On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here. (what inspired you to start a martech company)

I’m the founder and CEO, and I started Instapage out of frustration with the inefficiency in paid advertising. Google and Facebook have made the purchasing of extremely targeted advertising so efficient that both are among the top 10 largest companies by market cap in the world, but there remains significant drop off in relevancy and conversion rate from ad to post-click experience.

Instapage was created to solve this inefficiency by enabling marketing teams and agencies to create relevant post-click landing pages at scale.

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

With the increasing fragmentation of the marketing technology landscape, there has to be a period of market consolidation. I see this happening by industry verticals. Take conversion rate optimization, for example. A front runner like Optimizely or Monetate begins purchasing complimentary optimization/personalization companies like Crazy Egg (heat maps), VWO (entry level A/B testing), Dynamic Yield (personalization), etc.

These new conglomerates will become more valuable and more likely IPO candidates.

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

Personalization will continue to be the most important trend within marketing. Although this is nothing new, the level of personalization is accelerating as new consumer technologies come to market and more powerful data and targeting platforms empower marketers.

Consumers are seeing more and more product and service offerings that are relevant to their interests, political ideologies, location, buying intent, behavior, gender, etc. This trend will continue to offer marketers a higher return on their campaigns.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?

The biggest challenge CMOs face is establishing a marketing department that can meet the demands of growth objectives while continually adjusting to the ever changing market to stay relevant.

Not only are new marketing channels coming online nearly every year (e.g. Snapchat, native advertising, etc.), but new enterprise technologies are enabling competitors to speak to potential customers with more granularity. If marketing teams are not highly adaptive to this pace of change, they will eventually fail.

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

I have my eye on a few best-in-breed marketing and sales technologies: Autopilot (marketing automation), Heap Analytics (data visualization), and ProsperWorks (CRM). Best in breed solutions that integrate with third party tools are enabling a new level of sophistication and success across all stages of the customer buying cycle.

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

• Adwords & Facebook Ads for Ad Buying
• Instapage for post ad click landing page personalization
• Autopilot for marketing automation
• Buffer for social media marketing
• Mentionforreal-time media listening
• Google Optimize for website optimization
• Heap Analytics for advertising attribution
• SEMrush for SEO

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

We recently launched a new collaboration solution that was built on top of our landing page platform. This is mainly targeted for marketing agencies working with multiple clients and large marketing teams looking to build a lot of landing pages quickly.

The launch success came from our multi-channel approach and high level of personalization. We built targeted content and messaging for paid campaigns, social media, email, marketing automation, in app, an offline event, webinar training, video, and more.

This launch has led to a spike in sign-ups and rapid adoption. In less than one month, we’re seeing an average of more than 500 new comments left on landing pages per day. This solution is helping teams and agencies reduce friction during the design revision stage of a landing page campaign.

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

It’s important to establish best practices for data collection and standardized naming conventions. This is the foundation of an AI future. Even if an organization does not yet know how they’ll use AI in their marketing efforts, they’ll need years of data when they do.

The second method is by building an innovative and creative team that focuses on design and messaging. Both of these things will be even more important when other areas of marketing become fully automated.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Delegate.

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

– Slack for team communication
– Workable for hiring
– My android phone for on-the-go everything

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

I spend much of my time hiring the best possible person for each position. The better our collective team gets, the less I need to worry about productivity and finding shortcuts.

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

I’m about to board a plane to fly to our office in Poland, and I’ll be reading From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin.
However, I typically consume my information through audiobooks while I walk to work and back.

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

Never give up! Perseverance is the reason Instapage is now a 100+ person organization, and I believe far too many entrepreneurs fail because they gave up too early.

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

Hiring. I involve multiple team members to help find the best possible candidates – from sourcing to panel on-site interviews.

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

Co-founder and CEO of Autopilot, Michael Sharkey

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