a new brand, with a limited number of skews on the market, it’s important to take the time to get every little detail of new products perfect before putting them on the market. You only get one first impression and making a good one is worth the extra time so don’t be afraid to push back on launch deadlines to get things dialed.Key Quotes:“I hit a point after we sold Urban Decay to L'Oreal -- I stayed on for four additional years as their head of marketing and merchandising -- and I was passionate about what I was doing, but I was tired of building dreams for other people, and I wanted to try to do it for myself. That's really why I took the leap of faith.”“I would have probably never done this by myself. I have a BFF, my skincare BFF, my BFF in life, “Nurse Nancy.” I've been her patient for over 10 years. And we always, when I would be visiting her to help fix my skin, And it was with these medical grade products and she would always talk about it. She always wanted to work together. And we both hit the same point at the same time. It was kind of this magical moment where we said, ``Well, let's do something together.”“When they said yes, when Ulta said, ‘We want to launch you.’ I can't explain that feeling. I just laid down on the floor of my daughter’s room and kind of just started gyrating, I don't take anything for granted. I built strong relationships in my career and people believe in what I can do, it's all about working hard and giving the retailer and the customer something that they need and they want.”“I couldn't be happier with the partner that I chose, but you really have to find that yin and yang and in a partnership like that, it's no different than a marriage.”“We’re going to test a new platform called Comments Sold later this year, which is really interesting to me. It’s live streaming to your social channels and people can buy right then and there. It’s like Amazon live, like HSN, but it's really more targeted at your unique followers.”“It's kind of a challenging world, the influencer world. It’s gotten very hard to play in that space without spending a lot of money. When I was at Urban Decay we could get people to do things for us by just giving them early access to a product. You can't even talk to somebody without first paying the agent. So what we've decided to do is go kind of a much more micro route and really kind of build relationships at a grassroots level. And then also we've really built this group of what we're calling our “Routies” they're really are true brand devotees who have been with us from the beginning and they are infl

Having the right elements and the right design is critically important to reaching the right people the right way. Detria Williamson, the CMO of IDEO, has years of experience working with clients to create meaningful impact through design, and throughout that time she has seen the world of design shift and the buyers’ needs change. To meet those needs, Detria says it’s all about listening carefully to what customers are saying. “The new design buyer, they're CMOs, they're CEOs, they're CTOs, they're Chief Diversity Officers. So we really needed to make sure that we were expanding our listening ability and in terms of making sure that our services were known to other leaders across the C-suite. Articulating all of our communities and deeply listening internally and across all those communities. On this episode of Marketing Trends, I was excited to hear more about what it takes to actively listen and respond in today’s world. Plus, Detria and I got into how she is helping to not just create more inclusivity, but allow it to become common practice across the industry. Detria has a revolutionary way of thinking about building her team of designers, seeking maximal creativity and diversity of ideas as the primary focus, and she explains it all in this episode. All this up next on Marketing Trends! Main TakeawaysInclusive Customer Experience: Break away from the idea that it’s only important to focus on diversity and instead think more about inclusion. You can fake diversity but true inclusion is harder to imitate. The New Design Buyer: As design has become more democratized and the design-buyer has changed, it’s more important than ever to tune into what they are asking for. Some of the leaders in these positions may not even know about the resources available to them, so there is an educational part of the process as well. Don’t Over-stack: The explosion of MarTech tools means that marketing solutions are abundant but it’s important to maintain a healthy balance in your budget to ensure that you have the people and the resources to put it to use. Make sure you are constantly evaluating your tech stack based on what is performing and what is not. If something isn’t performing, get rid of it in favor of a tool that is a driving force for your business. Key Quotes“The most well-known digital tool that I created while I was there is called inclusive customer experience. It really fell out of a design-thinking workshop that we were doing. So again, design-thinking has always been this kind of three-way savior. I would say through my career, it's a safety net.”“Diversity can be engineered, but inclusion can't.”“There are so many CMOs that don't have the luxury, the privilege, or sometimes even the awareness to have design built into their budgets. So when you say design for inclusion, that requires intention and requires you to allocate financial resources and team resources behind it. What you gain from it is beyond imagination. Having a more inclusive brand and a more inclusive experience has to be designed for.”“The new design buyer they're CMOs, they're CEOs, they're CTOs, they're chief diversity officers. So we really needed to make sure that we were expanding our listening ability and in terms of, you know, sort of making sure that our services were known to other leaders across the C-suite. So articulating all of our communities and deeply listening internally and across all those communities.” “Three things from a design perspective: One is designing for inclusion. Two is designing for privacy, and three is designing for experience. CMOs have to do that.” “You can't hire your way through [inclusion]. I don't think that that’s the only, or the quickest or most agile way to solve for CMOs answering to big challenges. Designing your way through them is the way forward.”“[I’m] not just looking at diversity in terms of gender diversity, in terms of ethnicity -- those to me are table stakes. When you hire radically inclusive leaders, those things just happen. They should happen automatically. But diversity in terms of, you know, how they gain their skills. If you go, and you actually recruit everybody out of San Francisco, that's grown up the same way that's come out of the same type of households. It's had the same track through the UC schools, — no knock against UC schools or the schools there — You're probably going to get people that approach a problem that come day to daya with the same sort of approach, they come with the same stories, the same way they attack problems. “You have to stay inspired and stay nourished. Because our agendas are wicked. They're just crazy. So that's one thing. It sounds again really simple, but if you want to stay confident, then you have to stay nourished. You have to stay inspired in order to maintain and sustain inspiration to your teams.““Make sure that your infrastructure is in place so that you can use MarTech to really align sales and marketing. It doesn't matter if you are

Online shopping has exploded in the last year and with so much to choose from at the click of a button, many online merchants are finding the need to help consumers narrow down the options and find what they really want. Saksham Sharda Creative Director and CIO of Outgrow is here to help consumers with decision fatigue, while at the same time helping vendors get to know who is looking at their website.No-code tools such as Outgrow are valuable in social commerce. With consumers looking for answers at all hours of the day, chat-bots and other questions that lead you down a path towards what you’re actually looking for help remove the decision fatigue many consumers are facing as they just try to simply find what they want.On this episode of Marketing Trends, Saksham and I go deep on the relationship between developer and marketers, and how a cohesive relationship can get products to market faster. Saksham also explains how traceable campaign testing is helping marketers level up their strategy. Enjoy.Main TakeawaysTraceable AB Testing: Creating campaigns that allow you to test which ads or copy people to respond to is very helpful. Taking that a step further, using advanced software to track people where they went in your funnel will tell you what’s working, what’s not not working, and where you should be experimenting.The speed and usefulness of no-code tools: Waiting for developers to create the visions you have in your head as a marketer can be frustrating, and sometimes the time delay can be so great that it renders the findings less useful. No code, or low-code tools, are providing marketers with the ability to spin up tools more quickly and efficiently.Keeping Attention and Making Choices Easier is the Goal: The interactive nature of taking a quiz, short, easy and relevant, on a website does two things simultaneously. For one, surveys keep the users engaged with the material on the page and it can help them narrow down possible purchase choices. For the marketer, collecting more data about the way your consumer is thinking will help you provide for their needs more effectively. Key Quotes“No-code and A.I. is basically just telling you, [that] you don't really need to know much about coding. You just need to know the basics of building something.” “We have allowed people to make calculators, allowing businesses to make these tools easily that tell you an estimated cost of a thing, or a quiz that helps you choose. There's so much choice paralysis when I end up on someone's website. So as a podcaster, if on your website, I put a quiz saying, which of my episodes should I listen to first? And then you also have a particular question about the industry and then you give them two or three episodes. You’re making choosing easier.”“No-code allows you to see marketing differently and to see the entire marketing game differently and to understand that it's a game.” “Any marketing you do, 60% of it is going to be based on luck and only 40% of it is going to be based on all the hard work you put in.” “The hardest part of the job is negotiating with developers. One thing to understand, especially in marketing, is that the market does not favor your coding skills or how great a developer you are. What the market favors is creativity.” “What you can easily do is get a bot template to customize it. [You can] add your own questions, et cetera. As no-code works, there's a very simple function called duplicates. You just duplicate that chat bot into three chat bots and you put three of them on your website and different instances. Then you measure which one is working better. The analytics part is such an important part of the software, because you can keep constantly improving on what's already there.” “When I think of Omni channel marketing, I mostly think of how I can recycle the stuff that's doing well on one particular channel to other channels.” BioSaksham Sharda is the Creative Director and CIO at Outgrow. Throughout his career he has specialized in marketing and web development, particularly in relation to interactivity and data science. Interactive experiences designed by Sharda have been featured on TrendHunter, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, Alibaba, TechCrunch, and Digimarcon Silicon Valley. He is also the host of the Marketer of the Month Podcast which has featured guests including the co-founders of Wikipedia, Forbes influencers, and Pulitzer Prize winners. He has also contributed to The Huffington Post, Borrowers and Lenders, and Shakespeare Bulletin. To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforc

On the show we hear over and over again that marketing and sales need to find alignment and that data needs to be a big part of that. Kevin Tate is the CMO of Clearbit, a company that is taking an entirely different approach when it comes to data quality and coverage. Clearbit is a tool for marketers to use to better understand customers, identify future prospects, and personalize marketing and sales interactions. And if there is one thing Kevin knows, it is the importance of quickly aligning the marketing team’s vision with the customer perception and the needs of the business. I was curious how tried-and-true marketing pillars have influenced the way Kevin runs his marketing department, so I asked him…“One of the things I've learned being on both sides of the sales and marketing equation is that there has to be a balance between marketing's vision for how we want to be viewed in the market and here's how we want people to think about and value what we do. Then there's the sales reality of [being] on the phone with this person, and they're asking for X, and there has to be a really close alignment between how do you help reframe or guide the conversation, but how do you also understand and listen to what that customer is asking for?”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kevin and I go deep on why static or stale data is leading marketers down a precarious path when it comes to their data management. We also touch on how Clearbit is not just another data vendor, but a company that’s doing radical things when it comes to empowering marketing. I hope you enjoy this episode. Main Takeaways:Combining Sales and Marketing Knowledge: There can be challenges related to aligning the marketing vision and sales objectives. Often there needs to be some time spent reframing with the client to guide them towards mutual interests. The marketing department has objectives for reach, the sales team has goals for moving the product, and the client on the phone has needs that you need to service. All three of these things need to work in concert. Content Marketing to Marketers: Content that is useful to your clients can be a great marketing tool. Blogs, eBooks, how-to guides, and reports are all good tools that can add value to your customer or prospective customer. Funnels are Dependent on Good Data: To be able to hone in on what changes you need to make in your marketing mix requires that you have immediate and good data about your potential consumer. Especially with Product Led Growth companies the funnel that you build needs to have the most accurate information about what consumer are responding to and what they need. Connection Between Your Email Efforts and Ad Efforts: The most valuable thing you can have is a first party mechanism that will give you the most accurate data about the way that your email marketing campaign is supporting and working with your other marketing efforts. All of your marketing channels need to work together for a cohesive and effective marketing strategy. Key Quotes:“There's two parts to Clearbit, there's the data -- and we have data about every company with a website that we collect from hundreds of public sources. Then there's what you do with the data, which is the platform we have to put that data to work in your ad campaigns. Personalizing your website, shortening your forms, enriching all your other systems. We're trying to remove friction. Then on the operations side, having rich real-time data from the front to back of your revenue operations, that ends up mattering a lot. That's what people are doing with Clearbit.” “Clearbit is getting pulled into a company that is implementing an ABM strategy and needs the data and more importantly, the integrations to put that data to work at all the different points in that marketing and sales funnel.”“Product Led Growth companies [have] built funnels that depend on really good data to know of all the people trying [the] product and all the people giving intent signals, and all the people experiencing the product through its life cycle. ” “ The value that a company creates is linked to its product roadmap. You can extend the value beyond that roadmap. One is building things on top of it, and that's what we're doing in the growth engineering team.”“One of the things I've learned being on both sides of the sales and marketing equation is that there has to be a balance between marketing's vision for how we want to be viewed in the market. And here's how we want people to think about and value what we do. Then there's the sales reality of [being] on the phone with this person, and they're asking for X, and there has to be a really close alignment between how do you help reframe or guide where you can the conversation, but how do you also understand and listen to what that customer is asking for?”“We're using marketing technology to sell marketing technology technologists. First from a market perspective, I think we're fortunate to be in a really interes

Here’s an age-old marketing truth: sex sells. But marketing sex, or sexual wellness for that matter, can be a tough subject to bear. Within today’s oversaturated marketplace, marketers are fighting not just for attention on shelves and landing pages, but also for customers’ eyeballs. But when you’re marketing a taboo product, such as a sexual wellness cream, those challenges are magnified and building product awareness becomes your number one goal.“This is a category that people don't even know is something that they're missing. There is no need-gap. You're filling as much as building an aspiration. There is a product here that's going to improve your sexual function. And this is something it's a first of its kind, it's a breakthrough. That’s Bulbul Hooda, Head of Brand and CMO for Vella Bioscience, a CBD-infused pleasure serum designed to act as ‘Viagra’ for women. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Hooda joined me for a candid conversation on the challenges she faces as a marketer marketing a product that consumers might want and need but could be nervous to approach. She discussed the need to normalize products such as pleasure serums, how Vella Bella manages goes about product awareness, and to succeed in a competitive eCommerce environment. Enjoy this episode.Main Takeaways:Marketing a category that people don’t know exists: When you have an entirely new product category, you have to get the word out about what the product is before you can convince people that they need it. Doing unbranded campaigns in a market like this can go a long way to educating your prospective customers. Marketing to Gen Z: As the next generation, Gen Z, has more spending power, their unique interests, and purchasing priorities are starting to affect markets and the products on offer. Gen Z is tending to use wellness categories, self-elevation, and self-improvement. Test a variety of channels before launch: Test your systems to ensure everything is correctly in place before launch. Run a silent campaign to see if things get rejected. Test whether email might be a stronger channel and shift resources away from social or put effort into retail play. This mixing and matching are better the more and you also need to be analyzing that. Power of Agency Partnerships: The debate about whether or not to use a marketing agency or to keep everything in-house has pros and cons any way you cut it. The benefits of hiring an agency include tapping into their resources both in terms of manpower, time, expertise in a specific field, and relationships they already have in the market. Key Quotes:“This is a category that people don't even know is something that they're missing. There is no need-gap. You're filling as much as building an aspiration. There is a product here that's going to improve your sexual function. t's a breakthrough. To create that I needed to have those skillsets in my arsenal. Believing in my intuition, obsessively knowing my consumer. The third bit is building a brand together, piece by piece and that is something I truly learned at Unilever.” “Two things were happening because of the pandemic. Beauty was declining in color cosmetics. North America is a color cosmetics market. Second, what we are seeing is Gen Z becoming a critical purchasing group. Younger kids have more money, they're buying stuff, and they are leaning towards wellness categories, self-elevation improvement.” “[Social advertising issues] were definitely a small setback, learning every time we put an ad out, our website would get blocked. [Then] you [have to] wait out seven days. Thankfully we were testing this two months before launch. We use social both for organic community, but also for advertising. We collect email signups through our ads on social media. So we now know that we are only talking to people who are genuinely interested and therefore email marketing has, I can't say that it has completely replaced social media advertising, but it has arrested a lot of that loss for us. It’s 30% of our revenue channel. Beyond that, we use paid search. Ads on Google, both display shopping and search words, and then what we use social media for is advertising through influencers. Influencer strategy combined with email strategy has helped us navigate the restrictions on Facebook ad blocks.”“I do come from and believe in agency partnerships. My entire marketing team is external. We’ve got somebody who looks after just PR and influencer strategy. There is another agency that does social media, community management, and yet another that’ll do the website and all the updates. Digital marketing, that's a separate leg. The fourth one is a creative agency. While I truly believe in grooming and leading the team, and I've done that, there was just that need in the startup structure to get to market as quickly. Now we are starting to look through the structure and build the internal team. I deeply value all the four agency partnerships that I have.” “[Because certai

Double-tap — or in some cases just tap — to like. Those little filled-in hearts and thumbs-up used to be the currency of marketing campaigns. How many did you get? Then bots disrupted, and the market for selling likes got out of control. Brands started wising up to the super high customer acquisition costs they were seeing in their marketing reports and they wanted to trim the fat, to know more about who was seeing what and for what reason? Passionate about intricate marketing details like these is Dave Fink the CEO & Founder of Postie. He’s seen a lot of change in the social media marketing landscape in his times on the scene. “We were starting from an authentic place, which was a need for more control over our growth - beyond the behemoths that are social and search. Watching those channels take more and more power, and marketers lose more and more power over their growth trajectory, but not wanting to acquiesce and give up all of the technology and tools and data and measurement and predictability that comes from those channels.”The realization that social media marketing on Facebook was extremely volatile and based solely on large corporate algorithm decisions made by the tech giants sobered Dave into action to move away from relying on paid social media and into the physical mail sector. On Marketing Trends, hear more about how Dave built Postie into one of the most data-driven marketing platforms and how companies within the Fortune 500 are using Postie to level up its customer experience. All this next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysAdvantages of Direct Mail to Marketers: There is so much data and 100% of the possible market to be reached, physically with direct mail marketing. So much focus has been spent in recent years on tracking clicks and cookies and other digital marketing metrics that the cost of direct mail marketing has gone down and the effectiveness of it remains high.Generating Data for Direct Mail Campaigns: To be effective in direct mail campaigns you need a lot of data that can support predictive modeling and auto-optimization. All of this data can be fed to computers thereby increasing the effectiveness of machine learning. Direct mail in the modern era is about using data to micro-target the best possible consumer.Invest in having good mentors: The difference between business owners that have and utilize the wisdom to be gained from mentors is significant. Be aggressive and seek out the mentorships and curate those relationships, as it will be of great advantage to you. Key Quotes“We were starting from an authentic place, which was a need for more control over our growth - beyond the behemoths that are social and search. Watching those channels take more and more power, and marketers lose more and more power over their growth trajectory, but not wanting to acquiesce and give up all of the technology and tools and data and measurement and predictability that comes from those channels.” “We think about data and insights probably in two different buckets. The first bucket is direct mail. It’s a channel that can provide big data, both first-party data, and third-party data for all sorts of miraculous things — predictive modeling, auto-optimization. The same kind of characteristics that social has. You get better with bigger data and you get better with testing and insights. A core focus of Postie is big data and machine learning, The biggest product focus that we spend our time on is thinking about how to give all advertisers access to the same data and mathematical advantage that they get from other channels.”“We think about monster companies like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft -- those are still emerging brands, innovators, and disruptors -- then there's the Fortune 500 that almost always falls in the enterprise -- we service both sides. The other is, ‘Is this a brand that's currently invested in indirect mails as a core channel, or is the brand on the complete opposite of the spectrum?’ Depending on what quadrant a prospect or a client falls in will determine how we engage with them and what the education process looks like and how we think about their trajectory in the direct mail channel.” “Think about direct mail as a very specific individualized channel. It's a part of your marketing mix. Those advertisers that I see taking advantage of it with the best performance, with the most scale, most control, are those that start not thinking about just ‘How do we make direct mail work?’ But, ‘Who is our customer base? What are our core marketing objectives?’ Then thinking about a holistic plan for attacking those goals and affecting the achievement of those goals positively. Direct Mail can be a high performance, highly scalable component, but it all starts with markers and understanding, and being honest with themselves around what they're looking to achieve both in the short term and the long term.” “Remember the days when Facebook advertising was all about building your fan page and buying

There are few things in life that are not volatile. The stock market rises and falls, much like a pendulum swinging from left to right. Crypto is viewed as a rocket ship, but it’s returns remain mostly inconsistent, and the housing market has seen its fair share of crashes over the years. But if you’re looking for one asset class that bucks the trend when it comes to volatility, fine art might just be it.For centuries art has been seen as an avenue for the rich and famous to flex their wealth, but Masterworks believes it’s business model of allowing everyday consumers to invest in multi-billion dollar pieces of art, is shattering that glass ceiling and democratizing art for all.“We consider ourselves fiduciaries or financial advisors. We're doing that because art is a very confusing and brand new asset class. We're the only ones enabling access to this $1.7 trillion market. From a suitability standpoint, to let someone Yolo their life savings into a Banksy is not something that we want our customers to do. We don't think it makes sense for someone that has a $5 million retirement portfolio to put in a hundred dollars. So we'll tell that person, just keep your money; keep the cash; put it in stocks. So we're really getting people, not only to understand what is art as an asset class, why is art important, but to make sure they're investing responsibly and investing a part of their portfolio, that actually makes sense.”Michael Wenner is VP of Marketing and Director of Business Development at Masterworks, a platform that lets everyday consumers invest in pieces of art such as Banksy, Kaws, and Basquiat. Michael joined me on this episode of Marketing Trends to discuss how Masterworks is using centuries of data to its advantage to not just identify which pieces of art the company invests in, but also why they are opening that data up to everyone. Michael also dives into why he is bullish on content marketing, and how Masterworks views itself more as a financial institution rather than an art gallery. Enjoy this episode.Main TakeawaysData Strategy: When you need to get the attention of your prospective audience in a big way, you need to offer them something that is useful to them. Creating a large set of data about your field or industry that you can leverage to engage clients and leave a good impression with them is a great way to make a splash. Marketing a new asset class: Education is the keystone of grounding a good marketing campaign for a product or service that doesn’t have a market yet. You’ve got to get creative and think about what you can do to bring value to your potential consumers.Content Marketing Doesn’t Work: There is an argument to be made that annoying your customers, and prospective customers with an array of content emails, that can trigger bounce rates to go up, is not worth that loss. Those email addresses represent dollars and you should take every opportunity you have in front of your customer to serve them with your products. The most effective approach can be that of brute-force. Be direct with your potential clients; do whatever it takes to get their emails.Key Quotes“We always talk about how Facebook it's such a great platform, that people have given so much information about themselves. LinkedIn is giving you much more relevant information. You can tell exactly how wealthy and how successful someone is. So we don't really do role-based targeting or job-based targeting, but it's really incredible that by what you're able to do by brute force. [Linkedin’s] technology's obviously not as good as Facebook, but you can figure out how to set up targeting campaigns. You can get to the wealthiest, most successful people on earth. It’s going to cost you, but if you can convince them it's the best way to do it.” “We consider ourselves fiduciaries or financial advisors. We're doing that because art is a very confusing and a brand new asset class. We're the only ones enabling access to this $1.7 trillion market. From a suitability standpoint, to let someone YOLO their life savings into a Banksy is not something that we want our customers to do. And we also don't think it makes sense for someone that has a $5 million retirement portfolio to put in a hundred dollars. So we'll tell that person, just keep your money; keep the cash; put it in stocks. So we're really getting people, not only to understand what is art as an asset class, why is art important, but to make sure they're investing responsibly and investing a part of their portfolio, that actually makes sense.”“Our data science team has been doing incredible things. We have the largest proprietary data set of art market returns. We took 50 years of art auction results that were all published physically in the Sotheby's and Christie's pamphlets. We had a team of about 25 interns go in and [enter], this piece of art was bought for this and then sold for this. And we created this huge database to bring it all together. No one else had done it be

Swipe right on... Twirla? Creating ads for a contraceptive patch on dating apps is emblematic of the innovative approach that Amy Welsh, the Vice President of Marketing takes at Agile Therapeutics. Welsh has no shame in working with marketing agencies to utilize the advantages that they offer, while also maintaining close control of her brand’s integrity. It’s safe to say, Welsh has no shame in taking a different approach that spurs traditional marketing tactics“The novel -- the different ways of doing it -- is strategic media partnering,” Welsh said. “For instance, [at Agile] we were able to be the first contraceptive to advertise on dating apps like Match. I couldn't have done that if I didn't have somebody outside who was street-smart, and partnered with us to appropriately come up with a plan for that.” Welsh continued, “I want to ensure that the marketing team is the brand steward. We better know our brand better than everybody. And I want to use my agency for things that I don't know or can't do. It's a bit of a hybrid but the marketing team better be the brand stewards and the strategists a hundred percent.”Launching a contraceptive in the middle of 2020 might not have been the tactical dream for Welsh, but she did it anyway. Welsh has alway acted quick on her feet. It’s part of what makes him a good marketer and it’s part of what made this conversation with her so fun.Throughout her career in big and small pharma Amy’s launched many products and is a fountain of wisdom for having had all that experience. As she creates a new team, for a new company, in a new product market, her thirst to innovate is high. She’s found a need to create new roles for people who can specialize in marketing on popular new tools and apps. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Welch explains the unique challenges of marketing to Gen Z as well as creating awareness for an entire product class; she also talks about how she is creating new roles on her marketing team. I hope you enjoy this episode.Main TakeawaysMarketing to Gen Z: New iterations of media modalities require tailored marketing tactics. Marketers are treading water and testing out the best ways to market to this upcoming generation. Thinks that worked for millenials, don’t necessarily work on a younger generations with different values and needs. Getting in front of your audience via advertising on apps and other new media, is the way of today. Campaigns that are Purely Educational: When your product market is so young, and largely unknown to your target audience, you’ve got to embark on some educational campaigns. You’ve also got to listen, which means asking the right questions -- actually talking to people so you can learn what they are looking for and gathering feedback and data from those conversations is priceless for marketers. It’s a brandless campaign that’s teaching consumers about what it is and it’s an important foundation for marketing in a product field. Creatively Building Teams: Sometimes the positions that you need filled don’t really match with traditional job descriptions. As new needs in new markets arise, CMO’s and VP’s of Marketing are creating new roles in their teams to address advertising on new social media platforms. Marketing Needs to Learn from Sales: Market research, focus groups and other methods of gathering information about your audience are all helpful but if you have sales reps that you can talk about the reaction and perception of your product to your customers, you can learn so much about what you’re doing right and how you need to shift to address the needs of your customer better.Key Quotes“This felt like an opportunity to authentically connect and not push the brand. Pharma loves to push our agenda. Let's just sit and build a community and listen, ‘Does she even know patches exist?’ or ‘Does she know 15 or more options exist?’ And almost even more importantly, ‘Does she know things are changing? t the time, the ACA allows you to get any one of these options for free,’ so we started this campaign, shortly after I got on board in the middle of the summer called the ‘I'm so Done’ campaign where we just really wanted to have some fun and educate, and build a community before we were going to be all in.” “[In this industry] understanding Planned Parenthood and Student Health Clinics [which] are big in my world and the different marketing challenges there [are critical.] How do you make yourself meaningful there? It's telemedicine, but bigger than telemedicine. It's understanding the digital entrepreneurial world. What are the new businesses out there and what's next for either Twirla or Agile? Because we're not just a patch company, we're a women's health company.” “The novel -- the different ways of doing it -- that is strategic media partnering. For instance, we were able to be the first contraceptive to advertise on dating apps like Match. I couldn't have done that if I didn't have somebody outside who was street-smart, and

Bobby Jania, VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce understands how to look at a potential problem, reframe it, and utilize it as an asset. His ability to understand technical nuance, thanks to a degree in computer engineering, qualifies him as a leader in this space. Understanding the basics of how things are made, and then taking a step back to look at the way those little details are fitting together to fulfill the mission of the company is one of the big reasons why Bobby is where he is today as a marketer. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Bobby joined me and discussed where marketers might be going wrong as they implement customer-facing A.I. His can-do attitude, despite adverse circumstances, means more productivity around the clock as employees in different continents are able to keep work going when the sun sets over the US. “We're leveraging the fact that there are people in Japan and in Australia and in the UK on the team. It's not a barrier anymore. For some stuff when I log off, I know they're going to pick it up, and it continues on through.” Keep that train of progress moving forward, that’s the Bobby Jania way. We uncover some nuance from the annual Salesforce State of Marketing Report, and see how marketers across the board are revamping the way they work in their craft. All this, up next on Marketing Trends.Main TakeawaysKeep Mission and Vision at the forefront of all your Work: Keeping company values at the forefront of your mind can give you clarity on tough decisions that come up. Revisiting your company’s mission and vision on a regular basis can help everyone make more mission-oriented decisions in their daily work. Everyone needs to feel the pull forward through that common company vision on what the work is that you’re doingMarketing Through Cookie Disruption: Brands that are not already keeping a first party database have suffered most with the end of cookies as we knew them. Companies are expediting new marketing solutions and strategies to fill in this unforeseen void. Marketers now need to rely more on first party data, getting consumers to willingly type in their name and email on a company website, while also acknowledging a website’s intent to track their information, instead of third party cookies.Leveraging Artificial intelligence for Marketers: Marketers have to be careful with the use of A.I.when it is customer facing, especially when consumers are interacting with that technology to solve problem. Consumers are more likely to forgive the use of a robot in a customer service funnel because they understand the need to streamline the influx of help tickets. However, if you try to pass this off as a “real” person, when it’s still easy to tell when you’re communicating with a chatbot, people will become frustrated. They need to know they can escalate their request to a real person at any point.Key Quotes“It's really hard to make things simple. Mark Twain is credited with the whole idea of, ‘I would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time.’ It's that idea that to make something simple is really complicated.” “Salesforce recognizes the strategy and tactics that got us here today are not the ones that will get us to the next step. So there's this constant push, not just with the products we launch externally, but even internally. How are we going to do it differently than before so that we can keep this growth and keep this scale going?”“I really had to start trusting my direction, into what I could delegate. Now a lot of it comes down to the priorities. There are certain things I will dive really deep into. Certain products, certain features, certain review meetings I will get very, very deep in. Then there were other ones that I would have stayed at a very high level and get more of the readout of what's going on, than be in the trenches, making the decisions.”“There's probably been more disruption this year than I've ever seen before, as far as what was important. What strategies changed? What are the metrics that you look at that changed? As you can probably imagine, video channel value dramatically went up this year because we're all sitting at home, right? “We're leveraging the fact that there are people in Japan and in Australia and in the UK on the team. It's not a barrier anymore. For some stuff when I log off, I know they're going to pick it up, and it continues on through.” “If you're going to have an A.I. interface directly with the customer, and if it is trying to have dialogue, typing and chatting, you need to be transparent that you're talking to an AI bot. I've seen backlash when they try to pretend it's a human, and then, you can ask it certain questions, and very much tell right away it's not right. I think people are okay with it as long as they know.”“It is amazing to see the number of marketing vendors and solutions enter the space because it just shows how much innovation is still yet to come. I've been in this space for almost a decade and t

There’s a growing concern bubbling beneath the surface of marketers feet. Third party cookies are going by the wayside. This has been a really effective tool that marketers have utilized for years to target specific populations they deem are more likely to be interested in and purchase the products they’re selling. Moving forward, marketing in the digital space is going to look a bit different. Some say it’ll be survival of the fittest, others argue your data strategy should already be so robust you shouldn’t be reliant on off-the-shelf data. Everette Taylor is the CMO of Artsy, an ecommerce platform that allows users to buy art from anywhere in the world with the click of a button. But while most marketers are doing a deep dive into their cookie strategy, Taylor’s focus remains elsewhere.Main TakeawaysFocus on What Works, Not What is Not Working: Marketers have a tendency to focus too much on the products and services they offer that are not working. While it can be a good idea to address areas of weakness in your marketing strategy, it’s also important to invest your energy into the aspects that are are doing well.Your Content Reflects Your Strategy: Your content has to be a direct representation of your target audience. This means you have to have a grasp on who your customers are, what they are buying, and what is important to them and make sure that your content reflects those pillars. When you create blog posts and videos around things that do not reflect your target audience, it diminishes your brand perception, which should always be your number one priority.Act Like a CEO, Talk like A Marketer: When you ascend to the role of CMO, you can no longer think like a marketer. While it’s important to have a grasp on things such as brand perception, and awareness, it's more integral for the business if the CMO has an understanding of how problems its departments impact the overall business.Key Quotes“Sometimes marketers get distracted by the things that aren't working instead of where things are really working. What we realized is that our biggest growth channel was through affiliate marketing. Believe it or not, there's a huge economy of courses, of people teaching people how to grow a business or do this or do that. We realized that those were some of the best affiliates because people are taking their courses, trying to build their businesses and our product was great for people trying to build their brands and build their businesses.”“One of the things that I'm seeing in digital marketing is a lack of innovation, because people will become,so number focused. ‘We're going to do this thing. This thing works, we're going to scale, you're doing this way.’ People lose sight of how important brand perception, brand marketing, brand equity is in the grand scheme of things as well. It's interesting to see that shift, but it's, it's more than just the numbers for sure.” “There's a difference between being a great marketer and a great CMO. As a great marketer, you can grow the company. You can do things in the first year, but to be a great CMO, and be a great leader of a marketing organization, it takes longer.” “Before Artsy existed, no one was buying art online. People had to physically go to a gallery, and go to a show, or have the connection to a potential art advisor or a gallery. Now we've provided the ability that any, and everybody can collect art from around the world. Our average artwork gets shipped 3000 miles from gallery to [destination]. For us, the ability to really democratize the space, create a more open space for people to buy art, to make art businesses more fluid in the way that they do business and to reach new people....That just opens up the game for everybody.”“At one point, Artsy used to write about everything, and create content about everything. Then we learned very heavily into the market and made sure we served experienced collectors. Now we're leaning into that middle point of understanding there's something about brand-building. Building brand perception and reaching an audience that may not be as savvy as the experienced calligrapher. So building content for that too, but our focus is going to be on the experience collector, and that data and that wealth of data that we have to share and the types of things that they want to see, but also understanding that content is also important for brand perception and brand building as well.” “People don't know what they're capable of until they do it. One of the things that I try to do with my marketing team is always inspire them to go outside of their comfort zone and realize what it is that they're truly able to do and what they're truly able to accomplish.” “We have the audience. Right now our top of funnel has been as strong as ever, even in a cookieless world. I'm not going to give away secrets, but we are crushing it. On top of that, the biggest opportunity for us is that we have amassed the world's art collectors. How do we re-enga

Athletes are constantly striving to find their unfair advantage, and most businesses are no different. It’s one tangible thing that sets us apart from our peers that makes us stand out. In late 80’s Nike searched for their unfair advantage and found it in Michael Jordan and the Jumpman brand. Apple was floundering in a market dominated by its competitor until they brought Steve Jobs back into the fold and the rest is history. Marketing in a crowded segment, such as CPG, those unfair advantages are few and far between. Brad Charron, knows what it’s like to battle those brands flexing their unfair advantage. Brad has fought an uphill climb during his days at Under Armour, Lucky’s, and now as the CEO of Aloha, he’s bringing the heat to its competitors.“There's a lot of choices we make in terms of what goes into our product and our food and that choicefulness. We bring that forward in our messaging. We talk about being the only plant-based company that is a hundred percent certified organic that is B-Corp certified. It's good marketing to try to differentiate yourself. It also just happens to be true, even better. With hot spaces in general, the people on the margins are gonna try to get into this space. It's smart business for them. That does not mean it's the most authentic. And in our case our advantage is that we're walking the walk and the challenge is how do you get that message across in a very cluttered environment?”As a newly certified B-Corp, Aloha is making waves as a business that’s committed to the greater good, and their messaging reflects that. On this episode of Marketing Trends I sat down with Brad and we discussed a host of topics, including why, after a long run as a marketer, he decided to take up the reins as a CEO. Brad also touched on his past experiences with companies such as Under Armour, Chobani, and Lucky’s, and the role data plays in a marketers strategy, and why Aloha is all-in on omni-channel. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.Main TakeawaysJust Do It: Every company has an unfair advantage, it is what differentiates the company from the rest of its competition. In the CPG space, and in popular channels in general, you have to understand what separates your products and services from your competitors and hone in on that. If you're a health-conscious brand protein bar, make sure you lean into that to separate yourself from the other bars in the same space. Keep Showing Up: Your brand must be where your consumers are. Whether that’s in big-box retail, ecommerce or grocery stores, CPG brands have to provide consumers with a holistic shopping experience and meet them where they are. When you adopt a holistic omni-channel approach, you’re also setting your brand up for consumers to more easily find your product, leading to greater adoption.A Brand with a Purpose: If you’re a purpose-led brand, not only does your messaging need to reflect your mission, but your company has to align with that same mission. Mission-driven companies have the unique ability to build trust with their consumers, but once that trust is broken, it’s very hard to rebuild.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Let’s be honest, content is king. And the challenge today is finding ways to make that content not just resonate with people, but also more helpful by giving users a community that not only creates a lasting impression, but one they can benefit from. Wes Kao knows content, and as the creator and co-founder of Maven, what she sees as the answer to improving the online course education experience for instructors and students. Paralleling the development of the technology along with curating a powerful roster of instructors, Maven has already seen financial success before the platform has even hit the market. This reflects Wes’ nuanced approach to modern, content creation. While quality still reigns supreme, the days of begging for subscribers might be trending downwards, in favor of a more hyper-personalized approach. “Like and subscribe is dead because people used to need hundreds of thousands of followers to be able to make a living online.Things are shifting so that if you are a creator these days, you can make a pretty healthy living from a smaller audience of true fans who love what you do and want to, uh, want to engage with you and are willing to invest more in, um, in your content because they find it so valuable.”And what is it that consumers are valuing these days? Community. The days of online interactions are on the rise,, which means those users are looking for new ways to flex their creative muscles. Wes, knows how to curate these communities and In this episode of Marketing Trends, she delves into the way she approaches hiring, growing and developing her business, as well as shares some of the nuggets of wisdom she gleaned from her time with Seth Godin. Wes has so many insights! Be prepared to take a few notes and learn a lot. Here we go!Main Takeaways:Focus on Behavior in Marketing: There is often too much emphasis placed on the next and newest marketing tools, instead of a focus on the actual principles of human behavior. Being able to answer those deep marketing questions, knowing how to increase or decrease desire, is where you can have real impact. The basics of understanding people and cognitive biases are the pillars of what makes for a good marketer.Keys to Hiring Well: Having a good team makes for a successful company and knowing how to suss out the right candidates means taking a few extra steps aside from having a verbal or in-person interview and looking over their CV. When you’re going through the hiring process, make sure that you look beyond the candidate's resume, and focus on some of their ancillary activities. Seeing that people have side projects, personal websites, newsletters, etc. will show you about how a person presents themselves online, what they care about, and how much effort they put into their work. Take home projects are also a great way to ensure that you’re hiring someone who can do the job you have for them, and not just someone with some cool job titles in their past.Community has Become More Valuable than Content: Videos, lectures, articles are a dime-a-dozen and you get can really high-quality content about almost anything for free online today. If you want to make it in the content game, you have to focus on the community aspects of your business that you’re offering. Provide ways for people to connect with like minded people and develop relationships with them. That’s when people will open their wallets.‘Like and Subscribe’ as a Business Model is Dead: You used to have to rely on big numbers of followers or view counts to be able to have a successful business, or influences, but what matters now is less about overall numbers and more about the level of active particitants that are viewing your content. Spreading vanilla messages that resonate with a mass audience is not what drives engagement. Hyper personalized content that the listener or viewer can relate to is.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While cable services may be on life support, the simple truth is that live TV captivates audiences in ways on-demand content can’t. Maybe it was the anticipation that came with watching Roy Halladay fan 11 Marlins hitters in a perfect game for the Phillies back in 2010, or the anxiousness that occurs watching state-by-state election results roll in on a Tuesday night in November. The bigger point is that while on-demand content has become a big part of our daily viewing habits, live television and the revenue companies generate from those audiences is undergoing a renaissance.“In order to do business, in order to have the things we need, we need to generate revenue somehow. So the payment for what happens, and the ability to create content, pay artists, funding great content has to come from somewhere. Either people have to pay for it through subscriptions directly, which is the SVOD space, that’s Disney+, Netflix, and the HBO Max, or they have to be willing to accept advertising because the advertisers are paying for the value there. These are the tensions in the trade-offs.”Those tensions are creating an interesting dichotomy between traditional cable viewers and the trendiness that comes with being a cord cutter. But it's also generating an even larger divide in how media companies distribute their advertising dollars. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Mike Woods, the SVP of Product for Amagi Corporation, joined me on Marketing Trends to discuss how media companies are approaching their ad buys when it comes to live streaming services, and why SVOD services such as Netflix and Disney+ are bucking traditional advertising with subscription based models. Enjoy this episode!Main TakeawaysCan We Just Drop That In?: Dynamic ad insertion is providing advertisers with the ability to insert advertisements within movies and television shows that was not possible on traditional cable networks. With traditional cable advertisements, media companies had to buy based on show demographics, which drastically limited their reach. With streaming services, advertisers now have the ability to drop in quick mid-rolls and post-roll advertisements that they are able to strategically target to various homes or audiences.Digital Divide: While streaming services have made dynamic advertisement a core component of their business model, there is still a big divide between how advertisements are sold on live streaming platforms. Oftentimes, agencies will have specific departments devoted to cable TV and another to digital advertising, which is causing companies to skew their decision making one way or another. Until these two areas are housed together, media buying for these companies will continue to not deliver a holistic audience.Is It Worth It?: The general assumption when SVOD services such as Netflix were born is that consumers were paying less for individual subscriptions than they were for entire cable subscriptions. But as companies have adopted similar models and invested in streaming services with their own platforms, the cable TV model of paying for individual channels has been replicated, with consumers often paying more for individual subscriptions as a whole than they were for their cable subscriptions.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

At Chainlink Labs, CMO Adelyn Zhou embraces the complicated nature of marketing in the quickly evolving field of blockchain technology. She also leans into the idea that technology like blockchain can have a major impact on often-forgotten parts of the world.“I think one thing being in a developed world [is that] you don't realize is that we take a lot of our, our legal system and our contracts for granted. We think that, of course, you know, like if I get into this contract and they don't pay me or they don't deliver, I can take them to court. But in a lot of parts of the world, you don't have that.” Chainlink Labs is on the forefront of developing ways to connect data in the outside world to the blockchain to solve a myriad of problems. What does that look like in practice? Well, basically Chainlink is creating cross-chain communications and by doing so, it is using cryptocurrency and blockchain to open up a better way for developing nations to do business. And where does Adelyn come into the picture? As she communicates about the potential of this technology and builds trust with developers they move closer to fully realizing the good that can be accomplished in the world through Chainlink Labs. Learn more about the unique challenges of this new world of marketing on this episode of Marketing Trends. Enjoy!Main TakeawaysSpecial Challenges of Marketing to Developers: Zhou points to the challenges of marketing a rapidly developing product in the blockchain world. Also, marketing to skeptical developers requires a special level of trust that can’t be achieved by regular marketing channels.The Power of Hybrid Smart Contracts: Blockchain can be a major source for good, and one example of that is through the creation of hybrid smart contracts. These documents can combine all sorts of dynamic data from around the world, which can open up opportunities for people like farmers in third-world countries to create and implement contracts with data they never had access to before.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Coming into a new marketing role during a critical re-branding phase of a company’s life is no small task to take on. There are challenges with developing new working relationships, and most importantly, trust, in order to create a smooth and successful evolution for the business. “I'm naturally curious. I like to seek to understand; I'm naturally very curious. Want to delve into the details on some things and, as soon as you get to a confidence level and you're like, okay, that's either great or yeah, that might be something we want to revisit. Honestly I think some people feel like that's a little bit micromanage-y.”This is what makes Paul Stoddart successful in his role as CMO of Epicor, an Enterprise Resource Planning company. and while he’s a relatively new leader at Epicor, he’s done a lot for the brand already. Paul told us all about it on this episode of Marketing Trends and his impact starts with the fact that his foundation is built on the idea that you should always start with the customer no matter what it takes. And even though at first blush he admits he may come across as a bit of a micromanager, Paul’s ultimate goal is to understand the way things are done in order to find efficiency in the processes and ultimately build deep trust and foster teamwork with his colleagues. We’ll dive into exactly what that looks like, and all the cool ways the Epicor marketing team is standing out from the competition right here, so sit back and enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:The Essential Of Great Marketing: Understanding people’s needs is the first step in successful marketing. Another piece of the equation requires building great relationships. As a marketer, you want two key ingredients, first a great product to bring to market, and second, great people to work with. A key component to the latter is to be supportive of your colleagues and not too competitive.Brand Authenticity and Importance of Simplicity: The key to staying true to your brand, especially during a brand-refresh, is understanding what people are saying about you. You can then make honest decisions about the changes that you want to move forward with based on those perspectives. The awards for doing good work come, but the work should speak for itself. When you reduce something down and make it simpler, you make it better.Characteristics of Great Leadership: There are many ideas and ideals that make for a company with great leadership. Leadership comes from all levels in an organization. Management together is better than alone, and collaboration across all levels of the organization leads to the greatest sense of community, as well as the best possible end product. When it comes to the guiding principles of what that leadership looks like, there are many. A sense of ownership, as well as a deep level of curiosity, are two traits that make for great leaders.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There’s a notion among marketers that the way to provide the best customer experience is to have the richest data. After all, to CMOs and most modern marketers, data is basically the key to unlocking customer success. But to provide those marquee customer experiences, there’s a myth swirling around that the only way to have success is if all your data sets live in one place. You need the mythical “single source of truth.” But is a single source of truth actually attainable in today’s oversaturated martech ecosystem? Paul Cowan is the CMO of FreshBooks, and he isn’t so sure.“Having a single source of truth is next to impossible. I haven't been in any organization where anybody said, ‘Man, our data is in a perfect state. Here it is. Here's our 360 view of the customer. We're done, clap your hands and walk away.’ That doesn't exist. You need to have your single source of truth in terms of what you believe success looks like, and everybody's aligned to that...But I think being able to have that 360 view of the customer is the hard part.”Having a better understanding of who your customers are is something all marketers are striving for today, and it’s something that Paul and his team are working toward. But while a single source of truth might not be attainable, there are avenues to create a clearer picture to work with. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Paul joined me for a fun conversation covering a host of topics, including what it will mean to build FreshBooks’ data strategy to target an SMB market in dire need of reliable insights. Paul and I also discussed how FreshBooks reorganized its marketing department to eliminate siloed segments, and why the best marketers need to have an understanding of their sales counterparts. Enjoy! Main TakeawaysDo you Understand Where I’m Coming From?: In order for marketing and sales to have true alignment, both departments must have a clear understanding of the pain points that the other is experiencing. When marketing is under the direction of sales, it does not work. And when marketers don’t have a clear understanding of the sales process, there tends to be miscommunication. If you want true alignment between both, marketers and sales individuals must understand the roles of the other.Tension Builds Success: Healthy tension between sales and marketing is okay, as long as that tension is focused on building the overall relationship and strength of the brand. When there is tension between the two departments, it keeps both parties on their toes and responsive to the other. When those lines of communication are closed, there’s more room for complacency.Sources Say: The idea of a single source of truth for your data might be unrealistic, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t harness your first-party data to create a clearer picture of your target audience. A single source of truth should be about understanding the value of your datasets, but also understanding the best way to use your data.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What are your three words? It’s a question Amber Armstrong, CMO of LivePerson, loves to ask her team members. Those three words can be anything — they can be a personal mantra, a list of questions, or even a grocery list. But regardless what your three words are, the key is to make them count, make them relatable, but, most importantly, to let those three words be the driving force of your end goal. “When I was getting to know my team, I asked everyone for their three words. It all originates back to my time at IBM, and working for Ginni Rometty, who was our CEO. And it was a well-known fact that when you talk to Ginni, you gave her three things and that's it. And when she talks, she gives three things and that's it. And it's a number that you can remember, and when you can remember things they can become meaningful. They can really have a deeper association. If I told you my 10 words, you wouldn't believe half of them.”Armstrong’s three words are “focused, passionate, and kind,” and those three words are the backbone of how she hopes to continue building LivePerson’s marketing strategy. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Amber joined me for an insightful conversation about how LivePerson is building a robust ABM strategy to target not just the right clients, but the ones for whom LivePerson can have the most impact. Amber and I also took a trip down memory lane, as she reminisced about how her past experiences — including a transformative trip to Hong Kong and a 15-year career at IBM — shaped how she plans to push LivePerson forward. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.Main TakeawaysCan I Get Some Help?: ABM has traditionally been used by sales teams to build awareness on potential prospects and better target the prospects that are real opportunities for the business. But ABM can also function as a key building block to align marketing and sales. For example, when a sales team is able to identify key prospects, the marketing team can then target those potential customers, by honing in its efforts on certain ad placement to meet those areas.Can You Meet Me Halfway?: We hear all the time how important it is for marketers to meet their customers where they are. This can mean having active responses to customer questions through mobile channels and customer service, but there are more opportunities to explore. Marketers should begin using conversational intelligence in all channels as an opportunity to answer pressing questions,gain valuable customer insights, and build first-party data sources.Global Means Local: When you’re a global organization, your messaging still must be localized to resonate with specific audiences. This can be as simple as having a national message, but altering it to include things such as local pictures or restaurants.--Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

At first blush, getting insurance seems relatively straightforward. You research providers, you request a quote, and you go with the option that best suits your needs. Simple, right? Boring even. And sure, marketers have tried for years to add spice to a relatively bland industry… Geico continues to celebrate the Gecko, Progressive has long-running ads with the lovable Flow, and State Farm has encouraged us all not to buy insurance our parents did. But none of those ads cater to SMBs, and neither do the companies. But Thimble has been able to fill an SMB-sized void in the market.“Insurance is very intent-driven, and therefore search-driven for digital marketer. We can see what these guys are looking for. What are all of our competitors ranking for? So rather than... try to deconstruct their content calendar, we really go find new opportunities and find ways of thinking that are important to us versus them. So it's still the same approach or a skill set, but it's a different strategy.”That’s Rikin Diwan, SVP of Marketing at Thimble, a SaaS-based insurance platform that is helping SMBs and freelancers get insurance based on their needs. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Rikin unpacks how Thimble is making insurance fun by building a content strategy based on reusable blogs that puts the company at the top of the search rankings. Rikin also discusses his personal journey to Thimble and why every marketer should do a little self-exploration. Enjoy! Main TakeawaysAre We Speaking the Same Language?: Marketers can talk about KPIs, engagement and growth tactics all they want, but at the end of the day those are not the numbers other C-Suite members care about and relate to. Marketers must be able to relate marketing metrics back to business metrics and show how your efforts are affecting the overall health and growth of the business.Understand your Niche: You have to be able to identify what your unfair advantage is and consistently lean into that strategy. If the other big players are catering to a certain demographic, pivot and focus on the segment of the industry that is being neglected. When you consistently lean into strategies that larger companies are using, you won’t have an opportunity to stand out or grow your business.Did You See this Post?: Look for ways to spice up your industry. Just because the product doesn’t seem exciting, doesn’t mean that consumers are not looking for your product. Utilize SEO and blog posts to get in front of customers who are asking consistent questions that could serve as a gateway to your sales funnel.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Tonight Show debuted in 1954 with comedian Steve Allen welcoming a local television audience to his version of what he thought The Tonight Show should be. Since then, six different hosts have manned the desk for the late-night comedy show. Jay Leno was known for his charm and hair, Johnny Carson established the standard format for television chat shows – including the famous guest couch — and Jimmy Fallon is known for his exuberance, musical moments, and skits. Everyone brings something unique to the table, and when they do, a new era begins. You see, in the entertainment industry the only standard is change, and while hosts come and go, they all leave their mark and set a standard for the next person while the brand marches on.On this special episode of Marketing Trends, Ian Faison, who has held the mantle as host of the show since its inception, passes the baton to incoming host, Jeremy Bergeron. First, you’ll hear from Ian, as he reminisces on the origin story of the program, some of the behind-the-scenes folks who helped get the podcast off the ground, and what it was like to be part of the show as it’s grown from an idea in a Google doc, to more than 300 episodes and one million downloads and counting. Then later, we’ll introduce you to Jeremy, who will share a bit about himself, his background, and why he is so excited to take the reins and put his own unique spin on the show.Main TakeawaysYou Host for Evening Is: After more than 300 episodes, Ian Faison steps down as host of Marketing Trends. In his place, Jeremy Bergeron takes over as full-time host. Hosts Change, Brands Don’t: The role of the CMO is one of the most prolific positions within the C-suite, but it also has seen its fair share of change. Just as CMOs change from time to time, the brand and company will remain consistent. The same will be said for Marketing Trends, which will continue with a focus on the evolving role of the CMO, and interviewing innovators and leaders in the marketing space to deliver the strategies that you need to stay ahead.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

CMO’s tend to have a mantra when they take over a new job: reorg, rebrand, and restructure. But while the mantra is simple, the process is not. Any time things change, feathers get ruffled, even for the most well-intentioned CMOs.“Being performance driven, it's not always the most popular thing to do when you come into a new company. I pulled back spend in Q2 quite significantly from where we were spending, because I didn't feel it was working. And there were a lot of conversations with my peers, as well as with our CEO, and even the board on some of the risks of doing that. But I really believe that by pulling back a little bit and slowing down in order to get those insights and those key learnings in place, we'll be able to speed up in the future and kind of double down on what's working.”That’s Dana Paris, who is the first CMO of Canidae Pet Food, and she is quick to note that changes and hard conversations are not done in a vacuum. They are calculated risks designed to drive the overall health of the organization. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Dana dives into how having those tough conversations with your C-Level peers can set the foundation for a successful partnership. Plus, she also touches on why alignment across all your touch points, online and in-person, is imperative when you’re building your brand awareness.Main TakeawaysWell, this is Awkward: As a CMO, you have tough conversations. After all, there are KPIs to meet and products to sell. But as a CMO, it's imperative to remember that you were brought in to do a job, which means setting the company up for future success. Don’t be afraid to mix things up that you see holding the company back.A True Symbiotic Relationship: Today brands are not only fighting for awareness for the inventory on shelves, but they are also fighting for recognition online and across all digital touchpoints. Companies must have strong alignment when it comes to their ecommerce sites and their brick and mortar locations so consumers can easily connect the in-store and online experiences. A strong alignment on these things will also help lead the consumer further down the funnel in their purchasing decision. Building Brand Loyalty: When you’re a new brand trying to break into a populated space, you have to find organic avenues to naturally introduce your product to consumers. For Canidae, this process included working with breeders to introduce dogs to its food when they are puppies, and then having the breeders recommend the food to the consumer. This process helps to build consistent buying behaviors, while also helping grow the brand. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is one thing that every marketer would say they need: content. But what makes for good content and what makes for the best content? Is it storytelling? Is it authenticity? What content drives engagement, versus what content is merely passable? Kristin Frank is a well-respected and highly-seasoned media expert, and after a 20-year run at MTV, it’s safe to say she knows a thing or two about content.“My biggest advice is to not look at marketing, look at it as content. Make sure the story has quirks, make sure it's compelling, treat each individually as a separate piece of content, and be authentic to the platform. If you do that, you will have a relationship with your consumers that you can then speak to them in any way, and they will trust you.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kristin, now the CEO of AdPredictive, explains why after a successful career with Viacom and MTV, she had the itch to ditch her comfy enterprise digs and roll her sleeves up with a startup. Kristin also explains why different forms of content resonate with various platforms, how to attack those different channels and how AdPredictive is playing a role in helping marketers turn insights into advertising. Enjoy!Main TakeawaysNot All Platforms are Created Equal: The way people absorb content differs greatly depending on what channel they are using and the way marketers push their content should accommodate those different behaviors. This means that your content cannot be a one-size fits-all approach. Your content must vary by channel to fit what the consumer is expecting For instance, a piece of video might work really well on TikTok and Instagram, but would not generate the same engagement on Twitter. When you are designing your content to fit within a certain channel you have a better chance of resonating with your audience.Don’t View Content as Marketing: Content should be used in the same manner as how you would tell a story. It needs to have quirks, there needs to be a story arc, but most importantly, you should treat every individual show, blog, or post as it’s own piece of content rather than try to group everything together in a larger push. Can I Get Your ID?: Data visibility and data accuracy are two things marketers need in order to drive business values. When you have both accurate data and easily accessible insights, you can gain a better understanding of who your audience is, what their buying behaviors are, and what pieces of content get them to convert to your product.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Here’s a contrarian thought: buying ads doesn’t win you customers. What does win is when previous customers are happy and willing to tell everybody else just how great you are. Now think about this, before you buy a product, what’s the first thing you do? You read the reviews. From influencers, to friends, to referral codes and trade magazines, the way consumers decide what product or service is perfect for them is dependent on who they trust. David Lehman is the President and Chief Operating Officer at Birdeye, and he knows this more than most.“It's all about what research people are doing and who do they trust? Do people trust the brands? Do they trust the articles that they're getting from them? No, they trust their community, They trust their friends. They trust their network. They trust the crowdsourced reviews of both the business, a product. As a marketer, experience marketing is so critical because you've got to fulfill all of those needs for everybody.”So how are marketers flipping the funnel and tying their success to customer success? On Marketing Trends, David answers that question while also providing an in-depth look at how brands such as Blaze Pizza have used Birdeye’s experience marketing platform to put brand advocates front and center. He also provides a unique look at how marketers can supercharge their SEO strategies on Google, Facebook, and more. Enjoy this episode. Main Takeaways:Did You Leave a Review?: Customers leave reviews to help them advocate for a product or service, but they also read those same reviews to help them make an informed buying decision. Customers no longer trust a brand’s messaging to make their decisions, they trust their peers. This is why it's important to seize control of reviews and aggregate them all into a single place. When you have everything in one place, you can identify and resolve common problems as you see them come through and you can also gather and display top reviews easier. Just Call My Mobile: Customers need to be met on the channels where they are most active, which is mobile. In order to have an effective mobile strategy, you must have an always-on mentality. This means that prospective consumers should always be able to get answers to questions in real-time and you can facilitate that through chat, FAQs, or aggregated reviews.Stand-Up, Stand Out: An well-structured and optimized SEO strategy is a great way to make sure that a company does not get buried on the search pages, but it also is integral when it comes to making sure consumers can find you at a moment’s notice.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Text message marketing is a powerful tool — after all no other channel provides marketers with the same level of one-to-one communication that you get by sending a simple text. But just because you have the ability to press send, doesn’t mean you always should.“You need to think to yourself before you send any text message, ‘Is this message providing value? Is the person on the other end of this going to look at this and say, yes, I want to save this.’ If it's not the case, you probably shouldn't be sending it because you've got this unicorn right now, and this way to communicate to your customer is so direct, you want to hold it in the highest regard and respect it as much as possible.” On this episode of Marketing Trends, Matt Baglia, the co-founder and CEO of SlickText, dives into the dos and don’ts of text messaging marketing, and touches on the main reason marketers should approach this channel with extreme caution. Matt also explains some of the best practices that will set up any marketer for success. Enjoy this episode.Main TakeawaysSeeking Approval: You always need to know that the information that you are sending to customers is the information that they have opted into. If you don’t have a user's permission to send them content, don’t. If you send materials to a user that didn’t ask for them, you won’t only be breaking privacy laws, but you also run the risk of your materials being perceived as spam, thus creating a negative image for the brand.Set Expectations: When users opt in to your service, you must be explicit about what materials the user is signing up for. This does not mean that you need to provide a long explanation of every message a user will receive, but if a customer is expecting tracking information for a product, that is all they should be receiving.Don’t Hit Send Too Often: Make sure you have a consistent strategy for how often you send your users messages. Nobody wants to read an excessive amount of text messages from your business or organization. A good rule of thumb in most cases is 2-6 messages per month.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

B2B marketing gets a bad reputation. Some will say it’s boring and you can’t be creative in the B2B space. But who wrote the rulebook that said B2B couldn’t be fun or inspiring? Meredith Stowe Christie, the VP of Marketing at HVR, says that regardless of who your client is, B2B doesn’t have to be boring.“It's B2B, but you're still marketing to a human. Chances are, given the amount of people that are watching the Super Bowl, your target is watching the Super Bowl. If you have the budget and a message that resonates to a lot of organizations, why not do that? You want to be top of mind to these folks when they need to make that decision on your product.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Meredith explains how HVR is spicing up B2B marketing by putting the customer at the center of everything it does. What does that look like? Meredith says it’s about aligning S sales and marketing efforts to tell the best stories because content is what should be leading prospects through the funnel. Enjoy this episode. Main Takeaways:Know your Story: Make sure you know your product inside and out so you can fully tell the story of your company. When you’re marketing complex products, such as data replication, you have to know all aspects of your product to know what your unfair advantage is and what differentiates you from competitors. Make sure you talk to stakeholders at every level of the company so you can gather that intel in order to best tell the story of the company.Every Last Cent: Digital marketing has made it easier for marketers to track where every dollar and every cent is going, but it’s important to remember that as the company grows, your digital practices should too. This means you have to make sure to experiment with what channels you are spending in to create new avenues for the business.Can I Get an Alignment?: We hear a lot about the importance of marketing and sales aligning their efforts, but it’s important to remember that your content should be a driver to make those sales conversations easier for your reps. Make sure the content you produce opens up opportunities for prospective clients to learn about your product prior to the sales conversations.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Streaming services and connected television sets now dominate living rooms, but what influence has OTT programming had on brands when it comes to content development, strategy, and advertising? “If you can create content that appeals to the kid, but also the overall family and the parents, that's a win-win. You're going to get no pushback from the parents when everyone sits down and says, ‘Let's watch The LEGO Movie because it's fun, it's funny, it's exciting.’ Brands that want to create content, the reality is that some brands have afforded themselves the rights to be entertainment brands and some are just not there or will never be there.”While sitting down and picking a show has become easier, the ecosystem that on-demand services such as YouTube, Netflix and Disney+ offer is changing the game for advertisers looking to capitalize on the influx in inventory. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Charles Gabriel, Head of U.S. Advertising at WildBrain Spark, explores the intricacies of advertising on OTT services, including where advertisers go wrong in the space. Charles also covers major trends that he sees occurring within the industry, including why linear advertising continues to decrease. Enjoy this episode.Main Takeaways:Money Talks: What used to make TV an easy buy are now the same factors that are making it difficult for advertisers to invest in linear television. With more users cutting the cord than ever before, ratings are not only declining, but traditional media options that advertisers have are far fewer than their streaming counterparts.It’s All About Control: One of the biggest factors leading brands to invest in AVOD services is the level of control and frequency they have in picking where their ads are displayed and which audiences those advertisements are targeting. For example, if advertisers only want to reach families that watch children’s programming, AVOD offers better targeting and attribution for those particular audiences.It’s an Entire Ecosystem: Advertisers are now investing in more than just 15- and 30-second commercials. With streaming services, they can now invest in the entire ecosystem, from the actual content, to the advertisements that are played during the show. This is giving brands more influence in the overall product and the message they are able to send to the audience.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every corner of the world is different, and that means the way consumers buy and absorb media is different as well. In the U.S., email is a massive channel for brands to reach customers. But what about on continents such as Africa? With a population of more than 1.2 billion individuals, what drives the African consumer? What channels are businesses using to reach them, and where are some of the biggest differences between them and the western consumer?“Over the last five years, the start-up ecosystem has taken off aggressively. People are now building services, products, and services on top of the networks and on top of what the telcos have been able to achieve. The possibilities of what can happen with that sort of infrastructure has taken off. However, the depth of innovation we have seen is really five years-old, and the financial technological system has taken a lead there.”Elo Umeh is the Founder and CEO of Terragon Group, a predictive MarcTech service that is helping African companies connect and reach customers more thoughtfully and effectively. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Elo explains some key differences between the African and American consumer, why email marketing is not a big driver for his customers, and how Terragon is using data and analytics across all channels to help its customers effectively reach its desired audience.Main TakeawaysIt’s a Mobile World: Over the last five years, the startup ecosystem has grown significantly. With more developers building software that incorporates into a tech stack, there is now more of an opportunity for those companies to utilize data and analytics like never before to effectively reach their customers. Massive Reach: On a continent of more than 1.2 billion people, combined with a landmass greater than other continents, reaching the customer is one of the biggest challenges for African companies. Companies that want to reach their audiences must have an effective data and analytics strategy that is designed to meet their consumers on the go. This means hype-targeting content to mobile devices and social platforms.Different Strokes for Different Folks: Just because a strategy works in the US does not mean that it will be effective for other consumers. In the U.S., email is an effective marketing strategy. But in Africa, you have to account for both web and non-web channels one thing remains true: your messaging must not only be relevant, but it has to solve a unique problem for the customer ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sports and brands are synonymous with one another. The Boston Red Sox are known for the famous Citgo signs that resides beyond the Green Monster. The University of Oregon goes hand-in-hand with apparel and shoe giant Nike, and the University of North Carolina is tightly associated with the jump man himself and the Jordan Brand logo that graces its uniforms. There is no doubt that brands have made a lasting impact on fan bases everywhere thanks to sports.“Brands have a really interesting opportunity to actually create traditions around game day that are synonymous with the brands and finding things that are meaningful to the brands and become great traditions. A carpet company rolling out the carpet for a team to enter the field, or a particular sign being reminiscent of the kind of offering that a company can bring, or a sponsor of a particular segment or kind of content that becomes part of a game tradition.” But how brands become one with a university is a sticky topic. It requires identifying the right fit between brand and school or sport, implementing a proper strategy, and activating the sponsorship at the right time. With another year of collegiate athletics around the corner, Jennifer Davis, the CMO at Learfield, joined the show to discuss how the company brings big partnerships to life between brands and universities. Plus she explains how sports marketing has become a much more integral piece of the overall sales funnel. Enjoy this episode!Main TakeawaysBranding 101: Brands need to view sponsorship opportunities as a way to not only build gameday traditions with fan bases, but also as an opportunity to align your brand with the university and become synonymous with it. By building out these activations, whether it’s a highlight sponsorship, player of the game, or in-game sponsorship, you are creating memorable moments with fans, generating brand awareness, but most importantly, you are organically aligning your product with the university.Let’s Get Specific: As traditional broadcast mediums have changed, it’s afforded brands to take advantage of targeting specific markets with ad inventories. Instead of just placing a commercial spot across multiple networks, schools can now work with companies to identify specific markets outside of their home base to target, which could help lead to future conversions.You’re Now Free to Pre-Board: Any CMO who is about to take on a new role with a company should design their own pre-boarding/onboarding strategy. Rather than stick to the predetermined path a company has always used for onboarding, this could be an opportunity to take the initiative to meet with key stakeholders in the company to understand where you can best serve the company once you start.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kimberly Storin strongly believes that culture beats strategy every day of the week and that you can be the best strategic marketer in the world, but if you fail to build a sustainable culture, your strategy is irrelevant. It’s one of the reasons why when she joined the Zayo Group, she made a plan for her first 100 days, during which she would be relentlessly focused on making sure that within her organization, the sales and marketing teams remain aligned in their vision.“The biggest impact that we're going to have is to get that sales alignment right off the bat so that we can see a great account-based marketing approach. The biggest win that we can have in the next six to 12 months will be to implement account-based marketing.”Kimberly has extensive experience in enterprise technology, having overseen brand refreshes and strategy implementation at some of the world’s biggest technology companies — including Dell, AMD, and IBM. Now, as the CMO of Zayo Group, she helped to implement similar strategies. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kimberly explains why having a strong ABM strategy is integral to the growth of Zayo Group, she also dives into why every marketing department should devote resources to its own creative services department, and how every new CMO can earn quick wins.Main Takeaways:Building a Plan For a Plan: When you enter any new organization, you have to understand the values and benchmarks the organization needs to hit. A good practice is to start by meeting with all the internal stakeholders of the business to best understand where you earn quick wins. Once you identify these, you can then gain a better understanding of what the key elements and goals of the business are.What Makes for a Good ABM Strategy: A good account-based marketing plan starts with a strong alignment between sales and marketing departments. When both sales and marketing have the ability to leverage market data, combined with the internal data the organization has, it makes for an incredibly streamlined process for identifying the proper prospects to target.Let’s Get Creative: Brand consistency is key, but in order to make sure you are building a strong and consistent message, marketing teams should invest in having their own internal creative agency. When creative services are in-house, it allows you to highlight elements of the brand that matter while building a strong and consistent approach.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every company has a secret sauce —it’s the differentiator that separates one company from the rest of the pack and keeps it successful long-term. For Juniper Networks, CMO Mike Marcellin says that secret sauce centers around how the company is getting its customers to actively engage with its product.“How someone engages with a brand, with a company, is hugely important. 84% of [consumers] said that experience that a company provides is as important as its products and services. If you're a startup going into a completely new space and you're the only game in town, then the features and capabilities are there. But if you're in a mature industry where it's competitive, the customer experience must be there.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Mike explains how his team has evolved over the last few years to take a more data-centric approach to its marketing efforts. He also dives into how marketers can effectively use A.I. in their decision-making, and how organizations can reduce operational costs to improve their customer experience. Enjoy!Main TakeawaysYou Want a Holistic View of Your Customers: The best way to gain an entire understanding of who your customers are — what their buying habits are, how they like to be communicated with, and what their preferences are— the first step is to make sure all the first-party data you have on-hand about your customers resides in a single place that is clear and easy to read. This will help in organizing customer portfolios while also giving you a better idea of customer trends in real-time.Good A.I. Starts with Good Data: When using A.I. as a tool, whether that is personalizing certain experiences for customers or in your messaging efforts, you have to start with a solid understanding of where your data is coming from. Without good, clean data, your algorithms will give you unreliable results and skew your customer insights.Are you Hearing Feedback? It’s important to create consistent feedback opportunities for your customers to engage with your company, but it’s equally important to make sure you are not chasing your clients to participate in these conversations. When you have active and willing participants, that means you have stakeholders that are invested in the overall product and want to see you succeed.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In 2021, data flows from multiple pathways to a marketer's desk, and the insights generated from those datasets feels endless. But one thing is becoming increasingly apparent; despite the information you have on hand, it’s still never enough.“33% of marketers say they are completely satisfied with their ability to use data and to create more relevant customer experiences. A third of marketers feel like they have the ability to use data, to create a customer experience that's relevant. Think about all the relevancy that we now have with the brand, to think that only a third of marketers think that they're able to do it. To me, that's the opportunity for marketers to figure out how to go from not just using data, but making it relevant to customer experience.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Edward McDonnell, the Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for Marketing Cloud at Salesforce, returns to discuss the future of marketing. Plus, he explains how remote work is enabling marketers to build the most talented teams possible thanks to software that allows them to succeed from anywhere. Ed also explains why it's time to focus on reskilling the modern-day marketer.Main Takeaways:More Control, Please: Two-thirds of marketers in a recent survey stated the data that they receive is not painting a clear enough picture for them when it comes to their customers. Marketers in 2021 want more control of their data — where it’s coming from and how it is used so that they can create a more agile and elastic marketing strategy.Hit that Subscribe Button: Subscription marketing is a growing channel for marketers, but it goes far beyond the technology that enables it. Subscription marketing consistently challenges marketers not just from a sales and retention perspective, but it’s forcing them to rethink how they produce content, and how that content keeps users connected and engaged with a brand.Upleveling Your Skillset: Marketers are not lacking creativity, but the way companies engage with them from a remote perspective must change. Businesses need to rethink how marketers can be successful in a remote-first world. This means putting more of a focus on creating workflows that can enable an efficient creative process regardless of where team members are.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. ----Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.