Since the last time we spoke at MarTech Series, how much has the personalization industry evolved?

One major advancement in the evolution of the industry is our own recently announced personalization solution. More marketers are waking up to the fact that you can create highly targeted, relevant ads that speak directly to an individual’s wants and needs, and that you need something more than a generic page on your website to convert this traffic. You need to continue to have a personalized, relevant conversation through your post-click experience. Obviously, that’s very difficult to do if you have thousands of unique visitors, all with different desires. To do that, you need to be able to create these experiences at scale. That is what personalization offers:  building unique, relevant experiences to match your ad experience, at scale.

How important are landing pages to online website personalization?

Landing pages are often the first impression you make with a visitor. This is your chance to make it a good one and you can’t do that with an impersonal, generic page that is trying to speak to everyone instead of the individual. It is crucial that it is relevant and personalized to the human behind the click. Your ad got them interested and now you have an opportunity to continue that “conversation” and convince them to take the next step of purchasing or becoming a prospect.

How can Marketing and Sales teams fully leverage Instapage to drive their onsite traffic and ABM strategies?

One of the top Account-Based Marketing tactics is personalization. Once you identify who your key targets are, you want to engage them with relevant campaigns and personalized landing page experiences. By delivering experiences that speak directly to their pain points and needs, you are much more likely to get them to convert. The Instapage platform allows you to do this with ease and at scale.

What drives the 1:1 ad-to-page personalization at Instapage? How does it integrate with CMO’s MarTech stack?

The Instapage personalization solution empowers marketers to leverage their existing advertising and email audience data to create unique experiences for each target audience as quickly as they do ads. We automate the process so you don’t need developers anymore. You can design and build unique, post-click experiences for every audience to achieve 1:1 ad-to-page personalization in minutes and at scale, without a developer. Instapage is the first and only post-click optimization platform to offer this capability for advertisers.

Personalization enables advertisers and marketers to:

• Create any number of unique page experiences for a landing page
• Attach personalized experiences to target audiences
• Serve the right experience in real-time to the right audience
• Automatically fall back to a default experience for audiences not attached to any experience
• Create variations for a page experience to split test within a certain audience
• Identify high-performing audiences by tracking metrics at audience and variation level

We’re living in an age where marketing professionals are using a wide variety of tools in their MarTech stacks. That’s why we have native integrations with more than 40 3rd-party platforms and Zapier-driven integrations with even more platforms. Marketers can connect workflows in our tools to transform and send data to all the other platforms in the format that works best for them.

Tell us about your go-to strategies to support rapid growth and the lessons you learned through the periods of massive shift and transition in 2018.

The area that gives marketers the greatest opportunity for rapid growth today is post-click optimization. Pre-click advertising technology has become extremely sophisticated with trillions of data points with which advertisers can personalize relevant ads to their audiences. $273 billion is spent on pre-click advertising yet post-click technology has been overlooked, despite it being where the conversion happens. This has led to an abysmal 3.75% conversion rate being accepted as the norm and billions of dollars wasted annually on clicks that don’t convert.

The technology for turning the clicks into conversions was simply non-existent. Marketing Automation platforms were built for outbound demand-generation emails, to qualify, score and nurture existing leads. They simply failed to match the volume, velocity and scale requirements of digital advertising. And hence, the conversion stage of the funnel lagged quite a bit and this is the problem that we want to solve with our post-click optimization platform that is built for advertising.

What does your technology community look like? Who do you meet at events and conferences to discuss technology?

I enjoy meeting people anywhere within the marketing and advertising landscape to talk about their pain points and what challenges they face each day. I want to learn from them and understand what would make their lives easier. Aside from those directly related to Instapage, I especially love meeting other founders. Hearing their struggles and success stories are always inspiring to me.

Which Marketing and Sales Automation tools and technologies do you currently use?

Marketo is our main automation tool for demand gen, nurturing, and building customer relationships.

What are your predictions on the most impactful disruptions in digital transformation and advertising technologies?

I believe post-click optimization is the most overlooked and underutilized process right now. Advertisers are spending $273 billion on ads and fewer than 4% of them are converting. That means that right now more than $260 billion in ad budgets are wasted every year. The biggest competitive advantage anyone can have is stretching each dollar farther and turning it into more revenue. When companies start realizing the impact post-click optimization can have on their bottom lines, it is going to be a revolution in digital advertising.

What startups in the technology industry are you watching keenly right now?

HubSpot, Adobe, Marketo, Optimizely — not exactly startups, but I believe these companies are continuing to make noise in the MarTech space and will continue to drive innovation.

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

Embrace it. We are always thinking of how Machine Learning and AI can be incorporated into our own product — and we have some exciting things coming — but also keeping an eye on what others are doing. Automation is going to be something that continues to disrupt the business world as technology continues to play a bigger and bigger role. If you’re not paying attention to AI it is going to render you and your business obsolete in 5 years.

How do you inspire your people to work with technology?

It is important to not just tell people about the product or service and how revolutionary it is. Everyone thinks their new product is revolutionary or they wouldn’t have created it in the first place. Instead, we focus on showing people the value of our product. We show people actual results and how it is already revolutionizing our users’ workflow and bringing more return on ad spend today.

One word that best describes how you work.

Perseverance. If something isn’t working or I fail in some regard, I look for a new way — a better way. Admit the failure, discover how to improve in the future, and change course as quickly as possible. This is what drives me, and Instapage, to be successful.

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

Chartmogul, Asana, JIRA, Instapage, and Google Suite.

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

I block off time for strategic planning. I try to “batch” my work by blocking off time for other recurring tasks as well, such as emails, looking over hiring candidates, reading, and working out. The most important one, however, is for strategic planning where I can have uninterrupted time to think long-term and more strategically.

What are you currently reading?

I just finished reading “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.” AI is going to disrupt every industry and if you’re already in the tech industry and you’re not paying attention or planning now, you’re going to be dead in 5 years.

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

I always go back to a Steve Jobs quote, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is pure perseverance.” In all that I do. I believe that failure is part of the process of becoming successful but too often we see failure as an end instead of an opportunity to learn and grow. That is what drives me to make Instapage a must-have platform in every serious advertiser’s Ad Stack.

Tag the one person (or more) in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Brian Halligan, CEO at HubSpot.

Thank you, Tyson! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.