Mobile Advertising TechBytes with Changsu Lee and Benjamin Chen at Tapjoy

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July 28, 2017

Mobile Advertising TechBytes with Changsu Lee and Benjamin Chen at Tapjoy

In May, Tapjoy, the provider of Maximum Impact Platform™ for mobile advertisers and app developers, announced a key partnership with an Oracle-owned digital ad search engine –Moat. The partnership provides Moat’s independent viewability and attention measurement for video ads on Tapjoy’s in-app inventory. We spoke to Changsu Lee, SVP, Platforms and Ben Chen SVP & GM, Developer Relations at Tapjoy to understand how rewarded advertising helps app developers keep users engaged longer.

MTS: How does the Maximum Impact Platform™ provide mobile engagement and monetization services?

Ben Chen: Our Tapjoy Maximum Impact Platform™ is a unified SDK that is powered by data science, marketing automation and industry-leading ad units to help app developers segment their user base, deepen engagement and generate more revenue. It uses predictive analytics to help developers understand what type of promotional campaign to serve to which user and when. For instance, you can target engaged users (those who play regularly, opt in to rewarded ads, make in-app purchases, etc.) with a completely different set of promotions from nonengaged users (those whose participation is more passive, and are therefore less valuable). This level of targeting helps increase conversions, improve user experience and drive better engagement with the app.

MTS: What are the current dynamics in the relationship between rewarded ads and user retention?

Changu Lee: As this latest report shows, rewarded ads help drive retention in mobile apps. We’ve always suspected this to be the case because we’ve seen it play out anecdotally and through individual case studies, but this is the first network-wide analysis that we’ve conducted to prove our hypothesis. The reason for this dynamic is that rewarded ads serve as an excellent introduction to an app’s virtual economy. Rewarded videos, in particular, are especially easy to complete, and once the user has more currency to spend in the game they can access more content and do more things, which lets them experience the app on a deeper level.

MTS: What are the factors that affect retention among mobile app users?

Changsu Lee: There are a lot of factors that go into app retention. First and foremost is probably the quality of the app itself. Does it meet user expectations and do what they want it to do? If not, they won’t stick around very long, but that is the base requirement for users to continue using an app after they first download it. After that, there are factors such as the quality of the tutorial in explaining how to use the app, the quality of the First Time User Experience (FTUE) and how positive the user’s first session is, whether or not there are bugs in the app, the overall quality and ease-of-use of the User Interface, and so much more.

MTS: What is the impact of video advertisements on mobile app campaigns/retention?

Changsu Lee: As we learned from our research, videos ads have the strongest correlation with app retention of any of the ad formats studied. Players who watched just one rewarded video during their first week had a 30-day retention rate of 53 percent — an increase of more than 300 percent over the average 30-day retention rate. For players that watched seven videos in their first week, the 30-day retention rate was 71 percent, which was more than 450 percent greater than the average.

MTS: How do you see Mobile Advertising technologies integrating with traditional MarTech stack – Email, CRM, Automation, cloud, etc.?

Ben Chen: We see AdTech and MarTech merging within mobile apps to form a synergistic relationship. Historically, ad-tech and mar-tech clearly addressed different segments of the digital landscape. The former was designed to attract audiences, while the latter was for selling products and services to existing customers. But as mobile game developers started embracing the freemium model, these lines began to blur. Soon, developers will be able to factor in ad metrics like placement and frequency into app retention and monetization analysis, allowing them to automate control of their ad stacks and optimize results for a variety of consumer profiles. All of this is possible because of the fact that on mobile, every action is measurable and actionable.

MTS: The world is steadily growing from small screen to ‘no screen’ experience. How do you see Tapjoy shaping up for this upcoming trend?

Ben Chen: It’s probably a little too early for us to start building monetization solutions for “no screen” developers, but it is definitely something we are keeping an eye on. It will be interesting to watch how the market matures. We are also intrigued by advances in Artificial Intelligence that create no-screen opportunities — like what Google and Amazon are doing with Echo and Alexa. You can be assured that as the market grows, we will be there to help app developers turn their passions into real businesses.

MTS: What are the disruptions you would like to see in mobile advertising by 2020?

Ben Chen: I think that we’ve only just begun to tap into the potential of Artificial Intelligence in terms of its ability to create a better, more personalized and overall more meaningful ad experience, so it will be really interesting to see how that disruption plays out over the next few years. I would also like to see mobile ad creatives continue to evolve by delivering fun, engaging experiences that are native to app content. For instance, we are seeing playables and game-like rich media ads gain popularity, and consumers are spending a lot of time engaging with them. I think there’s a lot more that the industry can do to bring similar innovations to market and continue experimenting with new formats.

MTS: What are the top markets for Mobile Advertising technology providers?

Ben Chen: For the world that we play in — rewarded advertising — mobile games have been leading the way because they were the first to truly embrace the freemium model. But we are quickly seeing other types of apps — from news and media apps to healthcare, finance and productivity apps — jumping on board as well.

MTS: What is the role of content management systems used in Mobile apps and advertising? Is there any programmatic or AI algorithm working behind the content?

Changsu Lee: It’s true that more and more app developers are turning to Content Management Systems to help them deal with the growing demand for constantly updated, timely and personalized content inside their apps. This is especially true for content-heavy apps like news and media apps or retail apps. And yes, AI is working behind the scenes to drive better targeting and personalization through content management systems, just as it is with nearly all content and advertising in this day and age.

Tapjoy Research: Mobile Gaming Apps Provide Higher Brand Engagement Than Social Apps

MTS: How do you see AI technologies and advertising converging in mobile-first businesses?

Changsu Lee: AI technologies enable mobile advertisers and mobile-first businesses to deliver ads that are more targeted to each user’s individual tastes and preferences. At Tapjoy, for instance, we use AI to build profiles based on device-level data — using anonymous data, of course — that help us predict which category of ads a user is likely to be interested in, or how likely they are to complete a certain type of ad. This particular use of AI, to improve targeting and personalization, benefits all involved — app developers, advertisers, and the consumers viewing the ads — so it’s a critical strategy for the future of the entire mobile ad industry

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us , Ben and Changsu.

Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Five Keys to Managing Change

By

Relationship One

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July 28, 2017

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Whether you’re managing a modern marketing transformation, rolling out a new lead flow process, or simply re-painting your office, change comes with difficulty. No matter how great the vision, how fantastic the plan, or how awesome the paint, change is HARD. Any change you implement will be wrought with challenges. Despite the adversity, as long as you remember that obstacles are not roadblocks, you can and will succeed. With a clear vision and a strong set of tactics for managing change, you will effectively get where you’re going.

Change management remains a hot topic in the business world. Countless books, resources, and college courses are dedicated to it. Although there are many sound approaches, here are five key actions that I’ve seen make a huge difference when rolling out change in any organization.

Have a Roadmap

You need a vision. You need to know exactly where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. The most important part of your vision is the ability to spread your passion so others, specifically your key stakeholders, believe in it as equally as you. How will this change positively impact them and the company? What will you/they/the business gain from this change? The key is sharing the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). Never underestimate the power of connecting the dots for each person involved. Tell them exactly how they will benefit.

As important as vision is to the success of your initiative, you will fail without a detailed plan. Before embarking on any initiative, clearly document what you plan to accomplish. You need to explain, in detail, your objectives, milestones, actions, resources, timeline, metrics, etc. Keep in mind, you won’t have it all worked out. Consider this plan a roadmap for how you will get to where you need to be. The final plans won’t be possible until you’ve done your due diligence in discovery with key stakeholders.

As part of your planning, list any and all potential issues and bottlenecks, and devise alternative solutions if these problems arise. Don’t wait for issues or objectives to be brought to your attention. Have your own objection-handling guide so you’re prepared in advance.

Know Your Stakeholders

Although you are leading the project, you cannot succeed without buy-in and support from everyone affected by the change. Your initial goal is to share your vision and objectives with all key stakeholders, but you’ll need their insight, ideas, and support to add perspective to your plans. As you draft your initial roadmap, list all key stakeholders. Who will be affected by this change? Who will benefit? Who will need to execute certain parts of the process? You may find it easier to categorize individuals by function, level in the organization, business unit, product line, etc. to structure your thinking.

Once you have your list of stakeholders, make a note of which ones may serve as internal champions. You’ll want to spend extra time securing their buy-in so they can spread their support for your undertaking. Once identified, draft personas for these key individuals. Define their current role, proposed role, required process changes, etc. Document their needs, challenges, desires, and potential objectives. Keep in mind that much of this information will require conversations and interviews with these individuals.

Recommended read: Five Ways to Get Personal with Your Marketing

The reason for drafting personas is two-fold:

– It will ensure that your process and plan addresses the needs of all stakeholders as well as the organization. One person can’t know it all. Take the time to learn from others so your plan will be that much stronger.

– When you include key stakeholders in the planning process, you’re naturally acquiring their buy-in. They will be much more supportive when they’ve played a role in the development. When their needs have been addressed and their concerns have been taken into account, an individual’s participation and adoption is much higher. Remember, the more they see the WIIFM, the more they will buy in.

Conduct Lots of Training

Now that you’ve developed your roadmap, gone through discovery with your stakeholders, and finalized your detailed plan of action, your next key step is training. Everyone involved in the process needs to understand their role, their importance, and of course, what’s in it for them. They also need to understand the details behind execution. Review the overall plan, expectations, and goals with the entire team. Each individual should get detailed training on every step of the process. In some cases, an SLA may be required. In others, detailed documentation and consistent reviews will suffice.

As part of your training, be clear about the feedback loop you’re implementing. Everyone should know how, when, and to whom they should ask questions. Make sure to include opportunities for them to share what’s working and what’s not. In some cases, like with a formal SLA, this will be clear. In others, it may not be as obvious. Take it upon yourself to remove ambiguity in the process. Ensuring there is an open and continuous feedback loop is imperative for the success of your program.

Don’t forget to follow-up regularly to ensure the process is being followed and that no questions have arisen.

Get Some Quick Wins

It’s always important to think long-term, but it’s equally important to get some quick wins. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Look for short-term successes that can be felt throughout the organization. Maybe you can tackle a campaign, automate a difficult process, or streamline an old process to show value right away. It’s easier for people to get on board when they see the WIIFM quickly.

Once your plan is developed, break long-term goals into milestones. Break your milestones into short-term goals. Break your short-term goals into actions. Break your actions into tasks. You get the idea. The goal is to make your long-term goals as tangible as possible. Design your short-term actions so that each one has a measure of success that people can feel.

Most importantly, celebrate success! Especially in the beginning, celebrate every win, every efficiency gain, every conversion, every everything. Highlight how Mary from Sales or Joe from Customer Service or Luke from Marketing contributed to the success. Reinforce your message, your process, and your people whenever you publicize results to the organization. Gain traction quickly so you can really take flight.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

At the essence of each point iterated is the notion that you have to communicate. At each stage of the process, you need to communicate results, changes, enhancements, growth plans, etc. Communication does not stop after rollout. In fact, it is just beginning.

Devise a clear communication plan up front. Consider each stakeholder and what he/she needs and wants to know. In the spirit of marketing automation, personalize your communication to each persona. Don’t send the same message to everyone. Communicate what matters most to each individual. Consider various modes of communication as well. How and when you deliver the message can be equally as important as what you deliver. Different individuals may need to hear your communication at different times and in different ways. Include these variations in your plan.

As you develop your messaging, keep in mind that you will continue to have stakeholders at various phases along the adoption curve. Some will be champions, some will be laggards, and the rest will fall along the spectrum. Craft your message knowing that each individual needs to hear various messages – congratulations on successes, deeper explanations of WIIFM, potential solutions to current challenges, etc.

In your communication plan, include the recipients of your message, their potential adoption rate, pertinent messaging, channels of communication, timing, etc. Detail as much as possible so that you’re in a better position to continue your communication over the long term.

Also Read: Five Successful Digital Campaigns

TechBytes with Rami Essaid, Co-Founder and CEO at Distil Networks

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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July 27, 2017

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TechBytes with Rami Essaid, Co-Founder and CEO at Distil Networks

In May, global leader in bot detection and mitigation, Distil acquired real-time human detection company Are You A Human (AYAH). The acquisition was followed by the launch of Distil Bot Discovery for Google Analytics—a product that leverages AYAH’s technology. We spoke to Rami Essaid, Co-Founder & CEO of Distil Networks to understand how bots use browser automation to interact with websites, simulating human interactions.

MTS: What was the idea behind conceiving Distil, a bot detection company?

Rami Essaid: I’ve always had the entrepreneurial bug. After selling my first company, I went to work at a web security company. I was struck by how many customers were asking for a solution to combat malicious bots bombarding their websites and was inspired to face this problem head on. When Distil was founded in 2011, no one was talking about bots. Now, we’re seeing bots discuss everywhere, from how they are being used in major hacks to their impact on social media. Even Congress passed the BOTS Act in December 2016 to combat the use of bots to scalp tickets online. It’s become a bigger issue than I could have ever imagined.

MTS: Distil acquired Are You A Human last week. How did Distil identify AYAH to be a part of its offering? How did you prepare for the new addition?

Rami Essaid: When we founded Distil, we aimed to build the most comprehensive solution on the market to detect and mitigate threats associated with malicious bots. Are You A Human’s technology and method for identifying bots is different, but complementary to Distil. We added their patented biometric data analysis technology to make our bot detection even better, but also added new data from millions of new sites and users. Through the acquisition, we are also excited to onboard a team of experienced software engineers and data scientists who have dedicated the past seven years to understanding how online businesses have been plagued by the bot problem.

MTS: How are bots for web and APIs different? How does Distil Bot Discovery for Google Analytics work?

Rami Essaid: The difference between bots on websites and APIs is technical, but the end goal is the same. They are seeking to abuse your web application using an automated threat to achieve that goal. In the past, bots simply went to websites because they were the only way to interact with your data and system. As more sites use web APIs, attackers are looking to exploit this new area.

Bots that target websites will generally use browser automation or headless browsing software to interact with websites in a simulated browser session, allowing it to penetrate deeper into applications (such as sections behind the login page) and avoid basic protections.

If the person behind the bot finds an API that delivers the data they covet, they can program their bot to interface directly with an API, bypassing the website altogether. If the API is unsecured, the bot can be programmed to make API calls and extract the data without any impediments.

Bots make up almost 40% of traffic on the internet, but Google Analytics bot filtering only removes less than 1% of them. With the acquisition of Are You A Human, we also launched Distil Bot Discovery for Google Analytics, a one-click offering that integrates with Google Analytics to find and filter bot traffic. With this plugin, Distil analyzes how users interact on a website, differentiates whether each user is a human or a bot, and drives that data directly into Google Analytics. This increases the accuracy of Google Analytics reports that filter out bot data, meaning users can make better and more accurate business decisions.

MTS: What are Braintrust and Bot Defenders?

Rami Essaid: Braintrust refers to the level of talent of the employees at both Distil and Are You A Human. The people we have on board fighting the bot problem are truly experts in the field and the best at what they do. These people are the best Bot Defenders in the business.

MTS: How are marketing and advertising campaigns affected by bots?

Rami Essaid: When bots visit a website, they trigger an impression, and also pick up cookies. That means that any advertising campaign you run is wasting money by showing impressions to bots, who will never make a purchase. And, since bots pick up cookies, you’ll waste even more money in retargeting or audience extension campaigns. Bots that hit your site lead to inaccurate visitor tracking and reporting, which renders business marketing tools ineffective and distorts performance metrics. This makes it incredibly difficult for marketers and advertisers to determine the success of their campaigns.

MTS: Why should CMOs integrate Bot Defense as part of their Martech and Adtech investments?

Rami Essaid: CMOs should absolutely integrate Bot Defense, and consider how they attack their organization’s bot problem as a whole. When bots are flooding a website instead of humans, advertising resources are drained, and traffic and ad revenue are diverted to the bad guys’ sites. That means not only loss of ad revenue but damaged reputations. We enable digital publishers to determine an honest impression of their website’s traffic.

MTS: Would advancements in AI and programmatic, increase the threats posed by bots?

Rami Essaid: Absolutely! As the programmatic ecosystem grows and gets more complicated, there is more incentive to build sophisticated bots to game the system. As you lose visibility to exactly where your ad is running, and who you bought it from, it gets easier for bad actors to jump in the middle of that exchange and create phony bot impressions that are harder to track and root out. Many bots don’t care about advertising. They visit sites to hack accounts, steal content, or verify credit card numbers. But these bots still count as an impression when they hit a site, and create lots of ad waste, even though it’s not intentional.

MTS: What are the analytics that Distil provides pertaining to the mitigation of the risks posed by bots?

Rami Essaid: First of all, we offer the Bot Discovery for Google Analytics plugin that allows any website to see the proportion of bots on their website. Within minutes a business can easily and clearly see the amount of bots versus human traffic. Knowing you have a problem is the first step to solving it – Bot Discovery provides this visibility.

When businesses deploy the full Bot Defense for Web product they also receive deep analytics into bot behavior. By seeing the human traffic compared with good and bad bots, they see the variations, and traffic spikes, over time. Amongst the many analytics reports, Distil includes an understanding of the false positives generated by revealing how many CAPTCHAs were solved. This audit provides deep visibility into the efficacy of Distil as a bot mitigation solution. Amongst the many other reports available, we also provide rate limit recommendations based upon predictive analytics.

Another key measure is our proactive defense using machine learning technology that predicts a bot based on correlating dozens of dynamic classifications as well as pinpoints behavioral anomalies specific to a certain site’s unique traffic patterns. This is in stark contrast to the reactive, rules-based approach inherent to web application firewalls.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us Rami. We look forward to having at MarTech Series again for more insights.

Stay tuned for more on business insights on marketing automation, content marketing, video ad tech, programmatic and header-bidding technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

4 Reasons Your Business Needs Predictive Selling

By

Absolutdata

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July 27, 2017

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Predictive Analytics Usage Is Set For Tremendous Growth. In This Blog, We’ll Look At Some Of The Top Reasons Why Companies Are Bringing Predictive Selling Into Their Sales Technology Lineup.

Predictive analytics is designed to forecast prospects’ future behavior and decisions. As we all know, what’s true today is not necessarily going to be true six months from now. Prospects’ priorities change. Their business challenges shift. The right predictive analytics solution will give you complete visibility into your dynamic buyer universe, even as the landscape continues to evolve.

Just what is predictive selling? Simply put, it’s the ability to more precisely forecast a customer’s future behavior regarding purchase decisions- What will they buy, and when will they buy, based on their past behavior. Of course, there’s no sure-fire way to foretell the future, but predictive analysis can give valuable insight into the probabilities.

Four Reasons You Need Predictive Selling

What can predictive analytics do for your sales? Take a look at the following four benefits of using predictive selling:

Boosting Sales, Not Marketing Spend

Predictive analytics gives your company the information needed to reach customers with the right message at the right time. How does this work? By monitoring buying signals from your marketing technology stack and third-party data sources, predictive analytics accurately determines the buying stage of accounts and prospects. This data gives sales teams a way to implement data-centric scoring models to surface and prioritize their contacts.

The bottom line is that by analyzing customer behavior you have a better idea if their next probable action will be a purchase or not. You can use this input to create a more realistic plan and budget spend wisely.

Targeting the Right Decision Makers

Most sales teams can only be sure that a prospect is planning to purchase when that person reaches out themselves. As a result, sales waste time and money on untargeted tactics, hoping that broad blasts will spark enough engagement to stimulate demand and help nurture prospects through the sales funnel.

Conversely, predictive analytics uses sophisticated modeling to accurately identify targets as they’re entering the buying journey. This allows sales teams to reach the right members of the decision team with relevant messaging and calls-to-action.

Learning from Past and Present

When using analytics to assess your company’s performance, the majority of standard methods merely sum up past success or failure. But predictive analytics can learn from previous experiences, understanding mathematical trends and patterns among your data and using them to anticipate possibilities — some of which might be unexpected.

Plus, the capability to integrate social data and unstructured textual data provides profound knowledge of how consumers engage with social media and how they impact others in their social connections. This brings about the opportunity to predict churn or prospective customers based on historical data.

Guidance on next-best-action

Predictive models will help take the guesswork out of what to do next for each contact. It provides specific direction on whether to call, send an email, engage on social media or schedule a meeting to connect more successfully.

Intelligent predictions specify which products or services individual contacts are likely to purchase next. AI based insights send recommendations on how to keep buyers engaged with relevant conversation topics, KSPs and offers customized for a specific deal opportunity.

Is It Time to Reframe Your Company’s View of Predictive Analytics?

It’s important to understand how data can drive results. The best predictive analytics tools help you:

Identify prospects early in the buying process, before the competition gets to them
Determine the buying stage of all your accounts — both existing and net-new
Shed light on the most important contacts in those accounts: the true decision makers
Decide which prospects to pursue, when to pursue them, and how to promote engagement to establish a relationship
Keep the buyer engaged with relevant products, services and conversation topics

As a result, revenue goes up. Win rates go up. Customer satisfaction goes up. Business booms.

The Line Between Etailers and Retailers is Blurrier than Ever

By

Absolutdata

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July 26, 2017

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Both virtual and physical retailers are adopting an omni-channel approach by merging offline, online, and mobile capabilities—all with the aim of creating a seamless experience for shoppers.

The past two years have seen their fair share of hype about the line between online retailing and brick-and-mortar selling becoming increasingly blurred. And this trend isn’t over yet. In fact, the line just gets blurrier.

When Etail goes Retail

While it’s true that Etailers worldwide are a fast-growing breed, they feel an increasing need to not be an online-only solution for customers. Large Etailers are adding physical versions of their stores, so that customers can walk in, actually touch the products, and then order online either at home or with in-store kiosks.

Big name ecommerce players, like Amazon and eBay, have already created these showrooms to deliver physical experiences to the majority of customers that still enjoy them.

Why Physical Stores are Building Online Shops

On the other hand, physical shops are upping their game by taking the omni-channel route, a relatively new sales methodology that is gaining popularity because of the success of complementary experiences between online and offline interactions. Today’s customer wants a fully integrated shopping experience, so they can buy what they want when they want no matter where their product search started (or where the purchase will ultimately take place).

A combination of multi-channel strategies requires more technology in physical shops (like kiosks with endless-aisle solutions, product descriptions, and real customer reviews), thus blurring the line between physical shopping experiences and the wealth of data available to shoppers online.

You don’t have to hunt too far to see that this trend is expected to continue. For the first time ever, shoppers made more purchases online than in-store, with 51% of purchases being made online as of an early 2016 survey by UPS.
While offline sales still total more than online ones (just think about your monthly household needs), the number of online orders continues to grow, and it’s not too farfetched to assume that it may soon catch up in terms of sales as well.

With mobile devices are a key driver of online shopping growth, U.S. Etailers are expected to account for $523 billion in annual sales by 2020 (up 56% from 2015’s actual $335 billion). That whopping amount of predicted growth makes the future of etail look promising indeed.

Physical Store Purchases Stay Strong

The frenzied pace of growth in etail is partly due to its relatively small and humble beginnings. In other words, the only place to grow was up.

But the growth of etail doesn’t represent the full picture of modern buying trends. While online shopping is growing quickly in the billions, offline shopping still amounts to trillions spent each year.

Plus, having an inviting physical space with well-trained sales associates is a huge differentiator in a market where so many consumers are driven by experience, not price. At every price point, there’s competition, and the way retailers present themselves in person is a big opportunity to stand out and generate return business.

So while the relatively small base of online sales grows at a higher pace, physical stores have the chance to increase sales by doubling down on their existing strengths.

The big picture is not as grim for the retailers as certain stats may lead you to believe. The added complexity of choosing the right metric for comparison often casts the etailer in more favorable light.

Where the Industry is Headed

Online or offline businesses who view their counterpart as the enemy won’t succeed. Instead, cohesion is a defining factor. The future of shopping is about complementary approaches—where both types of businesses learn from each other and try to adopt new practices that they may have scoffed at years ago.

Many of today’s long-standing retailers have already started to rethink their strategies:

Wal-Mart bought ecommerce innovator Jet this year for $3 billion cash, investing more in its online presence than in expanding to new locations.
Another example of the blending of web and physical presences is Audi City. Carmakers have offered online new car configuration tools for a number of years, but Audi has taken this to a new level by creating a digital car showroom in London powered by Microsoft Surface tablets that project the customer’s designs onto large video walls.

On the other hand, online retailers are investing in brick-and-mortar stores to engage customers:

Retail giant Amazon is planning to build physical grocery stores to complement its online food delivery service
Rent the Runway is set to open its first store-within-a-store inside Neiman Marcus’ as part of a new partnership between the fashion tech startup and the luxury retailer. The move sees Neiman Marcus allowing an ostensible competitor 3,000 square feet to rent apparel and accessories to a demographic it has struggled with: millennial women. It also allows Rent the Runway, with its median customer age of 30, to get in front of an older, wealthy clientele.

More and more online retailers have opened up brick-and-mortar stores to expand their brand’s footprint and give customers a better feel for the entire product range.

Blurring the line with Access to New Technologies and Big Data

Location-based advertising is quickly proving to be a disruptive form of marketing that increases customer reach. Retail giants like Walmart, Target and Macy’s each have developed apps that allow users to search for product availability in stores nearby.

Many retailers also offer location-based coupons and deal notifications. These continued developments in technology are quickly forming the bridge between more traditional forms of marketing and digital methods, so that retailers can interact with customers in multisensory ways with a blend of online content and offline results.

The combination of physical and virtual sales is nowhere more apparent than in location-based advertising, which is already transforming the world into a “showroom without walls.” Both in-store and online channels deserve an approach that focuses more on customer engagement than purely on transactions.

Marketing is not the only department affected by these blurred lines. Customization of products is now a main focus, and it requires that suppliers sync up with retailers. Plus, with data collection taking place at every step of the customer journey, product development is up for change at every stage. Data-driven decision making will continue to be transformational.

The future of retail opens up a lot of opportunities for all brands willing to learn from both online and offline models and leverage analytics to gain insight into their customers’ buying trends.

Best Practices for Maintaining an Effective Customer Reference System

By

Susan Thomas

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July 26, 2017

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In my previous article in this series on building customer references for technology marketing, I described some of the most effective ways to ask your customers to be a part of your program – distinguishing the all too typical “can you do me a favor” request from requests that demonstrate the advantages for the customer to participate in your program. In this post, I’ll outline some systems and software that allow you to track the progress of your program and ensure your company delivers a united front.

Once you have confirmed customers that will participate in sales, marketing or PR initiatives, your long-term success will depend on the system, policies, and communication you put in place. After all, companies that depend on a single person to track customer participation and/or don’t have a system that allows the information to be shared are destined to struggle with the program. And just like with other organization-wide activities, the best systems and software for your customer reference program allow collaboration and are intuitive and easy to update.

Policies and Systems

A customer reference program requires a well thought out system that will work in your organization’s structure. Your system, and your policies that support the system, must contribute to each step in your customer reference program, including consideration for who in your organization is involved and who in the organization needs to be notified as things progress with each customer. Likely most critical to the success of the system is deciding who needs access to the information in your organization and who should be allowed to change the status of a customer.

10Fold recommends a system based on a database that allows anyone to apply search terms or filters to identify viable customers for each opportunity by geography, product deployment, sales status and even by customer satisfaction status (updated by the customer service group).

From a policy and setup perspective, the 10Fold best practice is to be inclusive with the information collected for your customer reference program. Usually individuals in the sales, customer service, and marketing organizations have vested interests in the reference program. By sharing and collaborating with this broad group, you can ensure that your company provides a consistent and united front with all of your customers. If everyone in the organization contributes information, you can also prevent mishaps that might jeopardize a contract that the sales organization has in process with an existing customer or avoid asking a customer that is experiencing technical challenges to speak publicly.

The best way to design a system is to start by asking all the groups involved in the customer reference program to nominate or approve the customers that are approached for the program. By doing this, each group involved has the opportunity to provide their thoughts on the viability of each customer considered for the program. And, once a customer enters the program, each group can check and update the status of that customer. That means that marketing, sales and customer service teams all have veto power to use customers in the program.

If a salesperson flags a customer reference record with a pending status, then marketing can hold off contacting that customer until the new contract in negotiation is completed by sales. Similarly, if a customer’s satisfaction status has changed, the customer service organization can ensure the customer is listed as pending until the technical challenges are eliminated. If a marketing team vets a customer and concludes that they simply are not consistently positive about their experiences, marketing may veto a customer to ensure colleagues in marketing and sales don’t get an unexpected result.

Another important policy to establish is when and how to say thank you to active customer references. Although you have already designed win/win opportunities for your customers, a thank you is a classy way to acknowledge your customers’ contributions. A thank you may simply be an email from a prominent company executive (perhaps the CEO) or it may be a clever gourmet food basket, gift certificate, or tickets to a popular event. Be especially careful about sending alcohol, cigars, or other gifts that may require a special interest – as the gift can backfire or offend. Whichever approach you choose, 10Fold recommends incorporating thank you gestures into your system to ensure that each customer participating is regularly recognized.

Software Options

In the best of all worlds, you can extend your CRM or sales or marketing system to incorporate customer reference fields. This allows you to ensure you are not keeping duplicate data (in separate software solutions that become silos) that can get out of synch with master systems. Don’t be confused by the referral program software – which is another platform that encourages your customers to directly make recommendations.

Of course, your organization may not have the time, money and/or resources required to modify your core CRM, sales or marketing systems. If that’s the case, consider applications such as CustomerWinHQ, a SaaS solution that makes tracking customers as simple as possible. It allows you to create a list of all of your customers in the program and it gives you opportunities to capture separate statuses for every category, by customer. It also offers easy sharing with clients and colleagues. Starting at a base price of $50/month, CustomerWinHQ charges customers based on the amount of data they store, not the number of users in the organization.

Strong Systems Ensure a Healthy Customer Reference Program

There is no doubt that a thoughtful, repeatable system that is supported by flexible database software is a great foundation for a healthy customer reference program. Most importantly, be sure to develop a system that supports information sharing and collaboration with everyone in the organization who has a vested interest. Use the system to inform your requests of these customers and to remind you to recognize active customers that may need a special thank you.

Interview with Doug Bewsher, CEO at Leadspace

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

July 26, 2017

1

[mnky_team name=”Doug Bewsher” position=” CEO at Leadspace”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/dougino” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbewsher/”]

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“I think that the change in user interactions is going to fundamentally change our way of interacting with one another.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a bit about your role at Leadspace and how you got here.

After holding the position of CMO at many companies, including Salesforce.com and Skype, I am now CEO at Leadspace – helping marketers be more effective, in contrast to being one myself!

Having lived and breathed B2B Marketing for so long, and seeing how people actually use Sales and Marketing Automation, including the successes and challenges they face, I wanted to be at the forefront of the next B2B Sales and Marketing trend towards “intelligent CRM” – bringing intelligence and analytics into these workflow systems.

MTS: How does Leadspace assist customers with audience management?

Just like B2C marketers before them, B2B marketers are moving from leads to accounts, and finally audiences. By “audiences” I mean distinct groups of companies – and more importantly, the people within companies that form buying centers and “demand centers”, to coin a term from SiriusDecisions.

Finding these audiences requires an audience management platform, which allows B2B Marketers to understand the total addressable market for their products, prioritize potential accounts, identify the specific personas, and then engage them through ads, email, sales, content – wherever – all from a single platform. Leadspace is pioneering this idea of an audience management platform for B2B sales and marketing.

MTS: What part did Leadspace play in their customer, Microsoft, receiving the 2017 Revvie award for (Enterprise) Marketing Team of the Year?

The Microsoft Marketing team are amazing – having won not just the Revvie, but also Large company ROI programs at SiriusDecisions in 2016. While it comes down – as always – to great people, great strategy, and good execution, we’re delighted to see that Microsoft’s decision to standardize on Leadspace for their data management and predictive scoring formed a key component of their success.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

I think that the change in user interactions is going to fundamentally change our way of interacting with one another – both in a personal and business sense. We will find it weird in 10 years time that people walked along the street looking at their phones all the time, not letting an assistant talk to you or read the news, or have it overlaid in context.

At the same time, we’ll also find it weird that we spent so much time looking at Gmail, Salesforce, or Hubspot interfaces on a big screen. Instead, we’ll be presented with the pertinent information at the right time – with a recommendation on what to do.

I think this is why you see such emphasis on large technology platforms trying to build out the “AI’ side of their platforms, as the specific form of interface will increasingly matter less – whether it is Alexa or Slack that you get your CRM data from – and it will need to be everywhere

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

I am interested in various companies looking to build applications on the new engagement platforms. For example, there are some really interesting applications we use in Slack, such as Champ, which help us build a faster moving, more informed and agile team. The same is true in the consumer space with applications built on Alexa and Google Home, and while few are yet mainstream, I think there will be a lot of very impressive innovation in this space.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

The great thing about working at Leadspace is that we get to use our own tool on a regular basis, and experience firsthand all the benefits I described earlier. We feed that data and intelligence through our CRM, Salesforce, and Marketing Automation Platform, Marketo.

We also have Uberflip to help manage our content, PFL for direct mail campaigns, and paid advertising tools – i.e. Facebook and Adwords – as some of our standout technologies.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)

We always focus on targeting the right audience when it comes to our marketing campaigns. For example, in our most recent campaign, we used Leadspace Audience Management Platform to identify our high-target enterprise accounts and the individuals in Demand Gen or Marketing Ops personas at those accounts.

After understanding the audience, we developed a campaign strategy including email and direct mail to grab their attention. We started off with some emails to get them familiar with Leadspace, and then sent them a “teaser” box, offering them a free Amazon Echo if they agreed to a meeting with us.

By taking the time to evaluate the audience, compared to our database and prioritizing the right people within high-value accounts, we were able to increase our deal size, sales velocity and pipeline.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?

AI is going to transform B2B Sales and Marketing, and every business leader needs to be building their knowledge and skills in this area. However, like all CRM and technology deployment, it is all about test and learn, and focusing on tangible results, not a “big bang” approach – what we call the “crawl, walk, run” approach. Leaders need to set a path, focus on where the results can truly be shown today – whether it is in AI-driven data management or predictive segmentation, and from this foundation of real results, start to experiment with the earlier stage applications such AI-driven marketing programs or intent based recommendations.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Agile.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Google Inbox, Slack.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Techmeme – a single place to stay on top of the news you need in tech in real time. I like to try to stay one step ahead on the news.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I am trying to move to only using my Pixel XL for everything. However, I have also moved back to real books as a balance to all the digital media – I’m currently reading the “Three Body Problem”.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Sleep on it.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

I learned at McKinsey the Pyramid principle for problem disaggregation and communication, which I believe is a critical skill for all business leaders.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

David Ogilvy – a genius at taking Marketing and Advertising and boiling it down to key truths.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Doug” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27abf93-f793″]

20 years building world class brands in the technology. Created and led B2C and B2B product marketing, demand generation and brand building programs for disruptive technology products and services.

Specialties: Product Marketing, Digital Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Social Marketing, Advertising Sales, Monetization, CRM, Customer Experience Management, Brand Strategy, PR, Customer Acquisition, Customer Engagement, Online Advertising, Digital Advertising, and Social CRM.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Leadspace” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27abf93-f793″]

Leadspace

Leadspace’s Audience Management Platform enables B2B companies to better engage customers and drive faster growth by allowing marketers to find and know their audiences.

As internal and external data multiplies, Leadspace uses AI to provide a single source of truth across all sales and marketing data, identify net new account and individuals, and recommend the best marketing activities.

Updated in real time, data and intelligence remains constantly accurate and actionable and can be consistently used across sales, marketing and advertising channels.

Based in San Francisco and Israel, Leadspace is trusted by more than 130 B2B brands and 7 of the 10 largest enterprise software companies, including Microsoft, RingCentral and Marketo.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

TechBytes with Adrienne Weissman, Chief Marketing Officer at G2Crowd

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

July 25, 2017

0

TechBytes with Adrienne Weissman, Chief Marketing Officer at G2Crowd

MarTech brands are increasingly relying on customer experience and feedback management to build their B2B customer base. Naked Marketing, a necessary but seldom understood, has grown to become a key factor to achieve success in B2B marketing. Last month, the leading business software review platform G2 Crowd took a giant leap in the industry by raising $30 million in Series B funding. Coming on the heels of a phenomenal year that saw the company grow by 300%, G2 Crowd’s position in MarTech expounds the paradigm shift occurring in B2B buying market where SaaS buyers are increasingly behaving like retail consumers. We spoke to Adrienne Weissman, Chief Marketing and Customer Officer at G2 Crowd to understand how the leading B2B review platform influence software buyers to make the right decisions based on naked marketing of insights and feedback from professionals.

MTS: What is naked marketing?

Adrienne Weissman: Naked marketing stems from the reality that your brand and the solutions are completely exposed. Business professionals are regularly sharing both their positive and negative experiences with one another. These interactions strip away your fancy marketing tactics and expose your naked product. Brands have historically shied away from facilitating these conversations, fearing that their business’s flaws would turn off prospects. But the interactions between a brand’s customers and prospects can be the key to the business’s success.

By embracing their nakedness, brands can add their own voice to the conversation that their current, former, and potential customers are already having. Customer advocates can do the selling for you as they objectively highlight your business’s strengths. Conversely, feedback from unhappy customers can simultaneously drive your product improvement efforts, increase the trustworthiness of your customer-reported strengths, and identify which customers may need a little extra attention.

MTS: In what ways can marketers expose their brands?

Adrienne Weissman: The best way to expose your brand is to encourage prospects to engage with current and former customers. Previously, businesses accomplished this through hand-picked reference calls. But often those potential customers would search out other people using the product and ask for their unfettered opinions. Today, it’s accomplished through review sites, like G2 Crowd. Building a comprehensive library of authenticated customer reviews, on third-party sites like G2 Crowd, establishes transparency and trust with prospects – a critical component of closing business deals. Plus, the immediacy of review sites can shorten your sales cycle significantly.

MTS: What are the benefits of embracing negative reviews?

Adrienne Weissman: Negative reviews are a fundamental component of naked marketing. How you respond to and assist unhappy customers plays a large role in how prospects view your business. Publicly engaging with your unhappy customers and addressing their concerns show them (and prospects who are reading) that you care about the customer experience. Additionally, prospects researching your product expect to see some negative commentary. They know that no business solution is perfect and view a lack of negative reviews as untrustworthy. Negative feedback makes your solution, and its strengths, seem more credible to and helps set realistic expectations for those considering your product. All in all, negative reviews are essential to customer retention.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us Adrienne. We look forward to having at MarTech Series again for more insights.

Stay tuned for more on business insights on marketing automation, content marketing, video ad tech, programmatic and header-bidding technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Five Ways to Get Personal with Your Marketing

By

Absolutdata

-

July 25, 2017

4

Five Ways to Get Personal with Your Marketing

Personalized Marketing Is Where It’s At For Today’s Customers. How Can You Use Social Media And Big Data To Connect With Your Audience In A More Meaningful Way? Read This Post To Find Out.

“Right audience, right channel, right time” is practically a mantra for today’s marketers. If that sums up how you want to contact your customers, personalized marketing is what will make it possible.

Personalized marketing is pretty much what it sounds like: tailoring your message to an individual customer. At its basic level, personalization is crafting your message for the right group boomers vs millennials -; heavy Internet users vs. newspaper readers; dog people vs. cat people. It also means only pitching them the content, products, and services that appeal to them.

Why personalize? For starters, it’s good business practice. A study quoted on Pardot.com showed that personalized marketing emails were opened nearly a third more than their non-personalized versions and had a 41% higher click-through rate. Besides, people — especially those in the much-discussed Millennial demographic — have come to expect personalization from companies of all sizes and descriptions.

How Are Businesses Personalizing Their Marketing Messages?

As you might imagine, there’s a wealth of information available about your customers on social media. And the customers put it there. So it’s not surprising that companies are using Big Data and advanced analytics techniques to create ever-more personalized data.

How are some companies personalizing their marketing efforts? Let us count the ways:

By geographic location
By the customer’s known interests
By interest groups (i.e. people who bought a certain brand of chocolate were also interested in…)
By IP address
By purchase history
By when (morning, afternoon, evening) and how (tablet, smartphone, computer) messages are read
By social media platform

These factors can coalesce quite nicely at some points. For example, it’s been estimated that about 70% of Pinterest users are women. So if you wanted to reach out to a female audience that’s visually motivated, technologically comfortable, and interested in crafts, where would you put your message? Exactly.

That’s a good start, but there’s still work to do. Let’s explore five ways to get personal with your marketing.

Personalize Your Marketing with These Five Steps

To successfully personalize your marketing efforts, you need to take advantage of the technologies available. That may mean investing or upping your commitment to Big Data products. Seeing as the alternatives are either crunching the numbers yourself or letting your efforts be outstripped by your competitors, it’s a good investment. You can even outsource data analytics if your company doesn’t have the inclination or space to do it in-house.

So, your true first step is getting the data in usable form. What then?

Embrace social media. From an advertising and marketing perspective, social media is the best thing since sliced bread. It might even be better than sliced bread. Your customers tell you all about themselves for free, and your message can go out to them at a significant savings over traditional advertising. Keep in mind (as we mentioned above) that social media platforms often have different user demographics. Use this to inform your approach.
Talk to Your Customers. Who’s the best person to ask about your customers? While data analytics can provide you with some amazing insights, it’s nowhere near as good as the customers themselves. Get into online chat, use mini polls, comb through customer support transactions, and peruse feedback. Your customers will tell you exactly what they want and what is important to them.
Market to Customers, Not Numbers. Customers have an account number. They are not an account number. Invest the time (and the information you’ve learned from previous steps) to create and deliver a marketing experience that matches their needs and expectations.
Create Content for People First. Content is important in marketing. So are search results. But your content should always be geared toward the customer as an individual. This might mean curating specific content for specific groups. Remember, your goal is personalization, not mass appeal.
Use Micro-segmentation. After developing user archetypes, you can further micro-segment your personas to slice and dice their purchase history, preferences and dislikes, triggers of purchase, etc., to design personalized messages for them.

Personalized marketing is used because it works for everyone. Your customers feel that they matter to your company. Plus, they get offers that make sense to them. You get a better chance of acquiring a loyal brand fan (and quite a few sales, over time). While it may require a greater investment of time and technology, we say the results are worth it.

Interview with Gareth Davies, Founder & CEO at Adbrain

By

Avinash Duduskar

-

July 24, 2017

0

[mnky_team name=”Gareth Davies” position=”Founder & CEO at Adbrain”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/GarethDaviesRM” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/gdaviesadbrain/”]

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“AI has the power to create immense value out of both structured and dark data but the biggest beneficiaries will be people.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role Adbrain and how you got here?

I’m the founder and CEO of Adbrain, a company specializing in AI for identity. I founded Adbrain with the core belief that companies that truly understand their cross-device customers can create a strategic advantage out of customer data, with positive consumer and societal impact as a result. I was also incredibly frustrated that no-one had figured out how to build a privacy safe, media agnostic single customer identity framework. The major adtech solutions were (and in many ways still are) black-box walled gardens, denying marketers the ability to truly understand their customers. There had to be a better way, so I started Adbrain to positively disrupt.

MTS: How do you see the cross device advertising and omnichannel targeting segment evolving over the next few years?

Whilst still two different animals, we’re seeing the convergence of Adtech and Martech as marketers start to bring their 1st party customer data (e.g. CRM, sales, call center) and advertising data (impression, click and conversion logs) together in one place. The role of the DMP (Data Management Platform) and the CDP (Customer Data Platform) are converging, and Identity – loosely defined by a single customer ID that ties a number of anonymized user specific IDs alongside known customer data – is the connective tissue that helps marketers tie online and offline, paid and owned to create a more complete and nuanced understanding of their customers. This single customer view leads to better customer engagement, fewer wasted impressions or sales opportunities and just a far better customer experience. As more people-based data ownership comes in house, marketers can focus on people and outcome driven campaigns (whether paid or owned media) and consumers will thank them. I also see TV and offline sales data rapidly being part of this new data landscape. That’ll be where things get really interesting.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Without a doubt, it’s Artificial Intelligence. Whilst over-hyped at times, we’re only scratching the surface of possibility when it comes to machine intelligence. Within the marketing community, this will lead to more predictive, outcome oriented systems that focus on delivering critical business KPIs like sales, or brand affinity. CTR and last-click attribution will finally die. More broadly, the impact across multiple sectors and society at large will be profound, enabling innovation at unprecedented scale. But I don’t foresee people becoming obsolete. AI has the power to create immense value out of both structured and dark data but the biggest beneficiaries will be people, freeing us up from mundane tasks and helping us to ‘level up’ our own intelligence and skills. Whilst disruptive for many, this new wave of intelligence will make us smarter and richer in so many ways.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge for startups to integrate a platform like Adbrain into their stack?

Adbrain has both an enterprise grade ‘Identity-AI-as-a-Service’ offering for data rich clients who are looking to build their own people-based marketing products (think large scale data owners, ad/mar-tech vendors and telcos) and a CPM data product for marketers. The challenge on the former is more around a client’s internal product development and prioritization, given that we offer a middleware capability where clients build on top. For marketers, we make our cross-device, people based targeting available through all the major DSPs and DMPs, activated as a CPM data buy. This significantly reduces the setup friction and allows brands to model cross-device user journeys, start cross-device targeting and retargeting, and valuable people based multi-touch attribution from day one. We’ve seen sales uplifts as high as 325% vs. standard targeting.

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

Pretty much anything in the AI and data space, particularly those addressing the dual challenges of training data and the lack of readily available data science talent. There is still a huge amount of friction in the sourcing and qualifying of raw, unstructured data to train machine learning and AI models. Most people think data is ubiquitous, but high quality, privacy safe training data is harder to find than most realize. Folks solving this in the new data economy include companies like SafeGraph and Narrative. On the AI side, I love seeing cool new consumer applications of AI, but it’s the platform stuff that really excited me – addressing the ultimate question of how we enable and democratize data science at scale.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

As a B2B business, we focus heavily on marketing automation using a combination of Google Analytics, Hubspot, and the Salesforce suite, and plenty of owned and operated media.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)

We were tasked by a global media agency with evaluating the influence of mobile interactions in driving conversions for a premium finance brand. The results showed that targeting “mobile researchers” drove a 325% increase in desktop conversions with a 31% cost saving.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?

You start with a data strategy and align your leadership team and wider business around the necessary investments and steps needed to unify, own and protect your first party data, including privacy and data governance. When it comes to the application level – namely where do I think AI can help me – it’s critical to first focus on the brilliant basics, questions like ‘what are the key business metrics I need to optimize for’, or ‘where can I drive greater process or business efficiency’. These may not sound sexy but before you dream up creative wow moments driven by AI, there’s huge value in the low hanging fruit. Focus is everything.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Collaboratively

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Slack, Gmail (out of need, not desire) and Google Now, my favorite consumer facing AI app out there – for now!

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

The classic do list. I keep a running to do list in Evernote, updated on my phone, and a more detailed project plan in a Google spreadsheet, with all the actions my team owes me, and when, so I can keep myself, and them, accountable. Separating the important actions from the urgent ones is critical in a startup (and elsewhere in life). If everything is an urgent priority, then nothing is.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I try and always have both fiction and non-fiction on the go. Right now, I’m reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, and finishing Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankel – a powerful psychoanalytical account of life in the Nazi concentration camps. It sounds depressing, yet I see it as an uplifting lesson in the power of the self and our ability to positively choose our reality. Beyond AI/data and marketing industry news (curated via Slack and Twitter) I’m an avid Economist reader. The depth of analysis on current affairs is invaluable, especially in a world of twitter soundbites and click bait!

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Be the best you can be. Or more simply, be authentic. Too many of us are taught from an early age to work on our weaknesses instead of doubling down on our strengths. Have the courage to be who you are, do what excites you, not what we believe others want us to be or do. I find the older I get, the easier this comes. And remember, authenticity is contagious!

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

I try and compete with myself, it’s exhausting trying to compete with others! That said, a strength I try and double down on is communicating a clear vision and getting people positively bought in and contributing to the journey. Easier said than done but probably the number one job of a startup CEO.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Larry David (the co-creator and writer of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm). I’m fascinated by the creative process, and see a ton of similarities between building a company and creating content. Both require ideas to be brought to life, and allowed to grow organically – you can’t write the ending on day one!

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Gareth” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27a01f1-59de”]

Entrepreneur and business leader focused on solving meaningful problems through data. Passionate about building world class teams that live and die by the values.

Founded Adbrain to help companies resolve single customer identity, power more enriching customer experiences, and build smarter businesses through data and AI.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Adbrain” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27a01f1-59de”]

Adbrain logo

Adbrain powers marketers and their partners to understand and engage with their customers with a personalized, consistent message across devices, channels and platforms.

We’re backed by leading mobile, enterprise data and SaaS investors, headquartered in London, with offices in New York, Seattle and San Francisco.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Marketers Must Move To The Beat Of The GDPR Drum

By

Todd Ruback

-

July 24, 2017

0

For months, the drumbeat has been growing louder and – with less than a year before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes effective – the hype is now reaching full volume.

While many well-known brands have finished their GDPR gap analysis and have a clear picture of what they need to do moving forward, others have only just begun to consider the impact of the regulation. Whichever camp you fall into, the GDPR requires significant process change and corresponding change management, so few companies will be 100% ready by the enforcement date of May 25^th 2018.

But there’s no need to let hysteria kick in; the GDPR should be viewed as a positive catalyst for change. The most important thing is to have an overall GDPR action plan in place and to work steadily against it, picking off the low hanging fruit first and staying focused on the regulation’s most critical aspects.

So, what should marketers be doing to ensure they keep pace with the beat of the GDPR drum?

The first step for marketers is to create a high level GDPR action plan, which should look something like this:

Determine how the GDPR applies to you – If you are reading this post, pretty safe to assume that it does. Any company that collects, stores or processes consumer data, or who uses vendors to do so, is covered.
Know what data your business collects and why, so you can determine if you need to obtain explicit consumer consent. Consent is the most important aspect of the GDPR, partly because the data protection authorities can easily see if it is in place by checking marketing touchpoints such as your website, and partly because infringements of the conditions for consent attract the higher level of penalty.
Develop an internal privacy impact assessment (PIA) process. PIAs allow your business to systematically analyze data flows and the associated risks to data privacy, and to find the most effective way to comply with data protection obligations. Establishing this process will plant the seeds of an internal compliance group.
Look at your tech stack and identify where it can integrate into middleware identity management systems or other databases to automate as much of your GDPR obligations as possible. For instance, you may be able to deploy a consumer-friendly consent management tool where an individual can exercise their new GDPR rights such as the right to object to profiling. You need to be able to receive a signal expressing this opt-out choice and then honor it, or risk severe penalties.

Marketers need to start with considering if the tech providers that make up their marketing stack collect and process data on their behalf. If this is the case they will need to work with those providers to ensure they are implementing their own GDPR action plan, and that they have the necessary processes in place, particularly regarding consent. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are going to be at risk quickly. Your law firm and/or ad agency should be able to help.

Marketers will need to protect themselves against possible penalties incurred due to something their tech provider has done, or not done, which may involve revising contracts with their data processors to include indemnification obligations. Marketers need to be clear who is ultimately responsible for activities such as record keeping, security, sending data breach notifications within the necessary timeframe, designating a DPO, and having contracts in place with downstream subcontractors, to avoid being landed with hefty fines.

Putting these measures in place will require plenty of heavy lifting but it is essential because even if you cannot get all the work done in time, having a GDPR action plan with logical timelines shows an intention of good faith.

To assist the process it is critical to appoint a Data Privacy Officer (DPO) as soon as possible and to furnish them with the independence and authority to give candid advice. While the GDPR aims to empower the individual with control over their data, the consequence is most companies will have to totally reimagine their relationship to data and rethink their data strategy – understanding what data they collect, why they collect it, and where it goes. A DPO plays a vital role in this realignment process and also acts as a link to the regulatory supervisors, running interference and smoothing the rough edges.

The GDPR provides an immense opportunity for constructive change and those that embrace the new regulation as such, will come out the other side stronger and more successful. The time has come for marketers to move to the beat of the GDPR drum, getting an action plan in place and setting in motion a positive shift in their relationship with data.

How to Identify Your Best Customer Reference – It May Not Be Who You Think

By

Susan Thomas

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July 24, 2017

1

In my previous article in this series on customer references in technology marketing, I examined the various stages of customer advocacy that can help you determine the activity that is the best fit for that particular customer champion. In this post, I’ll take a look at methods that can help you identify your best customer reference.

We’ve all been there – pressed for a customer reference for a sales opportunity, or marketing or PR initiative – and people begin shouting out company names. Usually the suggestions start with blue chip companies – such as a large beverage company or a big retail brand. These companies come to mind first because we all understand that leveraging the brand of a large, admired company makes our own marketing and sales efforts infinitely easier. Yet, it is also true that sometimes pursuing a reference from the big brands can eat up a tremendous amount of time and resources and create sales challenges. This is the guessing game many in marketing have played.

10Fold recommends a data-driven approach when it comes to selecting the best customers to become your advocates. Over the past two decades we have devised and honed a filter that measures specific characteristics, indicating where a customer will be more (or less) referenceable. The characteristics measured include personal attributes of the individual as well as corporate facts. This filter allows our clients to choose customers that are compatible with their marketing needs.

We have developed a number of ways to help us identify the reference readiness of customers. These include satisfaction and success with your solution; any corporate situations they are in – such as a crisis – that would prevent them from participating in external marketing opportunities; and well-understood corporate policies that prohibit them from participating in marketing and PR opportunities. Following are some more complex filters that bear further strategy and thought.

Marketing Technology News: Mono Solutions Joins Bauer Media Group to Strengthen SME Marketing Services Across the Globe

Urgency Drives Decisions

Far too often the marketing or sales executive is tasked with quickly finding a customer who will speak on the record with the media or participate in a customer event. We’d propose that if you are in a hurry, this is the wrong time to pursue a large corporate brand. This type of company will make decisions more slowly, be much more cautious in approving opportunities for fear of brand damage, and be more demanding in following an arduous process.

Size Matters

Hooking the big brands can be like trying to date the most popular girl at school. The challenge is that both know they are desirable and they play that to their advantage in every way. If you are an early-stage company, we recommend starting the customer advocacy program with smaller customers, or companies that are in highly competitive markets. Both types of companies will appreciate the additional marketing and media visibility, especially when it is not paid for by them.

Titles Tip the Scale

In developing your customer into an advocate, you’ll have a stronger chance of success by selecting someone who has a title indicating a senior management role (10Fold recommends directors and above in most organizations, and VPs or GMs in very large corporations). These advocates will need “clout” in their own organizations to get the approval of corporate marketing to participate in “live” marketing and PR opportunities that are not pre-vetted and approved before an article or video publishes. Although often willing, managers or individual contributors have a tough time convincing corporate marketing that they can and should support you and your company.

Marketing Technology News: Gartner Survey Shows Inside Sales Organizations Risk Losing 24% of Employees This Year

History and Habits

A very good indicator that your customer will be able to participate in your marketing and PR programs is their history in participating in similar opportunities. You can search their social accounts (especially Twitter and LinkedIn) for references about speaking at conferences or articles in which they were featured. Most executives featured in media often build interest in the article by promoting it on Twitter or LinkedIn. If they are not active on social channels, a good old-fashioned Google search can often reveal articles and/or conference activity in which they were included.

Review Your Options, Approach Strategically

In essence, what 10Fold recommends is assessing the available customers strategically. It’s important to understand what you need, how long you have to develop the customer relationship and trust, and how much flexibility you will have in supporting a lengthy or arduous approval process. By applying critical filters to your strategy of selecting customers to approach, you can save time and apply your precious resources and time to the most appropriate customers for the opportunities at hand.

So, you’ve identified your best customer reference – now it’s time to actually get that customer to say YES to your ask. And in my next article, I’ll detail some techniques to achieve exactly that.

Marketing Technology News: Paysafe Announces YouTube Partnership

Brands Are Winning In 2017 By Making Passive Video Active

By

Chris Roebuck

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July 21, 2017

0

Brands are expected to spend over $11B on digital video in 2017, a 67% increase from 2015. Facebook alone delivers over 8 billion video views daily. But if brands are spending so much on video and people consume so much of it, why does video in 2017 feel so uninspiring?

The Challenge

Consumer behaviors are changing rapidly. We are consuming more video on mobile, watching longer videos, and sharing video content like never before. Yet it feels like video formats are largely stuck in 2003. People are taking notice – to the tune of 75 million Americans, which is the number of people blocking ads in the US. Despite this setback, brands have the power to take back control of their video and win the hearts and minds of consumers by transforming passive video into an active and engaging interactive experience.

Today, the lion’s share of video spend goes to cheap ineffective pre-roll (currently 60%). It generates a 78% completion rate and is 5 times more likely to be abandoned compared to mid-roll units. In a recent study, pre-roll click through rates only registered 0.5% and it can be somewhat easily argued that 50% of those by mistake. If that’s success, we’re living in the twilight zone! Consider 1,000 people walk into your shop and 5 peruse merchandise, and out of those 5, 2 were lost. Would that be considered an effective business day? Of course not, so then why should we have a double standard for digital ads?

According to the IAB, the number one obstacle to spending more on digital video is ROI. We believe that video in 2017 could be a lot better if this issue is addressed head on. Here’s what best-in-class brands are doing to add a fourth dimension (in video click) to their digital videos.

Making Passive Video Active

The beauty of digital video and video advertising is that you have an embedded engagement opportunity with every placement you purchase or distribute. Digital video has the opportunity to get you through the marketing funnel much quicker than most other placements. In fact, enjoyment of video increases purchase intent by 97%.

But the current standard video is flat and passive, and will not lead people to take further action. At best, you send consumers on a product hunt through endless pages on your website, only to cause frustration and the potential for negative brand association. Interactive video, on the other hand, is built for engagement and enjoyment. Consider that user-initiated rich media video unit today with their limited capabilities have a 2.3% engagement rate – almost 5x higher than preroll.

Brands are taking note and are expected to spend over $12 billion on rich media units by 2019. Rich media add an additional level of “engagement” and it’s a unit that works even better on mobile. With swipes, taps, and custom animation, the possibilities are nearly endless. And while many brands are experimenting with rich media, these tend to be one-offs and are not necessarily part of a larger strategy.

Luckily, there is a new format that can drive awareness, interest, desire, and action in a single session; Shoppable/Interactive video. This could not have come at a better time given that, by 2019, 9.8% of U.S. retail sales will be completed online. Shoppable video makes passive video active and helps turn an “ad” into an experience. Custom interactive shoppable videos drive nearly 39% more awareness than standard pre-roll. What’s even more fascinating is that 56% of people in a recent study said they would use shoppable video to make a purchase directly.

Top brands are realizing that if you could generate more ROI out of videos, why would this not be pursued aggressively? Tommy Hilfiger, for instance, uses shoppable video to showcase their seasonal collections on Tommy.com and Kohl’s in collaboration with Under Armour uses shoppable video on Facebook and on Popsugar.com Both approaches have led to substantial increase in engagement and sales.

But not all shoppable or interactive video is created equal. The viewing experience needs to be very user friendly, intuitive and non-intrusive. Make it clean, make it simple and don’t overly force information. Not all consumers are created equal and everyone has different likes and wants. So, why force certain information on all viewers when it’s not applicable to everyone?! By allowing viewers to engage with only the items they are interested in, brands are creating a custom and individualized experience for every viewer.

Interactive video also isn’t just for retailers. It’s used by the travel industry to showcase vacation destinations, by the real estate industry to conduct virtual tours, and by the auto industry to highlight the various features of a vehicle. People are 64-85% more likely to buy a product after watching a product video.

Final Remarks

The growth of digital video has been explosive and brands are considering more immersive ways of utilizing videos to better connect with their consumers and drive sales activity. However, video is still largely used as an awareness tactic and as a traffic tool, not a conversion platform itself. Just 16% of brands have used shoppable video. However, given the recent success of major brands using shoppable video, we can expect to see much more of it in 2017 as brands take control over their creative assets and make passive video truly active.”

Also Read: TMB Study Reveals How Social Media is Driving Returns on Digital Videos

The Case for Insights Communities – Empowering People, Progressing Brands

By

Bill Gullan and Thomas Finkle

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July 21, 2017

0

Technology has impacted virtually every facet of our lives – in the marketing world, it has fundamentally altered the relationship between brands and consumers. The balance of power has shifted, and consumers now expect far greater transparency from brands.

Fortunately, technology not only heightens expectations; it also offers solutions. For marketers and research professionals, now is the time to consider an insights community: a collaborative, contemporary way to engage consumers and yield game-changing insights.

An insights community is a group of consumers who gather online on an ongoing basis to share their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about a category/brand. These folks are recruited once and deployed frequently across a wide variety of research topics and methodologies. The net effect is a continuous flow of consumer input to support key strategic and tactical decisions.

Community members can talk to each other and build off each other’s ideas while the brand can pose important questions and test concepts before going to market. Answers to questions using qualitative and quantitative market research techniques can be obtained almost instantaneously, and the use of mobile technology can enable community access at any time.

Insights communities reflect the convergence of consumer culture and research industry best practice. In today’s commercial culture, consumers increasingly use social media to express their opinions and have come to see their relationships with brands as an extension of their personal values. They have a stake in, and expect to have a say about, the brands they choose to trust.

In this new world, brands that put consumers at the center win – to drive innovation, shape marketing, and express brand beliefs. With the stakes so high, insights communities facilitate an ongoing, mutually supportive, highly productive consumer-brand connection.

Until recently, however, the market research industry has been slow to adapt to changing circumstances to adopt new approaches. The old model of gathering primary consumer insights doesn’t foster the ongoing conversation required for true customer centricity, and it no longer meets the needs of today’s brands for speed, efficiency, and diversity of learning approach.

Custom research is time-consuming, expensive, and yields isolated pockets of information. This type of research (slowly) yields a fresh batch of (expensive) respondents who have no frame of reference in terms of the work that has come before. Fundamentally, traditional primary research involves a series of transactional projects – when what the modern, customer-focused enterprise needs is a cohesive insights program.

For this reason, we have seen and are leading a shift to insights communities. Communities promote better data and more engaged respondents – faster and at lower cost.

With many options out there, what makes an online community successful, and how do you choose the right partner? In our experience designing online communities, Finch Brands has boiled success down to six key elements:

Member Engagement is Critical: Community member involvement leads to high participation rates and more genuine answers. Gamefication approaches, for example, make insights activities novel and enjoyable, helping to drive engagement. Consumers must have fun.

Analysis & Guidance is What Counts: On its own, data is meaningless. You need a team who can read between the lines and turn data into actionable businesses insights. To do this, look for a cross-disciplinary analysis team that possesses a mix of research and marketing skills, and a background in analyzing both primary and secondary data.

The Value of Full Service Community Management: A full-service approach to community management includes content creation, analysis, and reporting. Having all three is the most efficient way to make communities the centerpiece of your market research program.

Best in Class Platform is Mandatory: To keep users coming back, your platform (the site that houses the community) should be engaging and include modern design elements. It is also essential that it is scalable, and can be customized to accommodate communities of any size. Finally, member-to-member communication and functionality must be available quickly and at any time.

Think Through The Partner Role in the Workflow: Take an honest look at your company’s strong suits, as well as where will you need additional support. The right partner for your company is the one who fills these gaps, while complementing what your brand does best. Some community vendors see themselves as technology companies first; others as researchers – make sure your partner is strong where you need it.

Leveraging the Power of Communities for Innovation: While communities can answer questions across the product lifecycle, innovation leads to the refinement of product concepts at each successive research step. Communities are designed to promote creation and collaboration, so activities should allow for innovation and an engaging member experience. The result – validated, authentic innovation!

Insights communities simultaneously address two of the most important issues in market research – embracing customer centricity while streamlining the cost and process of gathering data. Market research is based on the belief that consumer input can help companies make good decisions. Given where we are in our commercial culture, this is true now more than ever – and communities are often the most effective way to listen and lead.

Bill Gullan is President of Finch Brands. Thomas Finkle is Chief Innovation Officer at Finch Brands.

Also Read: “User retention plays a key role in driving retention”

Customer Reference Friendlies, Allies & Champions

By

Susan Thomas

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July 20, 2017

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In my previous article in this series on customer references in technology marketing, I provided a few best practices for getting to know your customer champion and answering their upfront questions so they’re suitably prepared for marketing activities. Internal customer champions who are not especially ambitious or outgoing could be hesitant to speak in a public forum. The fear of saying the wrong thing, being misquoted, or treading on the toes of their own corporate marketing departments can deter people from participating in brand advocacy.

In this post, I’ll examine the various stages of customer advocacy that can help you determine the activity that is the best fit for that particular customer champion.

Finding The Right Fit

Understanding your customer champion’s preferences, constraints and interests is the most critical element in developing a customer champion as an asset for your company. Most companies underutilize customers – as the opportunities may not be as obvious. The graphic below defines a wide range of possibilities in which your customer can begin to participate in your marketing and sales initiatives.

At 10Fold, we look at customer advocacy in three key stages.

The first stage, which we call “Friendlies,” encompasses customer participation that can typically take place without formal approvals. However, it is important to note that a non-company-specific thought leadership quote attributed to an individual at a specific company may require approvals, depending on the title of the individual.

The second stage, “Allies,” offers your customers safe ways to participate in programs where they can review what will be published, or in other ways have control of the situation. All of the opportunities listed are pre-written/created and approved by the customer prior to being submitted or published.

The third stage, “Champions,” refers to the group of customers with whom you have developed strong trust, has experience with your solution, and is very competent in expressing the value of your product and company in a wide range of fora, including “live” situations such as media interviews and customer events.

Flybits Raises $6.5 M Series B Round Led by Information Venture Partners

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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July 19, 2017

0

Flybits, which was Deloitte’s 2015 “Company to Watch,” has announced that it has raised $ 6.5 million in Series B funding from investors, led by Information Venture Partners. The funding round also included new investor Portag3 Ventures LP and existing investors Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Trellis Capital.

Flybits is a context-as-a-service company that enables enterprises to leverage data intelligence with minimal complexity. Robert Antoniades and David Unsworth, Co-founders and General Partners at Information Venture Partners, will join Flybits’ board of directors.

Flybits has raised a total of $ 14 million in funding since launching in 2013 and has experienced sizeable month-over-month growth this year. The latest funding round comes soon after the conclusion of a number of new global partnerships and the release of Flybits’ new Experience Studio, an intuitive visual interface that hides the complexity of semantic computing so that enterprises can deliver highly personalized customer experiences.

Dr. Hossein Rahnama, Founder and CEO of Flybits, said, “This funding will allow us to ramp up our sales efforts in the United States and Europe, reinforce our existing global presence and expand our product and engineering teams to strengthen Flybits’ unique machine learning capabilities. Our product focus now is simplifying how our customers leverage their data ecosystem and drive customer engagement.”

Robert Antoniades said, “We are excited by the prospects for Flybits. Financial institutions, and other enterprises are sitting on troves of customer data siloed throughout their organizations. Flybits has identified a unique opportunity to give them the ability to make sense of these disparate sources of information and leverage machine intelligence to engage customers in an innovative and unique fashion.”

Flybits makes it easy for enterprises to harness the complexities of context so that they can become their customers’ lifestyle concierge – giving them what they need, when and where they need it.

Interview with Clint Oram, Co-founder and CMO at SugarCRM

By

Avinash Duduskar

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July 19, 2017

0

[mnky_team name=”Clint Oram” position=” Co-founder and CMO at SugarCRM”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/sugarclint” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/clintoram/”]

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“If the CRM doesn’t provide an easy user experience that makes their job simpler, marketing folks just won’t use it.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here

I helped found SugarCRM in 2004 with the goal of empowering companies around the world to transform their customer relationships and turn their customers into loyal fans. I was one of the original architects and developers of the Sugar platform, and focused on building out the product, company, partners, and community. I currently SugarCRM’s CMO, lead the global marketing team as we disrupt the CRM status quo.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?

Video is going to be huge. With the rise of mobile, video is in high demand because people love visual storytelling. This includes short form, long form, snippets, streaming, etc.

Augmented and virtual reality will also become part of the marketing stack. I can see, in the not too distant future, auto dealerships allowing customers to choose and design their new car’s features and interiors using AR from their mobile device. Or, real estate agents selling homes entirely with VR headsets.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Advances in health technology will impact humanity starting at a very young age. I sit on the board of trustees at a school for dyslexic children. The school recently partnered closely with University of California, San Francisco, to complete some groundbreaking research on how to medically diagnose learning differences in people through the combination of MRI technology and standard education testing. Together, they have uncovered a path to being able to diagnose learning differences. Their vision for the future is for a three- or four-year-old child to play a “game” on an iPad, helping diagnosis dyslexia or another learning disability. From there, they will be able to tailor a learning program to that specific child so their “learning disability” disappears. This will not affect the whole world by any means, but research shows that 10 percent of the population is affected by dyslexia or another learning disorder. This is a cause I am truly passionate about.

MTS: What’s one opportunity for using CRM that marketers often overlook, but has the potential for making a significant positive impact?

Marketers actually overlook CRM itself as a primary tool! Often, they see it solely as a sales tool, when it can actually help them do their jobs better. CRM can, and should, be tightly integrated with top-of-funnel marketing tools like marketing automation and the website. Building on that, CRM is the starting place for segmenting your customer base for install base campaigns. Rather than just blindly running marketing campaigns to your entire database, segmenting your customers and prospects by size, geography and industry helps you be more strategic and efficient. For instance, you will want to run a financial services campaign in New York and a manufacturing campaign in Detroit. CRM helps you do that.

MTS: What about challenges with CRM tools? What’s the most common challenge you come across and how can marketers get past it?

For marketers, CRM user adoption is a challenge. Marketers are smart people, and unlike our friends in sales, there isn’t the same mandate from management to use CRM. So, if the CRM doesn’t provide an easy user experience that makes their job simpler, marketing folks just won’t use it. As an organization, it’s the responsibility of your CRM selection team to not forget about their users when they select and deploy a new system. At SugarCRM, we have some wonderful examples of customers setting up creative on-boarding programs to make sure employees are comfortable and understand all the benefits of the CRM.

MTS: Marketers can use CRM tools to support initiatives across the customer lifecycle – from generating awareness to maintaining loyalty. Where are marketers currently under utilizing CRM tools? And what can marketers expect from increasing its use in that area?

Building loyalty by running marketing programs for current customers is underutilized in many companies. All the data tells us retaining and expanding relationships with current customers is much more cost-effective than turning leads into new customers. Marketing teams should ask themselves, ‘What else can we do to build loyalty, turn our current customers into advocates and offer additional products to increase revenue within the current customer base?’

MTS: There’s no escaping customer experience as a hot topic today. Marketers can use CRM to enhance many aspects of CX; some areas more than others. Where should marketers focus their use of CRM technology to make the biggest positive impact on CX?

Here’s why the customer experience is so important today: with a few exceptions, different companies in the same industry usually offer just a variation of the same services or products. And every one of those competitors is just a simple Google search away from the next. How you win customers is now based as much on how you treat them as it is what you sell to them. That means the need for an exceptional and unique customer experience is more critical than ever before. Think about it: I’ve stayed in many business-class hotels all over the world. There are some minor differences, but they all offer a comfy king-sized bed and a bathroom. The list goes on: airlines, rental cars, even Uber vs. Lyft. How do you differentiate yourself when you offer similar goods or services as your direct competitors? The answer is your customer experience. The companies that win in this era of empowered and intelligent customers win because they create better relationships with their customers. That makes sense, but a natural follow-up question is “How can you create a better customer experience when you are using the same, uninspired CRM system as your competitors?”

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

As an advisor to EverString, I am keenly interested in how predictive analytics will shape the future of marketing and customer engagement. PandaDoc, a SugarCRM partner, is doing a great job reinventing what it means to deliver sales quotes and proposals. I’m also keeping an eye on BrainSharp and Engagio, as both companies are very interesting.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

For SugarCRM’s 2017 marketing stack, we’re using Drupal and WordPress for our website, Marketo for marketing automation, EverString for predictive analytics, Influitive and Jive for customer engagement, and Pipl for data enrichment within our sales department.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)

Our home run campaign was our “It’s not me, it’s you” campaign that was targeted at unsatisfied customers of a certain CRM company. We rolled it out in stages and different geography and it generated a record number of net-new opportunities and forecast GARR. It was an example of the power of a coordinated effort between our content creators, digital marketing team and the sales team.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?

No doubt that artificial intelligence is hot right now, but quite frankly, the technology industry has overhyped it a bit. We won’t wake up one day and be in the era of artificial intelligence. Instead, it will slowly creep into the marketing industry just like most other technologies. I will say this: Adding cognitive intelligence will free up CRM users from tasks like searching for and organizing data — both things for which machines are better suited than humans. This will allow humans to focus on what they do best — communicating with other humans and focusing on other business-critical tasks.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work

Experimental. No idea is a bad idea.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

The way I manage myself throughout the day is through Evernote, Hipchat, email, and calendar. As far as getting my job done, I live inside of Sugar. This is where I am able to measure our leads and opportunities. Lastly, with all of the traveling I do, I would simply be lost in a random country without TripIt.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

For those who travel internationally on a regular basis, I highly recommend TripIt. Within the application, you can track your travel plans and map out your entire itinerary in one place.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I read sci-fi books all day long. In fact, I read about 70-80 sci-fi books a year. I love exploring the “what if” scenarios, where we are going in the world, and how technology is impacting us and will continue to impact us. I’m also an avid Flipboard reader and collect my daily news through my personal hashtags, #technology, #spacescience, #Starwars and #humor.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

The best advice I have received came from my dad, who was also a software entrepreneur back in the ‘80s. I was always told to hire people that are smarter than me and give them the authority to run their parts of the business and collaborate with them, but stand back and give them authority and accountability. I have taken that advice to heart and that is one of the things I feel I’ve done well at SugarCRM.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of success?

Persistence. It is my biggest strength and my greatest weakness.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Jimmy Carter – I feel like not enough has been said about his career.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Clint” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27a226d-d471″]

Helping people build better business relationships through technology.

I have a profound belief that business is about two people helping one another achieve their goals. One person has a problem that needs to be solved…a customer. The other person has the solution to that problem…your employee. Let’s connect them together.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About SugarCRM” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27a226d-d471″]

SugarCRM logo

SugarCRM enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution in the market. The company uniquely places the individual at the center of its solution—helping businesses transform the customer experience and enable highly personalized interactions that drive customer excellence and loyalty throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

SugarCRM delivers a fully transformed, personalized user experience that is immersive, engaging and intuitive. Sugar fuses the straightforward simplicity, mobility and social aspects of a consumer app with the business process optimization of conventional CRM. Recognized by leading market analysts as a CRM visionary and innovator, Sugar is deployed by more than 1.5M individuals in over 120 countries and 26 languages.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Social is the Foundation for Great Customer Experiences

By

Ragy Thomas

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July 19, 2017

4

New Research: Social is the Foundation for Great Customer Experiences

The business world is undergoing an unprecedented shift. A revolution that’s forcing every organization, from every industry, across every market to rewire how it operates.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, disruption is not being driven by the internet, mobile, or digital – it’s being driven by the customer.

Connected and empowered like never before, customers expect to be served on-demand and on their terms.

Two billion people are connected and empowered like never before. They expect to be served on-demand and on their terms. They advocate and criticize with equal and forceful power. And how they choose to apply that force is a direct result of one thing: their experience. A feeling that’s shaped by each interaction with your brand.

Everything a brand does – the way it does advertising, marketing, commerce, and care – all play a role in shaping the customer experience. Advertising? It’s about seeing a real person with a real need and making them aware that you exist. Marketing? It’s about creating advocates who want to evangelize on your behalf. Commerce and sales? It’s about delivering value from the very start. Care? It’s about sustaining that value so they’ll go on to tell others.

To adapt to this change, businesses need to put customer experience first. They have to map their strategies to customers’ interests and behaviors, and deliver personalized experiences across every touchpoint.

This may seem like a challenge, but according to a new research report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, select companies are already well on their way.

Leading Companies Integrate Social Media and Customer Experience Management

In the new report, Sprinklr and HBR surveyed 600+ managers and executives from some of the biggest companies in the world. The study found that leading companies have one crucial tactic in common: They integrate social media and customer experience management.

The report’s interesting results:

86% of business leaders agree that customer experience is vital for success
75% say social media will be extremely important over the next three years
Only 34% of companies have the tools and skills to deliver superior customer experiences
Leading-edge companies are breaking that pattern by spending heavily on customer experience and social media
Leaders in customer experience have more dominant market positions and post stronger revenue growth (compared to Follower and Laggard counterparts)

As the results show, businesses that deliver comprehensive customer experiences will enjoy stronger growth and more dominant positions in their markets.

It can’t be overstated: Integrating social media with customer experience is the single most strategic investment your enterprise can make. This isn’t just a trend. It’s a global mandate for modern enterprises that want to drive value for their customers and revenue for their businesses. It will pay off in revenue, reduced costs, and improved risk management. Most importantly, it will help you reach customers across all touchpoints, setting your company ahead of competitors in an ever-changing marketplace.

Also Read: 3 Brainstorming Exercises to Fuel Your Next Social Media Campaign

TechBytes with Doron Sherman, Vice President Evangelism at Cloudinary

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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July 18, 2017

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TechBytes with Doron Sherman, Vice President Evangelism at Cloudinary

TechBytes with Doron Sherman — Doron Sherman, Vice President Evangelism at Cloudinary

Last month, the leading Content Management solution provider Cloudinary announced its partnership with WebPagetest. Together with WebPagetest, Cloudinary is providing measurable and actionable information about how to go beyond simple compression to optimize web performance. The Cloudinary Website Speed Test Image Analysis Tool will enable WebPagetest users to discover how changes to image size, format selection, quality and encoding parameters can drastically improve website speed and ultimately result in a better user experience for web visitors. We spoke to Doron Sherman, Vice President Evangelism at Cloudinary to understand the rise of visual internet and the optimization of content delivery networks.

MTS: Tell us about the size of your marketing team? Which are your current markets?

Doron Sherman: Currently, there are five people on the marketing team and several contractors. In terms of markets, Cloudinary benefits businesses that operate a website with a lot of assets that need to be managed, in particular images and videos. Cloudinary is particularly essential for any business where user experience of its website and mobile app properties impacts business performance. For those, Cloudinary improves page load time via optimal delivery of high-quality content, personalized for each and every user, based on device type, network bandwidth, and geographical location. That said, we see the strongest demand for our services in the e-commerce vertical.

MTS: Cloudinary uses advanced algorithms for Image Management. Could you elaborate further on the technology? Does it run on AI/ML?

Doron Sherman: Cloudinary shows users how to encode, optimize, and resize images, and the impact that will have on page load time. Cloudinary takes into account many factors, from device type and viewport size to the type of browser on which the image is viewed. Advanced algorithms, including the use of AI and machine learning, are dynamically employed to achieve results that otherwise are only possible via manual human editing and decision making. For example, Cloudinary can automatically detect the type of image content in order to encode it in the optimal format and quality settings. Another example is art direction where Cloudinary performs face detection (or objects of prime interest) within the image in order to automatically crop the region of interest. Yet another example is calculating image breakpoints for optimal delivery of images according to responsive design principles (responsive images). Our customers expect us to continue releasing smart features that save them from tedious manual work and that means Cloudinary will increase use of AI and machine learning going forward.

MTS: Do you offer integrations with any of the marketing automation and cloud platforms?

Doron Sherman: Integration with marketing automation solutions isn’t currently available out of the box. However, Cloudinary offers open REST APIs following standard URL syntax that can easily integrate into any platform and programming environment. We have customers doing that today without our help. In some cases, we engage our solutions team to customize such integrations for customer projects. Last but not least, the developer community releases third-party integrations created as open-source projects that albeit not commercially supported by Cloudinary, are valuable for implementing system integrations.

MTS: Considering the increasing focus marketers now give to User Experience, do you think videos will ultimately replace images as digital assets in next few months?

Doron Sherman: I don’t see that happening wholesale anytime soon but interest in video content is growing in a number of application segments, particularly those involving social sharing and social networking. Currently, images are 60 percent of a website’s weight, and we are still seeing developers and companies struggle to get those properly optimized.

Video presents an even bigger challenge of content management and optimized delivery, an area in which Cloudinary keeps investing heavily to offer compelling solutions that are flexible and easy-to-use. A big part of the challenge is providing a satisfactory user experience on mobile devices that entail unreliable communication bandwidth and a wide variety of device types (in terms of both computing power and display resolutions).

Cloudinary is focused on technology that enables striking the right balance to effectively display high-quality video content utilizing file sizes that adhere to the prevailing end-user delivery constraints. It’s important to note that the internet is not an unlimited resource and isn’t currently setup to support the amount of bandwidth required for everyone to switch over to large video content.

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MTS: How do you see the B2B video marketing market evolving with the advent of new technologies? How is Cloudinary positioning itself for the competition?

Doron Sherman: Marketers are relying more and more on video content because it is a new and effective way to engage with consumers, but the current way we leverage video content is unwieldy and time-consuming. Most marketers have to drop video content into a file share service like Dropbox to share content because they aren’t able to send these size files over traditional methods, such as email. It is also important to make sure you are using modern video formats such as WEBM vs GIF, which is a 30-year-old format.

At Cloudinary we were ahead of the curve as we started working on video optimization in 2015. We offer the same solutions for video content as we do for images, helping our users to optimize their media without sacrificing the quality of what is being delivered. As we look towards some exciting announcements in the pipeline for this year, we plan to make the management of video content even easier.

MTS: Thanks for taking the time to chat with us Doron. We look forward to having at MarTech Series again for more insights.

Stay tuned for more on business insights on marketing automation, content marketing, video ad tech, programmatic and header-bidding technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

10 Tips for Naming Your Company

By

Ross Kimbarovsky

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July 18, 2017

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I’ve started numerous companies and have talked with and advised thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners around the world. Here’s something we’ve all had in common: we all struggled to come up with a great name for our new company.

If you’ve never named a company, you’ll discover that naming is very time consuming and frustrating. 77% of consumers make purchases based on a brand name. A great name can make a big difference.

We spent over 50 hours in 2007 when we came up with “crowdSPRING”. Some entrepreneurs can easily spend hundreds of hours searching for a perfect name, only to hit a wall.

Naming is hard.

This is one reason why many years ago, we added company naming as a project category on crowdSPRING. Today, instead of spending dozens of hours looking for a name for a new company, I post a crowdSPRING project and let the community of 200,000+ creatives help me with a great name (and domain!). That’s how I come up with names for my other businesses.

Whether you find a name on your own or work with the crowdSPRING community, here are good tips to keep in mind to be sure you’ve found the right name for your new company.

Think about what you want the name to convey.

Your company’s name is an important part of your company’s identity. The name will appear on business cards, letterhead, website, promotional materials, etc. to identify your company and its products and/or services.

Service-oriented businesses should consider whether it will be easy for their prospective customers to recognize what services the business provides, based on the name of the company (example: Friendly Dog Walkers, Bright Accounting or Quickly Legal).

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Brainstorm to identify possible names.

Once you understand what you want your company name to convey, you should set aside some time to brainstorm.

Think about words that describe your industry or the products or services you offer. Think about words that describe your competitors and words that describe the differences between your products and services and those of your competitors. Also, consider words that describe the benefits of using your products or services.

While brainstorming, look up Greek and Latin translations of your words – you might find new ideas from doing that exercise. Look at foreign words too (Swahili is often a great choice).

Expect this process to take some time. It took us about 40+ hours to brainstorm and then another 10 to finalize names before we picked “crowdSPRING” – we went through many possible names.

Keep the name short, simple, and easy to write and to remember.

The companies you admire typically have names that are short, simple, easy to write and easy to remember. (Examples: Apple, Chanel, Virgin, Southwest).

Obscure business names are often difficult to write and even more difficult to remember. This is a problem because for most small businesses, wordof-mouth advertising is the most successful form of marketing. If your customers can’t remember your name, can’t spell it or can’t properly pronounce it for others, it will make it difficult for them to help promote your business.

Don’t forget to consider the acronym of your company name (an acronym is composed of the first letter of each word in a phrase). You might not use an acronym, but your customers might refer to your business by an acronym. A name such as Apple Support Services can result in an unfavorable acronym – ASS.

Avoid names that are too narrow or too literal.

Think about how your business may evolve over time and make sure that the company name can evolve with the business. For example, if you name your company iPhone Accessories and later expand to sell accessories for other products, your original name will be too narrow and restrictive.

The same advice applies even if your company sells a niche product. For example, if you sell antique lamps, you should consider whether in the future, you might sell more than lamps. Naming your business Joan’s Antique Lamps may be too limiting when you later start selling antique clocks and furniture.

Avoid decisions by committee but “test” your name with others.

It’s tempting to involve friends, family, employees and customers in finding a name for our company. Sometimes, this can work out really well. But there are risks. People might be upset if you don’t pick a name they think is great. You’ll also find yourself trying to find consensus – which can lead to a very plain name. If you must involve others, pick a small group of people who understand you and your business (and pick a mix of right-brain types and left-brain types so that you can have some variety). Once you’ve selected a few possible choices, you should share them with a few trusted friends, family and customers to get some feedback about the name.

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Avoid plain words.

Plain words make it very difficult to differentiate your company from your competitors.

For example, there were many logo design businesses around the world when we came up with the name “crowdSPRING.” Many of them had design or logo design in their name. But we knew that we would be expanding to many different industries (logo design, print design, graphic design, web design, industrial design, company naming, and many more) and we didn’t want to name the business Great Logo Design or ManyDesigners – it would have been descriptive, but not memorable and certainly not unique.

There are exceptions. General Electric is one of the most successful companies in the world and its name is composed of two plain words. But, General Electric was one of the first companies in its product/service category and was able to get away with a plain name by spending billions of dollars on marketing and advertising.

Be careful with geographic names.

Some people use their city, state or region as part of their company name. If you plan only to work in your city, this might serve you well. But a geographic name could hinder you later. One great example is Minnesota Manufacturing and Mining. Initially, the name worked because the business was focused on Minnesota. But once the company grew beyond their industry and the state of Minnesota, they needed to find a new name – 3M.

Avoid obscure words.

Company names that help tell stories can be powerful and memorable (think about Google, for example). But obscure words or references might be difficult to spell or pronounce. Be especially sensitive if you’re trying to reach a mass audience, such as one on the Internet. Obscure or invented names can work – Xerox is a great example – but this often requires a huge marketing budget and tremendous effort.

Avoid trends.

You’ll want your company’s name to evolve as trends evolve, so be careful to identify the trends and to avoid following them. For example, in the late 1990’s, it was trendy to use a “.com” after your company name if your company was an Internet business. After the Internet “bubble” burst, the “.com” became synonymous with having no business model and those companies who survived very quickly dropped “.com” from their names.

Consider whether you can register a domain.

It’s important to make sure that your competitors are not using the same name in your industry. It’s not uncommon to find similar, or even identical, names in different industries, but this can result in confusion for your customers and vendors. If your competitors are using the same name – you’ll expose yourself to possible litigation and you’ll likely be unable to obtain trademark protection for your company name.

Look for a company name that is also available for registration as a domain (ideally, a .com domain). This is not easy because .com domains are very popular and you’ll struggle to find available domains that match your company name. This is one reason why every naming project on crowdSPRING is accompanied by a domain name.

Today, URLs are becoming less important because most people are searching online and clicking on links. But it’s still important that your URL is short, easy to pronounce and easy to spell. And, whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of operating under one name but having a URL pointing to a completely different name.

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