On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? (What inspired you to be a part of a Marketing Automation company?)
I am one of the company’s co-founders and have served as CEO since its inception. Prior to launching 4Cite, our management team owned and operated another marketing service company – I-Centrix.  That business, also focused on retailers, built and managed Marketing Databases for its clients.  In addition, I-Centrix also had a strong list processing offering as well. We sold I-Centrix in 2007 and exited the organization in 2010. At that point I wanted to build another organization and leverage our deep retail history. This time around we chose to concentrate on real-time digital solutions. Our team was fortunate to have decades of retail experience and saw, first hand, where retailers were struggling to evolve in the digital world. We had the experience, the connections, and the where with all to launch a business to help address these needs. Today we serve hundreds of top ecommerce retailers including such well known brands as Staples, Vera Bradley and Harry & David and non-ecommerce companies in the automotive, financial services, healthcare, not-for-profit, hospitality and travel industries.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of online engagement with customers, how do you see Marketing Analytics platforms evolving by 2020?
It has become clear, in my opinion, that Marketing Analytics is morphing from an ‘after the fact’ process designed to measure performance into an ‘inherently actionable’ process that drives results – in real-time.  Let me give you an example…let’s consider the following scenario: A marketer launches a Facebook campaign to drive site traffic.  Traditionally, Marketing Analytics might be used to measure the success of that campaign via any number of KPIs.  These metrics are difficult to measure with precision because of other, overlapping, programs that result is muddied waters in terms of sales allocation.  Don’t get me wrong, reporting and allocation is a vital role for Marketing Analytics platforms and will remain so in the future.  However, that will be only one aspect of the capabilities required going forward. We are seeing a shift toward real-time harnessing of Marketing Analytics data.  In the above Facebook example, we are using engagement data to build audiences and trigger messaging in real-time.  Ideally, the marketer will be able to know, in real-time, when a visitor comes to their site because of that Facebook ad.  Then, instantly look at that consumer’s previous engagement with the brand (i.e. has she been to the site before? Is she engaging with emails? What products has she viewed? Has she made prior purchases?).  With that data in hand, the Marketing Analytics platform should be able to make offer recommendations, product recommendations, and maybe even trigger a series of customized communications in other channels if this visit doesn’t result in a purchase.  You can see from this example that Marketing Analytics data is vital to the derivation of the marketing message.  Properly done, it will be used to drive sales – not just measure them.

MTS: How should B2B marketers leverage customer data analytics to improve marketing campaigns with greater authority?
Make data a part of each marketing program and use it in real-time to drive content. Expand beyond customer segmentation and contact planning.  Be sure to use it to drive offer recommendations, product recommendations, and channel execution.

MTS: How should CMOs visualize the disparate and complex data to build a unified, singular definition of a customer? Could you give us a preview of the dashboard analytics provided by Cross Link?
Establishing a unified definition of a customer is not a new concept, but the ever-changing options for consumer engagement has made it increasingly difficult.  It seems funny to us that one of the latest trends is ‘People Based Marketing’.  Wasn’t that always the goal?  Have we become so confused by the digital landscape that we actually focused on devices instead of people?  Sure, cookies and device IDs are important but only to the extent that they can be linked to a person.   In the digital world, we have seen a consistent trend toward using a hashed value of the consumer’s email address as the chief identifier.  If there is evidence in the offline data that a person has multiple email addresses, that data can be further aggregated.

It is important for CMOs to ensure that ALL digital identification is done deterministically.  This simply means that there is a direct correlation between the engagement data being captured to the email to which it is associated.  In an effort to provide ‘more data’ some providers use probabilistic identification.  As the name implies this technique relies on less reliable data points and use models to indicate that the activity in question is ‘probably’ for a particular consumer.  In my opinion CMOs should stay clear of using these techniques when building the customer views.

Concerning dashboards…4Cite’s services are geared towards identifying consumers and triggering real-time, relevant messaging – all within our customer’s existing vendor stack.  We are not looking to replace vendor relationships that our customers have and, in almost all cases, directly feed our clients existing platforms with our data.  This approach has been well received because our clients don’t have to learn how to navigate yet another set of interfaces or reports.  They can harness the same tools and technologies that they are already familiar with.

MTS: With the recent changes in data privacy policies, how do you see advanced visitor identification and tracking platforms delivering personalization?
Privacy is always a concern but keep in mind that most marketers are using data collection as a way to better communicate with their customers, not to offend them.  Consumers have expectations, too. They have come to expect to be communicated with in a way that is timely and relevant to them. They tend to respond better to marketing efforts that appeal to their wants and needs. Similarly, they are quick to opt out of campaigns that are generic and repetitive in nature.

From a data collection perspective, we advise staying away from intrusive technologies and make sure that consumers can opt out at any time. Privacy policies should also be clear and transparent. We advise against long and hard to understand policies and favor clearly worded, easy to understand policies.  The privacy landscape, as we see it today, favors marketers that respect the relationship they have with their customers.  They tend to operate in a permission-based mindset and make opting out a readily available option.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
We tend to watch new trends and potential channel opportunities more than we do individual startups.  We are currently exploring Amazon’s latest Advertiser Audience announcement.  We are also watching LiveIntent and their ability to deliver ads is unique in the industry.  We feel that both companies provide meaningful ways to deliver relevant, personalized messages.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We believe our marketing stack provides our clients with a competitive advantage that is not available from other marketing service providers.   We are the only solutions provider that combines advanced customer identification services with multi-channel real-time message deployment. In addition, we do all of this without requiring our clients to change their existing vendor stack.

To help shed more light on these differences, let’s start with our customer identification service – CrossLink^TM.  CrossLink^TM leverages the data network we have built across our retail client base.  This is significant market differentiator for a few reasons.

• First, there is massive scale. The network – branded The 4Cite Data Network^TM – monitors over 1.3 Billion email sends and over 800 million retail page views per month.  Our approach is different than others in the space because we focus on traffic that is purchase oriented.  The visits and linkages we collect are not only substantial from a scale perspective but they also represent consumers that are showing shopping behavior.
• Second, CrossLink^TM uses Deterministic techniques to identify visitors. That means that there is an extraordinarily high confidence level that the linkages we create are correct. Many of the other identity service companies use Probabilistic techniques.  They are by definition less accurate and although they may prove satisfactory for banner ad programs, they should not be used for CRM initiatives.

Identification is hugely important but by itself does not generate ROI. In order to be of value, once a consumer is identified they need to be communicated with in a relevant and timely manner. We find it interesting that most companies that offer Identification services don’t also provide services that enable their clients to generate revenue.

This is our other main point of distinction in the marketplace. Our Interaction Hub^TM is seamlessly integrated into CrossLink^TM and can trigger real-time campaigns in a number of outlets (email, light boxes, Facebook audiences, On-demand post cards, etc.).  We can even use it to generate product recommendations, offer recommendations and drive other dialogues via our LiveContent^TM service.

When combined, our technologies have been a game changer in influencing purchasing activity. The potential use cases are almost endless and we have helped our clients in managing their acquisition, retention, and reactivation campaigns. We consistently hear from our clients that we increase their campaign revenues 20% after the first 30 days of implementation and more as the program continues.

Another unique aspect of our stack is that our services are really easy to implement. We have developed API integrations with the leading ESPs and our services use a variety of technologies that integrate with a host of other marketing providers for website customization, real-time marketing database updates, and social advertising. We even make identification and engagement data available to the browser so it can be leveraged by our client’s website development team as well as third party tools.

We see ourselves as an extension of our clients’ marketing stack and, in the end, we are partner agnostic. Our goal is to provide identity and engagement data to our clients to use however they see fit.  Whether we trigger campaigns on their behalf or simply provide data for them to execute themselves, our goal is to simply add value.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
We had a retailer that was experiencing declining performance with their bulk email campaigns.  As the number of their mobile email opens grew, sales fell at almost the same rate. The client made a significant effort to improve the mobile experience but that had very little effect. This client came to 4Cite in hopes to find a solution. Before we get into the solution, I’d like to share some perspectives with regard to marketing on mobile devices. It is clear that almost every potential shopper has one. It is also clear that they spend a lot of time using these devices. That might lead you to conclude that emails read on a mobile device would perform well.  The truth is, that is not really the case. Think about all of the times you check email on your phone. Do you check it while waiting to pick you your son or daughter from soccer practice? At the airport while waiting to board a flight? Maybe even while walking to your next meeting? Now ask yourself if you actually had any shopping intent at those times. Probably not.

That’s why 4Cite created the Shopping Elsewhere™ Email Trigger.  This is a service that looks for your customers as they are exhibiting shopping behavior and triggers an email (in real-time) while he or she is in shopping mode. We accomplish this though The 4Cite Data Network (Keep in mind that our tags are in 1,300,000,000 emails per month and are fired more than 800,000,000 page views per month on retail websites).  The result, we see double digit increases in performance. Also, since we have API integration with the leading ESPs, we trigger that email on our client’s existing email platform. There is no need to warm up other IPs or worry about establishing another email sending reputation. We have a number of clients that are using this technology with great success.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
AI or Machine Learning is an area of opportunity for marketers.  As we discussed earlier, relevant and timely messaging is not only a good practice, it is becoming a consumer expectation. AI can assist with improving this type of personalization. That said, AI is 100% dependent on the accuracy and timeliness of the data that feeds it. In preparing for an AI-centric world, my advice would be to start today and evaluate all of your data collection processes. Start with customer identification and then move on to engagement details. If you aren’t properly identifying your customers, the data you associate with them is meaningless and worse yet, any AI generated messaging may actually perform worse than ‘unintelligent’ messaging. Data is king – focus on getting that right first.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Organized. Like most executives today, time is in high demand and is in short supply. I like to set aside time to tackle big picture items in my mind and am diligent in making that happen. It is important to me to take time to reflect and contemplate on our business.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
In addition to the Microsoft suite, which I can’t see anyone living without, I am somewhat partial to an app called Wunderlist. It is a basic but effective task management application.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I always end the day with the same final task…ensuring that I lay out my work plan for the next day. That way I can go to sleep at the end of the night knowing exactly where to begin in the morning. The day may not go as planned, but I take solace in having a plan of attack before the actual work day starts.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I tend to do most of my reading online. I can’t say I am an avid book reader, instead, I search for opinion pieces on various ‘topics of the day’. As you can imagine, almost anything related to digital marketing always peaks my interest.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received—your secret sauce?
Always keep your eye on the prize…providing services that your customers actually want and need. All too often I see companies that build great technology but it doesn’t completely resonate with the customer’s immediate needs. One of the best feelings is when a customer says “Finally, that is exactly what I was looking for. Why isn’t anyone else offering this?”

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Echoing the sentiments above, I think we do a great job putting ourselves in our customer’s shoes when developing our capabilities. We have a long history servicing retailers and continually work with them to understand their needs and challenges. Although those discussions may not prompt an immediate thought for future product development, they have indeed been the inspiration for every success we have had.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Jeff Bezos

MTS: Thank you Bob! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role at Beachfront and how you got here.(what inspired you to start a programmatic video company)
I am the Founder and CEO. I started Beachfront because I saw the power of video to connect people from around the world, in many different ways. We believe that access to video should remain universal and free, and as a result, a vast majority of video will need to be ad-supported. Beachfront is a video advertising platform that supports this mission.

MTS: Given how quickly programmatic video ad strategies have been accepted, how do you see this market evolving over the next few years?
Programmatic is “growing up” quickly. In a few years, I don’t expect it to be called “programmatic” anymore. That will be a given. We will just be transacting advertising via automated means, period.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
The next big phase in technology, in all sectors, will be Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, Machine Learning. As it relates to advertising, Machine Learning will give us the ability to more accurately find the most desirable audience for brands, automatically.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge for startups to integrate a programmatic ad platform like Beachfront in to their stack?
Integrating a new platform has become very simple. The biggest challenge today is understanding the most effective way to use the tools available. There is still a lot to learn in programmatic as the standards and new technologies are evolving quickly, but startups can be adaptable.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
RebelAI

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Our video content marketing is our own platform, Beachfront Reach. To reach the OTT / cord-cutting audience, we use Rise. For Inbound Marketing, we use Hubspot. Other than that, I believe that the marketing stack is continually evolving to meet the demands of our customers.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
Beachfront runs so many campaigns that it is difficult to pick just one. But one in particular, which has resulted in a lot of repeat business, has been an awareness campaign for a major food chain. Not only was the campaign super effective in creating awareness, we were able to use our mobile expertise to properly polygon geo-fence the right audience, at the right time for some great KPIs.

Our KPIs range from core ones such as view completion rate to viewability, to in-demo audience, to foot traffic. We are flexible and always focus on the brand outcome as the No. 1 success metric.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
Reading books. Currently, I am diving deep into Deep Learning, by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville. It’s an extensive read on the topic, comprehensively covering a lot of what deep learning can do for business.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Constant.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Honestly, I use whatever tools are available. I am pliable and can adapt.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I float around the office and take any available desk. Not only does the change of scenery work, but it also starts unexpected and exciting conversations that I would have not had if I would always been in my office.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
As mentioned, I’m in the middle of reading through Deep Learning. I read mostly non-fiction books. There is way too much to learn.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the very good.” is something that my first boss, Eli Wylen, used to say. Meaning, you can’t always be perfect. It is important to get customer feedback in the process of creating and refining your product.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Hard work, tenacity, and ability to adapt & learn while remaining focused.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Manny Puentes, Founder & CEO of RebelAI

MTS: Thank you Frank! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? (What inspired you to be a part of a technology innovation company?)
I’m currently the Chief Marketing Officer for Act-On Software. I started my career years ago in high tech at a small 30-person company in a web marketing role. Over the years, I held various roles in marketing, spending the bulk of my career leading product marketing and management teams at Stellent, Oracle, and Salesforce. Most recently, I was VP Marketing for the Salesforce Data.com business unit, eventually taking on the general manager (GM) role. Now as CMO at Act-On, I have a fantastic charter, focused on defining our go-to-market strategy, building the brand, generating demand, and expanding the customer relationship to impact retention, product adoption, and customer loyalty. It’s a role that’s rewarding as well as challenging – but I’ve been enjoying every minute.

I decided to make the move to Act-On for a few reasons. First, the market opportunity – the chance to enter one of the fastest-growing technology markets (marketing automation) and help steer a truly dynamic player in the space (a category-leader according to Forrester, four times recognized as one of Deloitte’s fastest-growing companies in North America). Second, the product – Act-On built an intuitive and easy to use marketing automation platform that customers loved, and that could scale to meet the needs of large implementations — supporting total database sizes in the millions. Third, the fun of the role itself. The best part about being CMO at a marketing automation company like Act-On, is that my team and I are essentially our company’s target buyers; we use our solution day in and day out. The entire company (from Tech & Products, to Sales to Customer Success) is interested in my team, the structure, our challenges, our successes, and how we solve problems and why. It gives us an opportunity to be our own best customer use case — and be a voice in helping to improve the platform for our customers.

MTS: Given the shifting dynamic of marketing automation toward delivering an enriched customer experience, how are modern marketing tactics identified, measured, tracked and reported for ROI?
The way we see it, marketing automation works best when leveraged as a shared workspace for a marketing organization – a centralized hub for programs across the key marketing functional goals (building brand awareness, driving demand generation, improving customer retention and creating upsell opportunities) – so it only makes sense to apply the technology and measure its impact by individual marketing functions. Brand marketing, demand generation, and customer marketing, each with their piece of the puzzle to mind, each with a segment of the customer journey to steward. And then ultimately tying it back to revenue, so marketers truly track and measure their impact to the company’s bottom line.

MTS: How should marketers plan the adoption of social selling and social media Account-based Marketing (ABM) to maximize their revenue opportunities?
We’ve found social selling and social media Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to be an effective tool for identifying and nurturing key stakeholders with content, within a given account. For targeting, identify people based on title, job level, and in a role to make or influence purchases. We’ve seen success when used at various stages of the funnel (top to bottom) – as long as the content offered is appropriate for that specific stage.

On the acquisition and awareness end, this might mean creating lists on LinkedIn based on titles you’re focused on (coordinators and managers active on the site, that list their credentials in their bios) and targeting ads accordingly; the same might apply when focused on customer retention, adoption, and loyalty end as well. For tracking existing customers, you can also use social tools such as Twitter to identify who has made support requests, identify potential advocates, and engage directly with people in a position to renew or renege on their contracts.

MTS: How do CMOs allocate budgets for audience segmentation and sales analytics to optimize all the stages of Customer Experience?
The Act-On marketing automation platform enables CMOs to personalize customer engagements at scale across the customer lifecycle (from the initial brand awareness, through purchasing, and then through customer renewal and advocacy). The solution also empowers CMOs to measure the impact of marketing efforts tied to a company’s revenue. With this platform, marketers segment their customer base using personas or behavior data, send messages and offers to individuals, and track engagement and impact to the pipeline. Additionally, Act-On is continually adding new capabilities that will allow marketers to build Adaptive Journeys leveraging Machine Learning to understand buyers’ behaviors, preferences, and interests, and automatically adapt messages, timing, and delivery channels to the individual. When this level of insight into message and segment engagement becomes available, CMOs can make better budget allocation decisions.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to achieve transparency and brand safety in their omnichannel marketing campaigns?
I think it’s important to have some level of centralized ownership and structure for your marketing tech stack. With the number of technology point solutions that are available in the marketplace and the ease of subscribing to all the various services — it’s easy for departments to wind up with scattered technologies across the department. The challenge is that marketing and branding assets end up being stored across these systems and campaigns are created and executed across so many different systems. And if there is no centralized oversight or centralized engine to manage customer engagement — it becomes difficult to see all the issues and ensure that you have the correct branding and messaging across all the channels.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
I think all the startups in the predictive analytics space are interesting and fun to watch.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We’re big believers in drinking our own champagne, so we use Act-On’s adaptive marketing automation platform as a centralized hub for our brand marketing, demand generation, and customer marketing programs. This functions as the foundation to my martech stack which connects to other technologies including: web content management, CRM, tools for A/B testing and analytics, connectors for account-based marketing, data enrichment and cleansing tools, email signature marketing, web conference tools, video platform, live chat, predictive analytics, SEO software, and a customer content platform.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
This past year, we decided to rethink our approach to marketing automation – to identify new use cases for the technology and a supporting framework for content. Our goal was to engage and better support CMOs at mid-market companies. We had seen these leaders increasingly tasked with stewarding the customer experience at every stage (awareness, acquisition, retention, expansion). We wanted to better highlight how our marketing automation platform could support the organizations at this level.

We first started with a survey of more than 250 senior-level marketers nationwide (both B2B and B2C firms). We wanted to find out how they prioritized their programs – if demand generation (historically where MA was best applied) won out, or if there were other functions that took its place. Next, we created a benchmark report summarizing the findings, converted into whitepapers, webinars, even a podcast series. The result? A broader framework that showcases the value of marketing automation beyond demand generation – from building brand, to generating demand, and expanding the customer relationship.

Assets specific to brand marketing, demand generation, and customer marketing instantly outperformed expectations – for syndicated brand content, 1600+ page-views and 1000+ unique visitors in just a month’s time; 580+ page-views and 960+ unique visitors for syndicated demand content in the same period; 500+ page-views and 550+ unique visitors for syndicated expand content, also in that window. In the year since the campaign’s launch, web leads rose by 19 percent, and the total number of mid-market leads (the campaign’s target) rose more than 70%. Renewals increased, with marketing driving 76% of the total pipeline. This was a successful digital campaign and these efforts better positioned Act-On as a critical solution for mid-market CMOs.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
AI is going to have a huge impact on how we work, the customer journeys we build, and the programs we run in the future. I don’t believe AI will replace marketers, but these new tools and systems powered by machine learning will become more of a “co-pilot” to help us make better decisions and do some of the heavy lifting so that we can be more creative and strategic. But if you think about this new world of marketing, algorithms will help us make decisions based on a variety of data (customer profiles, engagement data, product information, usage data, etc.). Marketing leaders need to make sure the company is set up to take advantage of this, gain a competitive edge, and generate more revenue. To do this, they must put in place the right marketing tech stack. Implementing a marketing automation platform as the foundation is key – so that companies can start tracking, scoring, measuring, connecting and learning from customer and prospect interactions. Understanding their engagement with key messages, channels and timing is important. Plus connecting this engagement data to customer data (CRM system) is essential so that marketing leaders can have a holistic view of the customer journey across influencers, prospects and customers. And finally, marketing leaders need to make sure that as their organizations continue to grow, they stay vigilant in maintaining great data quality. Because if one day algorithms will use this data to make decisions, they will want it to be based on accurate information.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
“Collaboratively.” Teamwork makes the dream work!

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Google Maps, Waze, Evernote (with Skitch), LastPass, FlyDelta App, Lyft App, Google Calendar (most importantly the ability to share calendars) and Google Contacts.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I have my assistant block out half a day every other week – we call them “Michelle Days.” Basically, it gives me an opportunity to better manage my time and get things done. If I don’t take the time to structure my calendar, it’s easy to suddenly have every day filled up with back-to-back meetings. This ensures that I prioritize time to think through challenges, build out plans, develop new strategies or simply research and get caught up on trends in the industry.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I’m currently reading The Atlantic monthly magazine on the airplane. I also just purchased a book called “Raising Your Spirited Child.” 🙂 I consume information through so many channels – email, website searches, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, books and magazines.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“The only thing you have complete control over – is how you choose to respond to something.” We don’t fully control events in life, their outcomes, what others think or how they feel. The more you try to control these things, the more “out of control” and frustrated you become. For example, you can make someone apologize, but you can’t make them feel remorseful. If you need remorse to feel better – you could end up very disappointed. If you let accidents, failures, and negative comment from others ruin your day or make you stressed out, angry, or upset – you let other people and the situation have power over you. Realize that you choose what actions you need to take and how you want to interpret the intent of others and the situation. It is very empowering. You can always choose happiness. Your response is your responsibility. I believe knowing this and doing this can make a huge difference between success vs. failure.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I believe in being positive and focusing on the positive. There are a lot of ups and downs in life and in your career. It takes work to maintain, but it’s remarkably helpful in building coalitions, collaborating across departments, leading teams, powering through challenging times, and giving yourself the courage to continue taking risks after failures.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Andy Zimmerman, Evergage CMO

MTS: Thank you Oliver! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.