Most of the time, finding the right answers depends solely on asking the right questions – and that is often easier said than done. But Carol Carpenter, Former CMO of VMware – an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company – understands that the key to a good marketing strategy is always centered around knowing what questions to ask, and more than that – she knows how to break down answers into actionable data.   Intro quote (2:33): “The team, a few years ago, the team said ‘well, let's just suck in all the behavioral data from what [customers] have done in the trial. I'm like, ‘no, like, let us be really clear…what are the things that drive engagement and usage… what kind of data would help us make those decisions? Otherwise, we should leave the customer alone. If they're not having problems and need some education or help, don't bother them. Carol’s strategy has more than paid off. VMware’s success is undeniable – they’re the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture, and currently employ over 24,000 people. On today’s episode of Marketing Trends, Carol tells us about her career - including how she went from CEO of ElasticBox to CMO at VMware. Plus she shares best practices for CMOs looking to bridge the gap between data and action. Enjoy! Main TakeawaysYou can’t market what you don’t understand. If you want to be good at marketing a product, you need to understand it. You need to know the ins and outs of what makes it tick. If you can’t answer the basic questions about it, you won’t be able to pre-empt them for the customer, either.Focus on team wins. While a lot of business is very cut-throat, it doesn’t always have to be. Make sure to look for those moments when a personal win can be translated to a team win – how are you all working together to affect the market changes you’re trying to implement? Taking the focus off of your own stake can result in a refreshing change of perspective.Keep an eye on consumer growth. It is easy to try and maintain current customer satisfaction at the expense of the growth of a larger base. In order to grow, you might have to shake up the status quo – and that might mean pushing some current customers out of their comfort zone.Key Quotes“This is a company that is at the intersection of a lot of different computing capabilities. And our core value is we have been the bridge. We are the Switzerland, we partner with all seven plus high scalers. We meet our customers where they are.”“What is marketing? It's a combination of communicating the value… and the value is usually steeped and some kind of differentiated value. And it means it has to be unique. It has to be tangible. It has to be something your customers care about.” “I still believe you can't market what you don't understand. Like if you're not in the guts and you don't understand what the OS is doing, what the processor is doing… how could you even begin to try to translate that to a simple customer story?”“I definitely realized, like there are things I could teach and help others scale around marketing, whether it's in a large company or a small company across many different domains. So that’s why I came back.” Bio:Carol Carpenter joined VMware in June 2020 as chief marketing officer. As CMO, Carpenter is responsible for leading all aspects of the Global Marketing organization, which includes Corporate Marketing, Partner, Segment and Field Marketing.Carpenter brings to the role more than 25 years of technology sector experience. Most recently, she was vice president, Product Marketing at Google Cloud. Over the past three and a half years, Carpenter and the team led the transformation of Google Cloud from its early stage to its leadership position in cloud – building the team, crafting the brand positioning and campaign playbooks, enabling sales and the shift from products to solutions in its go-to-market. Prior to Google Cloud, Carpenter was the CEO of ElasticBox (acquired by CenturyLink) and held leadership and marketing roles in technology at Trend Micro, Keynote Systems and Apple and more.Carpenter holds a bachelor of arts in economics degree from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

In a world of increasing consumer awareness, creators are finding there’s a new, emerging factor that is important to target markets: transparency. People want to know where their goods are coming from: are they ethically sourced? Are they really made up of the materials they list on the back? How long was this product on the shelf? Businesses are finding that answering those questions has opened up an entirely new way of doing business. And for Francisco Melo of Avery Dennison – s a global materials science company specializing in the design and manufacture of a wide variety of labeling and functional materials – it is an exciting new frontier; an opportunity for businesses to be more accountable and sustainable. And Avery Dennison is more than up to the task. They’ve created an internally-built startup that has developed the world's leading connected product cloud, an end-to-end platform that can enable each and every physical item in the world to have a unique digital identity. You can see where your product was created, where it was shipped, and everything in between. More than that, it also allows you to find out the best way to dispose of it, should you need to. This entirely new way of approaching the supply chain is something that could – and, according to Francisco – will absolutely change the way we all approach buying things. “It’s about having that common vision and working towards it, and then understanding it’s the creation of win-win partnerships. This isn’t about me winning and your business losing… we both win because we create better evidence and we create a better future for tomorrow. We do something that’s right for the business and right for the planet.” To hear all about Franscisco’s bold plan for the future of RDIF and the implementation of this bold new tech into existing companies, be sure to tune into this week’s episode of Marketing Trends. .Main TakeawaysFind win-win partnerships. The business world will always be competitive – that’s the nature of the industry. But, there are ways we can work together – businesses, consumers, suppliers… everyone. And if we’re going to change the way we approach consumption on this planet, we are going to have to. Innovative concepts, such as atma.io, are just the start of the ways we can adjust. Keep a balance between optimization and velocity. The two concepts seem at odds – are you getting better, or are you going faster? But Francisco is adamant that striking a balance between the two is imperative in order to keep a company healthy. Find ways to make sure you’re doing the best you can with what you have now while also keeping your eye on the next big thing. You can have a preference of one over the other, but they need to work in sync.Digital identities are the future. While talk of the metaverse and avatars might be filling the airwaves, the real digital revolution has already begun on the supply chain, and it’s making everything more transparent. Bringing in everyone from the supplier to the retailer to the consumer makes for a more seamless shopping experience, while also helping everyone involved keep track of the environmental impact of the transaction. Key Quotes“I found that I really love being at the intersection between the technology element – the understanding of the technology and the marketing element. The value that it brings… that’s really what excited me the most through my journey through a number of companies.” “The easiest way to lead people is to come to a joint vision and be able to deliver on that without necessarily having the full ownership of that… your success is very dependent on everyone else’s success.” “I’m probably more towards velocity versus optimization. I tend to be asking… What's next? How do I drive it faster? How do I become more agile? How do we take it to the next level? Having said that… those things go hand in hand.” ‘It’s all about creating a smart retail lens, but I think more than that – what [digital identities] allow from a consumer standpoint is a smart supply chain. This isn’t just about retail, it’s about the supply chain. Because you can know what's happened to that product throughout its journey from the moment it was born…up to the retail and, potentially, beyond retail as well. I think it provides a level of transparency which is one of the key elements.” “I think the potential that lies ahead of us with a consumer element – not just potential from a business standpoint… can we help people make sure they know how to dispose of things? Can we help people to make sure they know what they should do with specific products so they don’t contaminate the soil?” BioFrancisco Melo is the vice president and general manager for Avery Dennison Smartrac. In this capacity, Mr. Melo directs and guides the strategy for digital ID solutions globally, working with brands and enterprise customers, to enable them to capture the benefits of enabling every item with a unique digital identity and digital life. Prior to joining Avery Dennison, Mr. Melo was a co-founder and CEO of Creativesystems (today part of Sensormatic), an RFID systems integrator and SW developer company. His earlier career includes extensive international experience in management, consulting, and business development with Synectics Inc. and Altran, as well as market development and product development roles at Royal Philips Electronics. Mr. Melo has a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and a Masters of Science in Instrument Design and Application, from The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He is passionate about how technology enables a better world, and how creativity is at the heart of disruption and progress, collaborating with the Porto Business School (PBS) at the University of Porto (Portugal) in the field of innovation and creativity.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Education is something that is incredibly powerful. It changes lives, communities, even countries. But education is more than institutions. It’s knowledge, empowerment, and knowing how to take action on skills you learn. My guest today, Kim Caldbeck, CMO of Coursera, is using her marketing skills to make an impact on individuals to help empower them to make changes.“We did a campaign in the fall that was about rethinking possibilities and, and that, and, um, this year, uh, the campaign platform that we're really working through is, is all about that feeling. When, when, you know, you can ACE that interview, when, you know, you have the skills for the job, when you realize you can actually go dream like you could when you were a kid.”In this episode she talks about what it’s like working at an institution that targets nearly anyone who wants to learn. She discusses some of the marketing tech she uses, what she looks for in success stories, and how she creates passion in her team. When you finish this episode, let me know what you think by leaving a comment on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube. Alright, let’s get to it!Main TakeawaysSales is about teamwork. In the end, sales always comes down to the marketing team, and they should be working closely with the sales team to make sure they have enough potential, and knowledgeable, customers to execute on. Take advantage of internal and external talent. When you are a growing team, it’s helpful to bring on external talent to make sure you are completing the jobs in the most efficient manner, but when it comes time to scale you want to bring on internal hires. Having internal talent will help make sure processes are followed, and you have more control over the end result.Look ahead. It’s easy to get trapped in the day to day work grind, but you want look down the road. What will the next three years look like? What will the world be like? What goals do you have for the next three years?Key Quotes“I think marketing is an amazing field that allows you to combine that interest in understanding people and empathy and creativity and storytelling along with hardcore data and analytics and technology.”“If marketing's not doing the most effective thing to close deals, then we're not doing our job. And if sales is wasting energy by not taking the leads that we're providing, then either they're wasting energy on their side and they could be closing more deals or we're not doing our job. It's just that shared commitment to the end result.”“[When hiring] what's their why? Pretty much everyone at Coursera has some connection to our mission in a meaningful way. It is an easy one to get behind when you're trying to transform life through learning. Having people be able to articulate why that means something to them and why they're excited.”“[External vs internal teams] is definitely a nail and scale approach. I would nail with more freelance support and scale with more full-time support. But even within that, the larger equation is, how do we get the job done in the best way possible at the lowest cost?”BioKim Caldbeck is the Chief Marketing Officer at Coursera. Kim joined Coursera in April 2015 as Director of Brand and Product Marketing. Prior to Coursera, Kim spent five years at Facebook launching many of Facebook's first consumer marketing campaigns in over 60 global markets. She spent much of her time in the mobile space spearheading Facebook's internet.org launch to bring internet to the offline world, leading product marketing for Facebook for Android and Facebook for Every Phone, and developing the Facebook for Android beta program. She also spent two years in business marketing at Facebook helping advertisers build their brands and businesses in the digital world. Prior to Facebook, Kim worked in marketing at Apple supporting a network of over 100,000 app developers. She started her career in brand consulting and consumer research at Landor Associates working with many of the world's leading brands. Kim received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

I have to tell you, I love all of our guests - but this one is a bit personal to me. I’ve been a big fan of the company for a while, and I LOVE watching their OneWheel Race for the Rail. Today I’m joined by Jack Mudd, Chief Evangelist. He’s the Chief Evangelist Officer, and you can tell his passion and love for his product. It’s infectious. “The valuable influencer marketing for us has been 1000% relationship based. And these are situations where, um, I will send product, not ask for anything in return, not have them sign a thing.I'm sure this is like all worst practices, but, um, but I, what I want to know is if you love it, then if you love it, then I'll, then I'll come, I'll come hang out with you. I'll go for a ride with you. Um, I'll go get coffee with you. We'll talk one wheel, we'll talk life, you know, and, and those are the relationships, um, like friendships. I shouldn't even, you know, it's like legitimately friendships that end up being, I hate looking at it in terms of value, but that's what it is.”By the end of this interview I know you will be a believer in not only his product, but his marketing style and leadership style. Hopefully there will be a part two next year, interviewing on a OneWheel adventure. Be sure to listen to this episode of Marketing Trends ‘til the end, because he knows how to make an impact.Main TakeawaysBe passionate about your products. If you are passionate about what you are selling, it shows. Your team will become excited, and that enthusiasm will roll over to your end consumer. Make and Impact with Your Marketing. Be creative and think of ways that you can really impact a community. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. For example, OneWheel found the most boring town in America, and brought their product there to make it exciting and received a lot of press. What can you do in a community?Create a community. When you build a community with your consumers, your marketing efforts will go viral. People will want to be a part of the community, and bring their friends to be a part of it as well.Key Quotes“We were looking at the companies in 2014. The GoPros and the Red Bulls of the world and thought this needs to be our approach. We need to build something that goes beyond the product. It's fun. It has personality.. It's something that people get excited about trying and riding and owning.”“On the retail side, demand has always been there. A lot of our retailers will almost sell out of OneWheels before their order comes in. Then their order comes in and then they call up their people and they come pick up their wheels and they order another batch. It's been a win-win. … I think we have 700 retailers in the US, but we also have a retail network in Europe and in Australia. And that's something that is really exciting to us too.”“I actually learned by doing everything myself, which I think is awesome because you learn every facet of marketing. Whether it's content creation, public relations, social, you learn it all. And then we hired folks that are better at that stuff than I was, which is always the goal.”“The valuable influencer marketing for us has been 1000% relationship based and these are situations where I will send product, not ask for anything in return, not have them sign a thing. I'm sure this is like all worst practices, but what I want to know is if you love it. Then, if you love it, I'll come hang out with you. I'll go for a ride with you. I'll go get coffee with you. We'll talk one wheel, we'll talk life, and those are the relationships, like friendships. It's like legitimately friendships that end up being, I hate looking at it in terms of value, but that's what it is.”BioJack Mudd is introducing the world to Onewheel. Helping to spread pure-joy and moments of oneness with the universe. In the business of making the future rad and having a grand ol' time doing it.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Being in a leadership role isn’t easy. One recurring theme I hear about being an executive at a company is that you need to listen to your team. It’s simple - not easy - but simple. That doesn't always mean listening with your ears, sometimes listening is seeing people’s habits. Brian Rowley, Vice President Marketing, Panasonic spoke with me today about how important it is to make sure your team is finding a proper balance and watching for their needs.“I'm a big person for balance. Because there used to be a time when we used to push people to the extreme where they break and then okay, take a couple of days and sort of come back and, whatever. There's so many people who you hear over the course of time that say, oh, this person's in the office from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM and what a great employee. And I always look at that and say, really like that job really only requires seven or eight hours. Why is it taking that person 12 or 13?”In addition to teamwork, we also dove into why and how Panasonic made a shift to a B2B focus, and what it’s like to work with so many different divisions and shareholders across such a diverse company. Really, they make everything from computers and tablets, to manufacturing and food processing, to professional video equipment. Be sure to stay tuned, this is an episode of Marketing Trends you don’t want to miss.Main TakeawaysImportance of listening. It’s easy to get caught up in just paying attention to stakeholders. Be sure to listen to your team, and their insights. You need to make sure you find balance, but be sure to trust in your team.Make sure people understand the impact of your ask. When you approach someone with a task, it’s incredibly powerful to explain why you are asking this of them, and what the impact will be. For example, instead of just asking for a change to the site make sure you say it’s because the result will be people spending x amount of time on the site.Everyone is a consumer. Whether you are in a B2B or B2C environment, remember that you are dealing with people. People want to hear a good story, and have their problem solved - so don’t focus too much on B2B or B2C. Focus on listening to the needs of the end consumer.Key Quotes“I wanted to be the type of leader that I wanted to be led by. So for me, I sort of focused on the skills that were important to me and made sure that those have always come through in the teams that are reporting and working for myself today.”“[Leadership is] the ability to be able to listen to what people have to say, make sure that you're acting with the best interest of the organization, but also trying to balance the needs of all those stakeholders.”“I'm a big, big person for balance. Um, because you know, there used to be a time when we used to push people to, you know, to the extreme where they break and then okay, take a couple of days and sort of come back and, and whatever. Um, for me it's really about, that's not as important. Um, you know, I always look at, you know, there's so many people who you hear over the course of time that say, oh, this person's in the office from, you know, 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM and what a great employee. And I always look at that and say, really like that job really only requires seven or eight hours. Why is it taking that person 12 or 13?”“At the end of the day, we're all consumers. How you tell your story again, it goes back to that relevant piece. What is it that you're trying to solve for? Because I might be in a business environment, but I'm gonna go home tonight and put on my consumer hat and through the age of digital, I'm gonna be served a variety of different content on my device. I don't know, necessarily, that the conversation is as much about B to C as it is B to B, but really being able to understand the needs of the customer and then be able to tell the story of our offerings.”BioBrian Rowley is the Vice President of Marketing for Panasonic Systems Solutions Company of North America and has extensive experience across partner relationship management, digital marketing, lead generation, and product management. As one of your hosts, he focuses on digital transformation and encourages discussion on what businesses need to be successful and how to deliver on the human experience to create a more meaningful connection, a sense of community, and to foster loyalty.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Leadership is something a lot of people think is about bragging rights, or being the face of something. In reality, it’s far more about encouraging teams and including others than it is about you as an individual. That’s one thing that Steve Mosinski, Global Head of Marketing at Fox Rent a Car has worked hard to do. “It's not my department, it's our department. So I'm going to make sure that's echoed throughout the organization, because when you share that and people realize that marketing isn't just Steve. … Otherwise, if you're trying to grow a team… if they view it. ‘Well, Steve is just gonna get that done. Cause Steve's always gotten it done because that's how Steve represents himself.’ The goal is to always, always pay it back to the people that actually help,give credit where credit is absolutely warranted and trumpet their successes”Steve has been through it all. Starting in the low ranks of marketing, to heading up global operations. He’s even gone through the good, bad, and ugly parts of acquisition - while keeping his eyes on the goal of reaching his customers in human ways that makes his entire company happy. Be sure to listen to this episode, as he shares some important insights for how you can bridge the gap between departments on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysGet customer feedback. The last thing you want is for a customer to blast you on Google or other review sites. It’s better to get that feedback directly from the customer, so your team can try to take action - and apply the lesson for future problems.Communicate with other departments. Usually in marketing, you are ether first line of contact, and a sales team executes the deal. Take the time to talk to the salespeople, see what friction they are having. Find out the feedback from customers and develop ways to improve the customer experience to get rid of the headaches early.Know your target. If you are aiming for a high-end client or an average person - this can really affect your strategy. Really be true to yourself, are you competing against a luxury brand? Once you know that, look at where you can find them in an everyday situation (where they will actually be) for your products to make an impact.Key Quotes“The biggest thing for me, historically, has always been blending the online and offline. So making sure that you always stay connected with that piece. The marketing department doesn't own the end transaction, our corporate operations team owns that interaction with the customer. Largely the history has been the marketing leader does not get involved in any of those conversations. Stay in your life type of thing. I've never been to one to be like that. So I have I have regular calls with the operations group going, okay, how can I help you? What's something that I'm not doing on the front side that's causing you a headache on the backside?”“The most difficult aspect for, is allowing somebody else's input and effort to actually help execute on something that I have as far as a vision. I've had to figure out how to articulate that thing in such a way that they can grasp it and still allow them the levity to put their own spin on it, but end up accomplishing the goal that we have in mind. The hardest part is stop being a doer as much as being a strategizer behind the doing.”“Customers want to be recognized. They want to be known that, ‘Thanks ,John Smith, for coming in today. We're, we're glad that you're here. Ee see that you reserved a compact car with us.’ That's what I view as a frictionless experience. You're not surprised that I'm here today to do a transaction with you.”“The biggest aspect of anything in car rental is the website, because that's our gateway to the customer. That's what the customer sees, whether it's under mobile device, tablet, phone, and all that. That's the biggest shift is that 98% of our transactions are done online. So only 2% are done in a call center environment. So, that's exactly where I looked at my team and went, okay, I need somebody dedicated to looking after the website alone and all the pieces that go into that site and maintaining it day in and day out.”“Historically being an entrepreneur organization, you can't really build a franchise network. There’s a lot of overhead, there's a lot of governance, there's a lot of cross-checking and everything else. So what we looked at is, what's the quickest way to get a global presence? And what you find is local market heroes.”BioSteve Mosinski is the Head of Global Marketing at Fox Rent A Car and has succeeded across multidimensional roles. He believes he has to perform as a leader in order to call himself one. It's with that drive that he pushes to find ways to lead by example, inspire and be a change agent. Of course, this is only possible with experience to back it up. He has held many hats in his career -- Marketer, Advertiser, Analyst, Salesperson, Brand Innovator, Operations Manager, Trainer, Coach, Financial Analyst, Product Manager and Digital Marketing Executive. As a result, he has the unique ability to manage multi-dimensional projects and complex challenges. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

When it comes to taking care of people, everyone in business says they want to, but very few people put together action steps to taking care of their team. Tim Metzner, Co-founder of Coterie Insurance, makes it his mission to build a culture where people not only want to work, but feel inspired and energized at the end of their day.“It's a big part of what drew me to this company, to this opportunity, to this industry. There's just such a chance to build a great long-term legacy company. I just love seeing people come alive in their careers because it trickles over into their personal lives and vice versa. Treating people as humans, building a great place for them to work. If you can do that, the impact you can have on a community is massive because we all become better humans when you know that 40 plus hours a week that we're dedicating to work is enjoyable. When we leave energized at the end of the day, when we leave actually wanting to come back and do more work. We have so much fire, to go do other good stuff in our lives.”You might think of insurance and groan, but Tim shows how a solid insurance company can really elevate your business. His team leverages their expertise to make sure business owners work on a company, not just in a company, and are able to keep their companies going strong. Be sure to listen to this episode of Marketing Trends to hear his secrets of satisfying and exciting both customers and employees. Main TakeawaysYou have to be adaptive: When marketing to new customers, you need to be ready to go to where they are, and speak a language that they understand. The best way to achieve this is to build a team of people who are smarter than you in new areas you don’t know about.Put your products in places of relevance. Your customers shouldn’t have to hunt down what they need. You want to make sure it’s easy to get what they need, where they need it. For example, by putting the option to buy insurance on jewelry right when you buy it - it increases those sales (and eliminates fraud). Think about where you can present your products where customers already are. Start your culture right away: There are a lot of leaders who think culture can wait until you are larger, but the truth is culture is going to be there either way. You want to be intentional about it right away. If you want to attract people who are talented and great human beings, you need to have a vision for the type of company you want to build early.Key Quotes“Some people will tell you until you've got a company, don't worry about things like culture and don't focus too much on values and vision and some of that. I just think that's the wrong approach. Because if things do start to take off and you make it, you're going to have a culture either way. You can either be intentional and create that, or it can kind of happen on its own. I just believe, if you want to attract people who are not only really talented, but just great human beings, you got to have a vision for the kind of company you want to build and you want to attract them to that.”“As you scale, it gets really easy to lose sight of what's happening on the front lines. What's that customer service, that customer advocate hearing and seeing and feeling? One of the things we implemented is called core coaching. Every three weeks, everyone in the company has a one-on-one with someone more senior in the company, and that entire one-on-one is focused on hearing from them. Hearing about what they're seeing, feeling, thinking we need to do better and also just about them in their career.”“Many people don't start a business because they're great at starting businesses. It's because they have a thing they love doing. Or they realize they're really good at a thing. So we want to help educate them on, what does it look like to actually work on the business, not just in the business. How can we use some of our own past experiences as business owners to help educate people along the way? Not just about insurance, but about making their business a better business.”“We built Coterie as a remote-first company from the beginning. All three of us co-founders agreed that there's no reason to limit ourselves to talent just in Cincinnati, Ohio. As much as I love Cincinnati, there are amazing people all over the place who want to have freedom and flexibility to work for a great company right from where they are.”“Build a scalpel, not a Swiss army knife.”BioTim Metzner is co-founder of Coterie, an API-based commercial lines insurance startup. Coterie empowers agents and brokers to secure coverage for small businesses faster and easier than ever. Previously, he was co-founder of Differential, a leading digital product studio and of OCEAN, a faith-based non-profit organization that teaches, mentors, invests in, and gathers entrepreneurs around both business and biblical principles critical to their success. Tim is currently an active member of the Board of Directors for all three organizations. In addition to his direct contribution as a co-founder, collectively OCEAN and Differential have spawned dozens of ventured-backed organizations that have raised millions and created hundreds of jobs.Tim is very active in the Cincinnati entrepreneurial community which, among other efforts, has included bringing Startup Weekend to Cincinnati, serving on the Advisory Board for NKU’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, serving as an EIR for the University of Cincinnati’s Venture Lab, as well as being an active mentor to entrepreneurs and students in the region.In addition to his volunteer and entrepreneurial endeavors, one of his greatest joys and challenges is co-leading his four young children (Nolan, Owen, Faith, and Emma) with his wife, Kristy.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

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

Technology has been disrupting the journalism industry to its core for decades. As younger generations come of age, the need to keep them informed in ways that reach and speak to them requires moving into new verticals, and maybe even thinking about who your competitors are differently. After all, what is news today? How is it consumed, ingested, and most importantly where is it coming from? Mayur Gupta, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Gannett, knows this because he’s living it, and if there on thing he’s focused on now, it’s reaching that younger generation.“We want to continue to index younger and younger. That's the growth segment we want to penetrate. So we are evolving and making a lot of investment in evolving our experiences, our content, the verticals. We are using a lot of those signals to identify what are the types of content? What formats, what type of experiences should we mark premium? At the same time, what does a premium experience look and feel like? And we know that as a user, you are living in this world where there's no dearth of great content. We don't compare ourselves with other journalism brands. We compare ourselves with the Netflix’s, the Apple’s, the Spotify’s of the world because in the end, it's all content. Their world perhaps begins and indexes more on fiction. If you ask me in one phrase, my vision for the company, me personally, I would love to build a Netflix for non-fiction content which is the premier source and destination.”Building a new brand identity in an established empire like Gannett is no small task. Mayur, listed as one of Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs, explains how he taught marketing to himself while on the road for another job. In this episode he shows how he’s taken the helm at one of journalism’s most respected brands, and is driving the company towards reaching younger audiences as a growth strategy. He gives some insight into his strategy on unifying large and non-monolithic systems that have been in place for years. Plus, he shares some of the big lessons he learned at companies such as Freshly, and Spotify. All this up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Index to a Younger Crowd: One of the best places to go when thinking about growth, as a legacy brand, is thinking about how to reach a different demographic or population with your product or service. Change the format, the style, the content itself, and then begin testing and looking at the numbers to find what’s working. Get creative with how you see yourself as an organization to open yourself up to more opportunities for expanding into new verticals. Building a Strong Brand: Also a unique challenge for legacy brands is thinking about how to quantify and show the metrics on an audioce that’s been following you for decades, and that you’ve never-before had this kind of understanding about. You just need to get creative with the numbers to help show the ‘top of funnel’ investment impact on efficiency of your growth marketing efforts. The Challenge of Unifying a Non-Monolithic System: One of the challenges in working with a company that has over 100 years of brand history and legacy also means that there might be a lot of piece-meal tech in place that you have to address. Updating the infrastructure for content management, and implementing a universal tech stack for the data ecosystem might be the best first step to take in order to have trust and confidence in your data moving forward. Key Quotes:“There was no marketing for dummies. I would go back because I would be into so much pressure talking to these guys who build these ad servers that are serving hundreds of billions of impressions. And they're talking about pixels and encryption, I had no clue. I didn't even know what a publisher was, what a target is, what a venue and a placement is because I'm coming from a totally different world. So I would go to Wikipedia. I would go back to my hotel, and I would understand, ‘oh, this is what they mean.’””There is something inherent for kids at least in my time who came from countries like India and many more where you have way more number of people and applicants than the opportunities that are within the ecosystem where when you get an A your parents don't get a back then the parents would not get excited. You got an ‘A’  grade. They want to know who else got an ‘A plus’ because [unless] you are coming first at something, you don't really have a shot at getting anywhere because they're just not enough resources.”“It’s an unusual challenge and a role that I took on and feel very grateful and fortunate to have been given the opportunity. It's an evolution from a hundred-year-old legacy advertising-led media business that has been typically obsessed with eyeballs and traffic to now fundamentally pivoting, to becoming a subscription content business that needs to be obsessed with user value and no longer eyeballs. That's a 180 degree turn all the way from what data you store and what KPIs and what north star metrics are relevant to the mind and the culture and so on.” “When you build that strong brand, that is culturally connected the challenge that we have on our site that we have to own is ‘how do you prove that incrementality with data, not just with emotion, how do you get creative with data and prove that the growth of your top of funnel investment, the growth in that brand of affinity actually has an impact on the efficiency of your growth marketing efforts in terms of efficiency in your cap, in terms of incrementality in your retention rate or a higher lifetime value until we bring that data.”“We are investing just as much in data engineering and cleaning that up and looking for an organization like us, which is a portfolio of 260 brands within local markets. That's the massive challenge because this company has grown with a series of acquisitions and mergers over the last four or five decades. We are not on a monolithic system. We've come a long, long way. We now have a universal content management system. We now have universal instrumentation and we are now getting a universal stack when it comes to our data ecosystem. So that's the mechanical part, building the muscle to understand how we apply all these different levels and variables to predict the future.”“We want to continue to index younger and younger. That's the growth segment we want to penetrate. So we are evolving and making a lot of investment in evolving our experiences, our content, the verticals. We are using a lot of those signals to identify what are the types of content? What formats, what type of experiences should we mark premium? At the same time, what does a premium experience look and feel like? And we know that as a user, you are living in this world where there's no dearth of great content. We don't compare ourselves with other journalism brands. We compare ourselves with the Netflix’sthe Apple’s, the Spotify’s of the world, because at the end, it's all content. Their world perhaps begins and indexes more on fiction. If you ask me in one phrase, my vision for the company, me personally, I would love to build a Netflix for non-fiction content which is the premier source and destination.”Bio:Mayur Gupta served on Gannett’s Board of Directors from October 2019 to September 2020, when he was named Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer. Prior to joining Gannett, Mr. Gupta was Chief Marketing Officer at Freshly, a growing food-tech company. Mr. Gupta has led digital initiatives at several companies, including VP of Growth and Marketing at Spotify and as Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer of Healthgrades, a healthcare scheduling platform. Mr. Gupta was the first Chief Marketing Technologist at Kimberly-Clark. In 2014, Mr. Gupta was recognized as one of the “40 under 40” leading marketers in the industry by Brand Innovators.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

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

Marketing leaders are faced with a litany of challenges, an ocean of tools, and seemingly infinite amounts of data, which can all get a bit overwhelming. Ingrid Burton, CMO of Quantcast, is passionate about the industry and on Marketing Trends she discusses with me some of the obstacles the modern marketer faces. “The challenges of today's CMO are very different than the challenges of even five years ago, 10 years ago. It is such a fast-moving space and CMOs have to be well versed in strategy and data in understanding the market. It's such a big job now. I wonder how my fellow CMOs are doing, because like I said, I started my day at four-thirty this morning because I lay awake at night with all these asks and I [wonder] how am I gonna get it all done? Do I have the right team on the field? Can we really execute this? Can we measure our results and make sure we're getting the attribution that we need. We need to be thinking about how we make sure CMOs don't burn out. How do we make sure CMOs are able to lead through this? And how do we make sure that the expectations are realistic?” There will never be an end to all of the additional things a marketer does, another channel to add to the mix, but be careful not to push yourself or your team beyond your limits. In this episode, Ingrid unpacks what they mean at Quantcast when they talk about providing a free and open internet. She delves into her passion and in-depth knowledge of machine learning, and how marketers can best utilize their endless amount of tools. She also explains why ESG is going to be a main driver for them next year and how they’re ensuring true Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. There’s so much to enjoy, up ahead with Ingrid here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe Challenges of the Modern CMO: The rapid pace of the software-driven industry is a lot to keep up with. Getting more data and analytics capabilities has driven a lot of growth in the last 5-10 years. The constant rush of information combined with the constant demand to put information out can lead some of even the most passionate marketers to burnout. Guarding against that is going to be what separates the leaders of the future. The expectations of many CMOs and marketing leaders are very high. The Value of a Free and Open Internet: The value of having clear and factual information widely acknowledged and accepted in culture is essential for unity. The internet disrupted the journalism industry, and this change has brought about the conversion to subscription fee-based models over the traditional ad-based mode. This means that some people don’t have access to the factual information they could be learning their news from. Machine Learning - The Power of Noticing Patterns: Pattern recognition is one of the most useful tools in leadership and in scaling business. Machines that can be taught to recognize certain patterns can do so and scan the entire database instantaneously. If you can notice patterns in marketing that can help you predict what your customers may be interested in or looking for at certain times of the year, times of day, devices, or locations. The power of machine learning in marketing is just in the early stages.Key Quotes“Hopefully I don't say ‘I’ too much. I always want to say ‘we’ - We did this. We did that. I'm just the guide; here's the north star we want to take. Or as I put it, here's the mountain we need to take. I put that out there very early on. I think my team here was very surprised. And when I showed them just a few baby steps of how you're gonna climb small hills to get to the top of the peak, they saw that they could do it. They accomplished it. Some of it's confidence-building and having them believe in themselves.”“Who can afford to subscribe to all these news publications. There's gotta be a different way. I'm afraid for a society that if we charge for every piece of content, what's going to happen to people that can't afford it [is that] they're gonna be left behind. They get left behind because they're not getting the right news. The internet is a great equalizer and we need to make sure that it's not a fee-based internet.” “One of the things that's unique about Quantcast is we have this unique, real-time data set and it's one of the largest in the world behind Google and Facebook. Since we started the company, we have established a relationship with all the publishers out there. This is Hurst which is huge, Conde Nast...we have a hundred million websites. Their data is feeding into this anonymized data set. That is one of the largest actually running in the Amazon cloud, one of the largest that they have. We're using machine learning to find patterns and make predictions about the behavior of what's happening in this data set.”“The challenges of today's CMO, are very different than the challenges of even five years ago, 10 years ago. It is such a fast-moving space and CMOs have to be well versed in strategy and data in understanding the market. It’s such a big job now. I wonder how my fellow CMOs are doing, because like I said, I started my day at four-thirty this morning because I lay awake at night with all these asks coming at me and I [wonder] how am I gonna get it all done? Do I have the right team on the field? Can we really execute to this? Can we measure our results and um, really make sure we're getting the attribution that we need. We need to really be thinking about how do we make sure CMOs don't burn out? How do we make sure CMOs are able to lead through this? And how do we make sure that the expectations are realistic?”BioIngrid Burton is a unique leader in the world of tech as she bridges the gap between technology and marketing in leading teams to unparalleled successes driving strategies for market trends including AI and machine learning, Java and HANA technologies, SaaS, Cloud Computing, Open Source, Internet of Things (IOT), community engagement and Big Data that have had a positive impact on the evolving technology landscape.Ingrid’s career includes her role as a member of the board of directors at Extreme Networks. She also held the role of Chief Marketing Officer at H2O.ai, the open source leader in AI and machine learning, where she led marketing teams while positioning the company through its growth stages. Prior to H2O.ai, Ingrid advised companies including DriveScale, MapR (acquired by HPE) and Paxata (acquired by DataRobot). She was CMO of Hortonworks, a Big Data company, where she drove a brand and marketing transformation, positioning the company for growth and subsequent acquisition.Ms. Burton led the Product and Innovation marketing team at SAP, where she was the marketing leader of SAP HANA, analytics, and mobile offerings, and where she co-created the company Cloud strategy. As CMO of pre-IPO Silver Spring Networks, she positioned the company for their IPO as the leader in energy networks. While CMO at Plantronics she reshaped a 50-year-old brand into a modern and exciting communications model for both consumers and business.Previously at Sun Microsystems, Ingrid held various leadership roles including head of marketing for the company, driving both the company and Java brand, global citizenship, championing open source initiatives, and leading product and strategic marketing teams. Early in her career, Ingrid was a developer.Ms. Burton actively engages with and mentors people in both technology and business functions, and provides guidance for them in their careers. She has received numerous awards including the 2005 Silicon Valley TWIN award.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Bringing new people into your business is exciting and it’s important to get the right match, all the way down to someone who fits that stage of the company. Through experience building great teams in her career, Amanda Malko, now the CMO at G2, knows what to look for in job candidates. Going beyond assessing their ability to complete tasks and looking for a future team member who is right for this stage of your company. High-performance team building takes an added layer of thoughtfulness as she explains.“I look for people who are right for the stage of the business are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”Not everyone who’s good at working at a corporation is good at working in a startup environment, and the sooner you find that out, the better! In this episode, Malko, an expert in the world of martech, gives insight into how she thinks about testing new tools, and the way she determines usefulness. She shares great insight from personal experience about how to get the survey results you need to make the best choice for your business. Get a pen, and get ready to take some notes on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Over-Indexing on Immediately Gratifying Ad Spend to Your Detriment: Keep your marketing budget diversified across channels, resisting the temptation to over-index on the immediately gratifying or easy to measure. It is easy to get drawn into the depths of marketing analytics because that is important and essential to running a good marketing team.Every Detail, Down to Word Choice Impacts Survey Results: Direct communication with your customers is the best way to know what they want from you and your product or service. Running a useful and accurate survey is more complex than dropping some questions into a Google Form and blasting that out to your email list. Every word that you use in your questions, the way you order the questions, and the format you choose to allow your respondent to select will all impact the data that is generatedRetention of Customers is Essential for Growth - Don’t Over Invest in Acquisition: Especially as a new business or brand, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle for new eyeballs. Even as a newer company, you should have already been thinking about what is going to keep people around. The value of a returning customer is the foundation for a strong business and for the growth of the company.Key Quotes:“We hear a lot about sales and marketing fighting for credit. It's really hard for that to happen if you have shared goals if you're both driving towards the same pipeline of revenue goals and you're getting at it in complementary ways, but if you each have your own targets and they don't align at the top that is where you get a lot of that.”“Because more things are going digital and you can measure more. As a result, we tend to over-index in what's measurable and immediately gratifying. That's true to who we are as humans. Social media is instantly gratifying and that's [also] true with our budget. You put a dollar in and within three months you see the dollar out, who doesn't love that?”“I really look for people who are right for the stage of the business and are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”“A lot of software businesses are waking up to [the fact that] retention is sort of the foundation for growth. If you over-index on the acquisition, you're going to find that in a couple of years, (maybe even in a year) you've got a leaky bucket. Make retention the number one metric, if you put those acquisitions. And so we do; retention is our number one metric, followed by acquisition.” “Some best practices [for surveying] are: Be focused on what you're trying to achieve. In surveys the longer the survey, the less likely are you to get [a lower] number of participants, but [also lower] quality of the feedback. Be really clear about what's essential and what's kind of nice to have. Definitely know how you're going to evaluate it cause that'll inform what tool you use. Ask the right questions.” Bio:Amanda Malko is the CMO at G2. She is a go-to-market leader who thrives on leading high-performing, cross-functional teams. Her career focus is on hyper-growth companies working at the intersection of marketing/creativity/technology.Formerly she was the lead of the partner marketing and programs team at Mailchimp, Inc's 2017 Company of the Year and G2's #4 Best Software Company, and before then she was CMO of 360i, named one of the 25 most influential marketing agencies of the 21st century (acquired by Dentsu) and CMO of Tongal, a global creative marketplace with 120,000 writers, directors, and animators. She’s served as Head of Marketing of IgnitionOne, a SaaS ad tech platform, and was the first sales and marketing hire at Massive, a video game advertising platform (acquired by Microsoft). She is a regular advisor to SaaS startups and media companies.She frequently writes and speaks on marketing in the digital age, and has appeared in publications and on stage with AdAge, MediaPost, Mashable, AMA, 4As, Forrester Marketing Forum, CMO Assembly, and others.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

The next business frontier, in terms of physical spaces, is not one you can physically walk on. I’m talking about outer space, and I’m talking about it today with my friend, Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics. I got to know Jason a few years back by chance, and immediately was captivated by his story, his passion, and his ground-breaking work in the space industry. Based in Boulder, Colorado, and in Sydney, Australia, Jason and his team are creating access to new areas of the space industry through better game-like user interfaces. Navigating business ‘friendly-enemy’ relationships in the industry and operating in the complex world of business to government relationships is no small feat, but Jason saw an opportunity as a new graduate and couldn’t say no. “Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.”Lowering that financial barrier to entering the space industry was all it took for Jason to dive in. In this episode, he walks us through his process of disrupting the space industry by creating Saber Astronautics. He talks about the complexities of their business model working with both governments, and businesses. Jason shares about how their innovative PIGI software was created,  and the rise of downstream space industry service companies and micro-industries like this. He’s predicting cool things for the future in space - all this up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Business to Government Model: It’s not one talk about a lot on this show but it creates some fun challenges in every aspect of the business. Biggest words of wisdom are, be ready to fight. The contracts are lucrative which means there’s some fierce competition for them. When you get into government contract work, know that the voices of doubt won’t just be coming from inside of your head; the government contracting industry is cut-throat. Space Traffic Regulation Is Coming: The amount of space debris, and operating satellites spinning constantly over our heads is increasing every day, and therefore so is the need for regulation and safety policies. Who should set these, what exactly they should be, and how they would be enforced are all up for debate in the community at this point, as companies and governments alike race to capitalize on the next ‘gold-rush’ of business opportunity. Space For All: What Space Democratization Means: For the space industry, and for business, the creation of CubeSats removed a massively prohibitive cost barrier to both businesses operating in the industry and students learning how to work in it. Companies like Jason’s could raise a normal business-sized amount of capital to start building out software, which they have done. Key Quotes:“It was a fistfight. We competed against companies that were 20 to 100 times our size, two of the largest defense contractors in Australia were our primary competitors, and they led up to, everybody said we couldn't do it. I was getting calls at two in the morning from our competitors saying, ‘what are you doing? You're never gonna make it.’ And we persevered and we made it there. “We have a very strong product and very strong brand in that part of the world and everybody recognized that. We were told by the companies we were talking to that we had to prove that we were good enough and that's how the conversation went. So there wasn't a lot of incentive for partnering in that case. The other part was we started getting a lot of calls from people asking us if we were bidding. The volume got high enough and we said, let's go for it.”“Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.“Historically space tools are bespoke. It's like the matrix. You've got a whole bunch of words on a screen and operators trying to figure out what is going on. ‘We said, why don't you turn that into a video game?’ It's easy to use this human interface, this user interface, modern UI UX design, and reduce the barrier to entry to actually make space as easy as flying a car is our goal. So normally, like you need a Ph.D. or a Masters 15 years experience to get trusted with, with the satellite. We've got undergraduate interns, 20-21 years old, and first time we sit down, have a go.”“There is no space traffic solution globally. The U.S. military has been running it for most of the Western world, but they want to be space warriors, not space traffic cops. So much more material is coming out there. We've got 7,500 satellites that are active in space today and I think that's going to grow to 40,000 by the end of the decade. Some people are predicting a hundred thousand satellites and for every satellite, you've got 10 times more in pieces of debris floating around and it's all traveling at eight kilometers a second. If you get hit by one of those, that'll ruin your day. We do a lot of work in that field.”“We need someone to do it [patrol space traffic.] It can't be military; can't be a single government; it has to be a consortium of governments. I think it should be a public-private partnership because right now a lot of companies like Saber are competing for tools to be a part of that next gold rush. It's a hard thing to justify because it's related to the safety of flight.”“PIGI is our mission control software. We use it for entry-level design. With it, you're able to design all of your orbits and plan any orbit from it, pretty much any planet in the solar system, and use the outputs of that to plan your business. Students use it for their student projects but we really made this useful for entrepreneurs, people who want to start their own space businesses someday. They use it to calculate the addressable market for their mission plan.” Bio:Jason is a space engineer with 20 years of experience in spacecraft, operations, mission control, and team leadership. Space is a personal passion of his. He founded Saber Astronautics as the mechanism to contribute to this industry. For the last 10 years, this has been a practical application of machine learning and 3d graphics making space easy to control and to solve operational problems such as flight diagnostics, swarm control, space weather, orbital dynamics, etc. Saber now sells to the US Air Force, Australian Air Force, and a growing range of commercial satellite owners. Before founding Saber Astronautics, he was a US Army Major for USSTRATCOM (Space Command) and deployed internationally during wartime. He taught at the Interservice Space Fundamentals Course and served as an active duty engineer at Army Space and Missile Command Battle Lab. Military service also includes 5 years in the field of artillery deployed to a range of hazardous duty locations. As a civilian, he wrote flight software for the Hubble Space Telescope (Wide Field Camera 3) and testing for the International Space Station.As an academic, he lectured for the IRS Space Station Design Workshop, University of New South Wales, and International Space University. He led a research expedition in the high Canadian Arctic and is actively growing the "NewSpace" community co-founding teams such as the Delta-V SpaceHub Accelerator and the University of Sydney space engineering laboratory.He served on the Australian Government “Expert Reference Group” designing their Space Agency and is also active with international think tanks Global Access Partners, NSI, and the Economist, and I'll occasionally provide expertise to Australian News programs. Both through active teaching and through Saber's internship program brought over 250 people into the industry.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Mentorship is a sexy topic that gets thrown around in a lot of interviews, but this week’s guest does more than just talk about it. We caught up with her JC Lapierre, the U.S. Chief Strategy and Communications Officer at PwC as she was wrapping up with a regular mentorship session that she offers to her team. If you really want to see change, make some changes to your schedule; allocate time to things that you say are important, such as molding a younger generation of leaders and do something about it.“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” JC leads by example through active listening to her team and their clients, and she does that through her actions as opposed to just rhetoric. In this episode learn more about the ways JC is focusing on stakeholder and audience personalization, a bit about the new partnerships at PwC, the need for good communication in a large organization, the shift in the ways that people are consuming media. Plus, JC provides us with an update on PwC’s new strategy more than six months into its launch. Hear more from JC and PwC on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go! Main TakeawaysWe have Lost Valuable Strategic-Friction Time in Our Day: Amidst all of the disruption and change in the past couple of years, one of the things many people have lost is their commute time, whether that be flying to meetings in other states, or just driving or walking to the office. That friction in your day, used to allow you to reset yourself a bit in-between parts of your day and parts of your life. Having lost that means losing valuable time to be quiet, and think, and it’s important to realize this loss and create intentional space in your day to let your brain wander.Focusing on Stakeholder and Audience Personalization: Stress less about making sure that every single media channel is broadcasting the exact same message. The more you can personalize your messaging for individual stakeholders and for individual audiences, the better. When we talk about personalization, it can mean swapping a customer’s name into an email, but really you need to be going much deeper than that.  Curating messages for customers and segments of your audience based on their other interests is the best way to get attention.Evolving Channel Landscape and Consumption: As things change rapidly on the media channel front, it’s important even as a large company to stay nimble and willing to try new things and experiment in channels that you are not as familiar with. You can read stories and reports about what the best new tools to use are, but testing it out is the best way to find out what works for your own brand and message.Key Quotes"It all starts with listening, no matter what role I've been in. A I've had like nine lives, nine careers in my time at PwC, but one of the most important things anyone can do in any relationship, personal or professional, is to truly listen and to ask really effective open-ended questions, without judgment, questions without assumptions, embedded assumptions, and to really try to understand what is it that you aspire to do? What are the impediments or obstacles to getting there? What's the opportunity? And then when you've listened to a whole bunch of different data points and a whole bunch of different perspectives, you can start to build.”“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” “We call this the ADAPT framework. There's five forces that are pushing on the world in significant ways. First is Asymmetry. We see asymmetry primarily in the income inequality gap, but you see it in other ways in which you see haves and have nots. D [stands for] disruption that gets at both technological disruption, as well as climate disruption. The second ‘A’ in ADAPT is age. In the U.S. we have an aging population; we have fewer workers than we used to and that trend is going to continue. [This means] we are going to have fewer people to work in the workforce. The P is for polarization, I think we all see it's happening within our four walls; it's happening across the globe, but that increased polarization is growing. [Finally,] the T is for trust.”“The more we focus on stakeholder and audience and personalization, the easier it becomes. The team doesn't have to keep recreating stories or recreating what they are that they're doing [across every channel.] We have to just be consistent, simple and measured in terms of how we bring our audiences along.”“Our people are some of our best brand ambassadors. [I want to] make sure that they feel confident, not only in telling our story, but that they are enormous parts of the story. They are executing our story and they're building that strategy every step of the way with us.”“The way people consume information has shifted. That’s where we (broadly not just PWC) aren't sure what is going to land and what are the best channels to use. So we are going to try everything. [Example,] the work [we did] with Hulu and streaming is outperforming all of the metrics that we set out for it. We are [even] starting a Tik Tok channel. We are going to go to a whole bunch of different places so that we really can understand how information is being consumed and what is the easiest way to share our messages with people that might be interested in hearing them.”BioJ.C. Lapierre is the U.S. Chief Strategy & Communications Officer for PwC leading communications, marketing, brand, and creative teams with heart. Redefining the industry with the best team and technology to better serve our clients as they seek to build trust and deliver sustained outcomes. Committed to my nieces and nephews, adventuring around the world, upskilling teachers in Kenya with Flying Kites and cycling in Boston's Pan-Mass Challenge to raise funds for cancer research and treatment.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Taking the plunge into unfamiliar territory, such as investing, can not only be a difficult fray to enter, but scary at the same time. When should you buy? Should you sell? What is the right stock for you to buy?. The world of finance and largely, participating in investment has long been the domain of the few and privileged. Now, thanks to the companies like Robinhood, becoming a part of the finance world is as easy as downloading an app from your favorite app store. The challenges of communicating with this new class of investors excites Rashad Drakeford, Head of Content Marketing at Robinhood. And Rashad told me all about how e knows that asking the right questions of his audience will help him to guide them through the process of investing, and to their goals. “What we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is: how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone?” This future-focused mindset, paired with an incredible background in politics and entertainment, gives Rashad a unique perspective as a marketer. Whether it’s been through his time working on the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign, or from his experience at Apple, and working on Beats by Dre Rashad’s experience has touched multiple industries and he shared his wealth of experience with me. In this episode, Rashad and I dive into the way he thinks about his influencer marketing strategy, he speaks about some of the incredible leaders he has been influenced by, and you’ll hear about what makes the most compelling content marketing campaigns. Get ready to enjoy all that Rashad has to share on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysLeverage What You Have: It can be discouraging as a small business marketer to look around and see all of the cool campaigns with fancy bells and whistles that big companies with massive budgets can produce. The key to getting the most out of your own brand and budget lies in the quality of the stories you have to tell. Good stories resonate, and a good story can help you compete with the likes of fancy, high-dollar productions. The human touch of a great story can have just as much impact with your audience as some fancy production elements. The point is to lean into your strengths as a business and lean into your strengths as a marketing team to compete against bigger players. Picking the Right Influencer: When thinking about your own influencer program, bigger numbers are better, but there are some additional factors you should be considering to make the best partnership decisions. The quality of their audience engagement is critical and the overall alignment of their mission with yours are two of the factors that, when aligned, will serve both parties well. What Does a New Class of Investors Need? The opportunity to reach a new audience is one that excites a creative marketer. First, the challenge is to educate and inform. The best way to do that, to draw in a new audience, is by asking them the right questions. Seeing things from their perspective will help you to craft your message and really connect with your audience. Key Quotes“The way we leaned into our ability to create branded content across social and digital; We were doing virtual reality concerts. This was back in 2013 [when] no one was really doing that. If MTV is able to create interstitials and vignettes that live on linear TV because they have 80 to a hundred million households, what's our value prop? What we landed on was, we have phenomenal storytellers. We have great content creators. We're going to go and create content for brands that we'll use across all of our social media and our digital and linear. And on top of that, we'll white-label it and give it to you to use however you want across your channels. And so we were able to really be innovative in that, in that space.”“Robinhood really did lower the barrier of entry and democratize information and democratize people’s [ability] to participate in the wealth generation process, especially for folks that have been historically, and systematically left out of financial empowerment in this country. I felt like there was an incredible opportunity to come here and help tell stories, to help inspire people to get involved in their financial health and wellness.” “hat we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone? “The way I have the team approaching [influencer relationships] is avoiding one-offs, and [istead] developing a real partnership with talent that not only pushes forward our business goals but also helps the talent reach their goals. I never walk into a partnership conversation with a fully fleshed-out plan. [I’m] making sure that our missions are aligned because this is not just about someone cashing a check. [I’m making sure] we're both invested and passionate about what we can do together. I don't let how many followers someone has be the determining factor on doing a deal or not. Numbers you see on Tiktok and Instagram and Twitter are important, but what's the engagement and what's the conversion metric from past partnerships or even their own work?”BioRashad Drakeford is the Head of Content Marketing at Robinhood - Head of Content Marketing. Previously he spent time at Apple as their Head of Global Social Media. Before that, Rashad spent some time at REVOLT MEDIA & TV as the Senior Director of Digital Content Development. Because of an opportunity, he came across while he was in college, as a student he became the National HBCU Outreach Coordinator for The 2008 presidential campaign of United States Senator, Barack Obama. This campaign position led to jobs for him as the Obama-Biden Transition Project, as an Associate and Public Liaison in Intergovernmental Affairs, and then took a position in the government at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as Special Assistant in the Office of the Secretary. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

As the methods of communicating messages of love, sympathy, celebration, or holiday cheer have evolved in the last 100 years, the 20 billion-dollar greeting card industry continues to adapt to serve multiple generations of ‘caring-connectors’. This term ‘caring-connector’, used by Hallmark CMO and SVP, Lindsey Roy, to describe Hallmark customers of all ages and demographics, is an illustration of the relational way they think about their consumers at this legacy brand. For more than a century, Hallmark has been giving consumers the tools to make holiday moments of gift-giving and connection unforgettable. Lindsey Roy, CMO and SVP, Hallmark, brings two decades of experience as she helps people connect with each other in meaningful ways. “If I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's consumers wanting flexibility. You think about 10, 15, 20 years ago, you played the game as the manufacturer, or retailer. [But now ] ‘I want it how I want it, when I want it, where I want it.’ Whether it's grocery shopping, or buying your presents for Christmas, whatever it is, people are completely demanding flexibility. That's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.” Giving your customer that flexibility they demand for when, where and how they want you, whether that be via the tap of an app or at a retail location, shows that you’re truly listening to and serving them. In this episode Lindsey and I dive into the role that data plays in every aspect of Hallmark’s strategy including innovating; the ways and thought processes behind Hallmark’s testing and uses for A.I.; how Hallmark’s data strategy is redefining and its rewards program, and a bit about Lindsey’s leadership style. Excited for you to enjoy this conversation I had with Lindsey on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go!Main TakeawaysHiring Smart People with Agility over People who Only Check the Right Boxes: Sometimes when it’s time to hire, your team might already have a great need to be filled, but don’t be tempted just to hire the candidates who look good on their resume. Get to know your new hires and focus on finding people who are flexible and open-minded team players. You can always teach people how to use new tools and software, but you can’t teach passion and dedication to the mission. Allow for Your Vision to Iterate and Morph in Practice: When you spend so much time and effort building a particular marketing strategy, it can be easy to over-commit to certain elements or aspects of that original plan. Don’t get too caught up in the details, though. You need to stay agile and be willing to iterate and try new tactics as the data informs, so that you can react to data about the way that your message is being received by the audience. The quicker you can course-adjust to a more connected message, the sooner you can fill the needs of your audience. Addressing Consumer Needs Across Multiple Generations: When you’re a brand that serves everyone, looking across generational needs is important when thinking about where and how you’re going to reach your customers. The new modes and methods for connecting with Gen Z are going to be quite different from those you’ve traditionally used for the Baby Boomers, for example. New social media apps drawing the attention of younger audiences, compared to older generations that may be more prone to read a longer email, for example. Key Quotes“We care about getting people with diverse perspectives. We try to have people with short tenure, long tenure, people who've been in the agency world, have been in the brand world, everybody from the college intern, to somebody who has 25 years of amazing experience, different backgrounds, et cetera. We are very purposeful about that. I'm a believer in hiring good, smart people with learning agility. Sometimes that's more important than ‘check these three boxes. Have you done X on Salesforce? Have you done Y on Adobe analytics?’ I think [when you hire] good smart people that want to learn, and can learn, you can't go wrong.”“From my vantage point, if I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's that consumers want flexibility. About 10, 15, 20 years ago you played the game as the manufacturer or the retailer. Now [it’s about the consumer] ‘I want how I want it when I want it, where I want it.’ People are completely demanding flexibility and that's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.”“[When you ask] what are your perceptions of cards? You learn a lot of amazing things. There are what we would call the ‘caring connector’ archetype: that person who believes that the world is inherently good, that person that believes that relationships are the glue and they're willing to put in the time and effort. These people exist at 12 [years old] and they exist at 92. To figure out what they need and how to tap into what would make sense for them, that's the key to relevance in my mind. Be open, ask the hard questions and make sure that you're investing in innovation to answer those questions.”“We look for what we call ‘when’, W-H-E-N data. And that means, if you are a 28 year-old mom of two, who's a caring connector who shops in these places. It's also important for us to try to have a conversation where we maybe learn when your birthday is, or when your significant other's birthday is, things like that. That kind of part of the data genome around those people who are most close to you, those people who you might want to activate, and we can do that. I'll give you a really basic example. If you buy a card for your sister on August 12th and you have some relationship with us, we can then maybe tell you next July 30th, ‘Hey, you might have a birthday need coming up.’ And people find that helpful if they're like, oh yeah, ‘I’ve got to get that.’ in their mind.” “We always believe that the more personalized is super important. We're doing a lot of experimentation [with A.I.] The biggest live-use case we have with A.I. right now is in our chat bots that come to life in our digital experiences. Consumer care is also part of my world. I get to work with an awesome guy who leads that part of our business and we've launched this year, a couple of chatbots because it's easier for people to interact oftentimes with the chat bot and we have some great A.I. that feels very Hallmark and very helpful, and it can hopefully get people to accomplish their task in a fraction of the time.”BioLindsey Roy is the SVP, and CMO at Hallmark. She oversees Hallmark Global which includes gift wrap, greeting cards, stores, etc. A tragic boating accident while on vacation almost claimed Lindsey¹s life and left her with an amputated left leg, severely injured right leg and injured right arm. Through a challenging recovery process, Lindsey learned impactful lessons on how to harness disruption and find clarity in the chaos. A fresh voice on the speaking circuit, Lindsey has been heralded for her authentic style and universal message. Lindsey has spent over eighteen years in the corporate environment, leading teams in innovation, digital development and product merchandising. She was named Vice-President at Hallmark Cards at just thirty-two years old, one of the youngest VPs ever in a company with over a 100-year history and in the top 1% of brands worldwide. Lindsey combines her unique life experience, corporate background and emotional intelligence to truly connect with audiences.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Content is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and the truth is, today it is easier than ever before to create content. A big reason for that is thanks to companies such as Røde Microphones, which create budget-minded products that constantly push the industry forward. For Røde, innovation is the name of the game and no one knows that better than Damien Wilson, the CEO of Røde Microphones. Damien has been with the company since its early days, growing into his leadership role and scaling the business in a rapid timeframe. But even for him, despite the success, the last decade has been a wild ride.“I'm a kid from the Western suburbs, which is not necessarily a nice area and I never thought I'd be sitting in New York doing business, or sitting on a couch with Guns and Roses. When I walk into Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and I see a Røde product, I get excited because I listened to that music of the eighties where Sunset Boulevard was the place to be.”The transformation of the audio industry has been accelerated because of the way companies such as Rode have democratized audio equipment. It no longer takes a fortune and an entire studio build-out, to get professional-sounding content. On Marketing Trends, Damien took me through how Rode has muscled it to the top to compete with legacy brands within the space. He also touches on the unique hiring challenges that Røde has been facing in Australia during the past 18 months, and how the company has been able to pivot through innovating in their use of manufacturing equipment. He also discusses how Røde handles customer feedback to ideate its product line, and how influencers can push your products further. I’m excited for you to enjoy and hopefully learn from this conversation with Damien up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe Secret Sauce: Innovating with Product Manufacturing Equipment: More than ever, supply chain management and sourcing are critical to the success of any business that sells products. Finding the best, most cost-effective tools to build your products might not be created for your industry. You may have to think creatively about what other industries use similar manufacturing equipment that can be modified to build your goods.It Takes Educational Background to Create Great Content: Having an education-focused mindset is a foundational part of good content creation. When you create materials that educate the consumer on products, even if they are not your own, you're building trust with the consumer. This kind of content helps build a community which helps to further push consumers down the funnel.Where to Look for New Product Inspiration: Assess all the other products, aside from your own, that your customer also uses to see where to expand product offerings. Other tools and tech they use to create their finished product could also be an area for you to cross over into. Key Quotes“One of the things that I brought immediately to the company was that style of video-based education, style marketing. Because one of the things that I thought was the big problem with audio brands, especially anything music-related, you needed to sort of teach people how to use the product and that gave them the ability to purchase.”“We have a machine that is specked for making parts for watches. Every high-end Swiss watch manufacturer will have one of these machines. It's the same machine made by Citizen, but we use it to make backplates for the microphones because the precision and the tolerance is so insane. They're making a hundred thousand dollar Rolex's, but this is for a $200 microphone. Other mic manufacturers are not thinking in that regard; they're not thinking about how we can take that machine out of that industry, put it into our version and then create a product around it. That's really the secret sauce.” “One of the things that we did a few years ago was look at our ERP system and look at how we were running the business end-to-end, and sit there and go, ‘Okay, what are the improvements? What process improvements do we need to put in place right now?’ And before we didn't have a mature supply chain team in house, but we grew that super quick. And it was just at the right time, because then COVID hit [and] we started to see some interruption in supply chains. We had the ability to be able to pivot into making things that were completely available to us onshore in Australia. That meant you needed to have the right amount of raw material and all those bits and pieces, which was a testament to the supply chain team getting an AI pay system up and running quickly.”“What we're looking at now is adjacencies that we can move into. We look at our customer and say, ‘What is our customer's workflow? What are they doing?’ They’re podcasters; they’re content creators. ‘What sort of equipment are they using?’ Oh, they're wearing headphones, and those headphones don't say Røde. So maybe we need to work into that adjacency.” “Where Røde has risen to the top in terms of customer sentiment has been the fact that we deliver a product and we keep on enhancing it. And it becomes a schedule of, every three months, let's add something else to this particular product. So the customer goes, ‘Wow, you've done it again.’ And it also shows that we're listening to feedback.”“I'm a kid from the Western suburbs, which is not necessarily a nice area and I never thought I'd be sitting in New York doing business, or sitting on a couch with Guns and Roses. When I walk into Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and I see a Røde product, I get excited because I listened to that music of the eighties where Sunset Boulevard was the place to be.”“When you get big it's like the mistakes are just amplified, right? In the past, if we made a mistake in a launch and maybe there was a component wrong, or the testing was incorrect, you may be thinking about 5,000 units. Now you're talking about, you know, 500,000. We can't afford that. So we need to have everything upstream and downstream sorted. So we know that we're not going to replicate any of those issues.”BioDamien Wilson is the CEO of The Freedman Group, home to RØDE Microphones, Aphex, Event Electronics, and SoundField. He is a multi-talented senior executive with over 25 years’ experience in advertising, sales, marketing, and business development.  Prior to the Freedman Group, Wilson was Creative Director of boutique advertising agencies The Shop and Peer Group. He joined the Freedman Electronics/RØDE team in 2007 as Marketing Manager and within a year was made Global Sales and Marketing Director. He acted as General Manager of RØDE Microphones, LLC in the USA until 2013 before returning home to Australia as the new CEO of the Freedman Group in 2016.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

A good customer experience requires more than just making the sale. It’s taking a look and analyzing every little detail that pushes them further and further down the funnel... If you design it the right way, the customer experience should be serving the customer first while giving you the conversions you desire. As an experienced marketer Jonathan Rowe, the CMO of nCino, a cloud banking solutions company, has welcomed the challenge of working in a highly regulated industry, servicing big banks.  “From a customer perspective, make sure that they're getting the most value from what they purchased from your product. That's being proactive and giving them that information. It's making sure you can add. We work with our institutions. I've had marketing conversations with CMOs of banks, just because they want to learn some of our best practices. [Think] how can your organization go above and beyond. And then help infuse your brand with your customers; make them help sell your product.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Jonathan looks back at the exponential growth that he experienced at nCino. He looks back at his academic roots that he says laid the foundation for him that helped spur that growth. But behind the numbers and metrics, what separates nCino and its marketing department from its competitors is its company culture, and Jonathan and I dive into how he’s built a culture, what pillars he leans on and how he thinks about hiring and recruiting talent. Learn more about the way he approaches team building, thought leadership, and good communication up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysTransitioning from Academia to Marketing: The skills that it takes to be a great academician are more transferable to a career in marketing than you might first think. When you look at marketing as ‘education’ things begin to fall into place. Even if you’re not in academics, looking at the craft of marketing from a slightly different perspective, instead of just focusing on converting customers, maybe a focus on educating them will actually drive more conversions.Looking Like a Billion-Dollar Brand: Even if you’re at the very beginning of your business journey as a start-up, fake it till you make it! Presenting your brand like a top-dollar player from day one sets a tone of excellence for your team, your business, and your customers. Everything you do, every piece of communication, marketing materials, conversations, and attitude all should reflect the top-dollar attitude you want at your company.Use the Channels and Communication Styles your Customers Prefer: Maybe long emails don’t perform well anymore by marketing industry standards, but maybe your customers, in your niche market, still like to receive and read longer messages in their inbox. Adapting your marketing channels and even messaging for your audience shows them that you’re listening and will only enrich your interactions with them.Key Quotes“'I never expected an academic background to transfer to a startup and now high growth company. But marketing is really about educating, right? You're educating a lot of stakeholders, whether it's partners, whether it's potential clients, whether it's customers, whether it's investors, whether it's your employees. And so that to me was a very early realization that really it's about education.”“First and foremost, who are you selling to? Make sure you understand your target market. It sounds so simple, but when you understand who you're selling to, you can then ask yourself the next two or three questions, which is, ‘Where do those people go? What do they look at? What are their interests?’ And that's even before you get to, ‘What is your message?’”“‘Everything we do represents a billion-dollar brand.’ I literally put that on the wall because I think this is true of anybody, even if you're a small business. What do you aspire to be? How do you want your employees thinking about every day when they walk in or take a phone call or make a product or do a service delivery, how do you want them thinking about your business? One of the things you realize in marketing is you don't own the brand.  You’re a steward of the brand. You may help set direction for the brand, but your employees own the brand, your customers own the brand. All your partners are invited like all these different people. In those early years, I wanted us to look and feel like a billion-dollar company.” “[Go] back to understanding your audience, what channels do they engage with? In a lot of industries, you may say, ‘I'm not going to write a document that's longer than two pages because nobody's going to read it.’ That's true universally, but I think in banking, folks are still reading a good deal of information. They also like research; so for us, from a customer perspective [how can we] be a thought leader. It's really understanding our ability to not go to a bank and say, Hey, we know how to do things better than you, because obviously you never want to do that. But to go in, challenge and share research and share data, because now it's your point. Now that we've built up 1100 customers, we're learning a lot about the industry. And how do we share that back to the point about what we talked about with Salesforce, kind of creating these, this community of raving and nCino fans, where again, we entered an industry where a lot of the banks are competitors and they used to never talk to each other. And here we are, you know, almost 10 years later.” “From a customer perspective, one, make sure that they're getting the most value from what they purchased from your product. That's being proactive and giving them that information. It's making sure you can add. We actually work with our institutions. I've had marketing conversations with CMOs of banks, just because they want to learn some of our best practices. [Think] how can your organization go above and beyond. And then help infuse your brand with your customers; make them help sell your product.”BioJonathan Rowe serves as nCino's Chief Marketing Officer, helping fuel growth for the worldwide leader in cloud banking. Jonathan and the Marketing Team are responsible for the Company's global branding, public relations, conferences, creative design, digital, and product marketing functions. Jonathan also oversees nCino's Recruiting Team and all employer and culture branding initiatives. A year-one nCino employee, Jonathan has been instrumental in establishing the nCino brand and leading the Company's marketing functions globally.Prior to joining nCino, Jonathan was a professor in the Cameron School of Business and Director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He holds a Bachelor of Science in International Marketing from UNC Wilmington, a Master of Business Administration from Babson College and a Ph.D. in Business Administration and Management from the University of Auckland.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

The opportunity to work from home may be taken for granted a bit more within the last year and a half, but for years Rev.com has been providing opportunities for tens of thousands to work from home. Adri Nowell the VP of Marketing at Rev, came to our studios in Austin, Texas to talk about what it means to her to see so many people able to work from home with Rev.  Adri’s experience as a marketer and a leader gives her a unique ability to serve both the Rev customer, as well as the tens of thousands of transcriptionists that Rev employs in a massive remote workforce. “We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital who are transcribing at the foot of a hospital bed. Being able to put your child first and be able to provide that type of love and compassion and care for your child while also being able to make a living. Those moments make me so proud.” Learning how Adri runs an ABM campaign, what skills she uses as a leader, and how she thinks about scaling her team will give you great insight into your own exciting growth and leadership. It was so great to speak with Adri in person about her experience in marketing and how they’re growing at Rev. Get inspired with Adri, up next here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe transition from Doer to Leader: When you’re in the trenches doing the actual work, your actual day-to-day responsibilities are different from those of the leadership of your marketing team. Transitioning to leadership isn’t for everyone; some really enjoy the work of making the campaigns happen. When you’re the leader you have to rely on the savvy of the marketers on your team and give them the tools that you know work and watch them make it happen! Account-Based Marketing Challenges: One of the biggest challenges of running a successful Account-Based Marketing or ABM campaign is getting the structure of the accounts right. Define what a segment is, define who your tier one in the funnel is; define what an account is. If you go through this legwork and really take the time to build a good foundation, you’ll have set yourself up for a great campaign. Working with Speed and Excellence as You Scale: When your company is experiencing massive growth it’s tempting to just start moving really fast and being okay with things breaking. If you can take a little extra time to make sure that you don’t go too fast and make needless mistakes, that is way more profitable in the long run.  You need to quickly automate whatever you can when you’re in a high-growth environment so that you can leave that task with confidence as you go to solve the next big problem. Key Quotes“Now that we're going after [more] market segments the marketing responsibilities are going to shift around. We generally test everything that we can; learn quickly; fail quickly; fail cheaply, and for the things that work, invest in them. When you have that type of mindset, you get scrappy marketers that are willing to tackle new challenges, and test new channels or test new tactics.“People get really nervous [about transitioning to leadership]. It's an emotional thing. It's a natural, emotional reaction. And Molly Graham actually describes this really well. And she talks about this concept, this emotional rollercoaster that people go through during these transition periods as she uses the metaphor of building a LEGO tower and then giving away your LEGO tower, which is so relevant. You have all these smart marketers that can jump in and they can tackle a challenge. And they built up their Lego tower and made it successful and then they have to hand their LEGO to the next person coming in. It can be really nerve-wracking. ‘What if someone breaks the LEGO tower? What if they build it back up in the wrong way, or maybe they don't expand upon it in the right way?’ And I've found her description of this to be really relevant and taken her advice to talk about it." “Marketing is never settled. You're never done in marketing. Consumer behaviors are always changing. You always want to go back and retest or test different variations. We measure [our success] by getting people to respond. ‘Are we getting them to the next action?’ Whether that's actually converting into a paying customer or taking the next step with us in their journey… and when new channels work, we expand them; when they don't, we abandon them. [We’re] constantly just exploring new outlets.”“We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital who are transcribing at the foot of a hospital bed. Being able to put your child first and be able to provide that type of love and compassion and care for your child while also being able to make a living. Those moments make me so proud.” “With any launch, you start all the way at the timeframe of ‘What's the problem that you're trying to solve?’ My philosophy is to listen to the market. You should be talking to your customers; you should be talking to your prospects. You should be talking to people that want to do business with you should also be talking to people who don't want to do business with you.”“The most important thing with account-based marketing is in how you structure the accounts that you want to go after. How do you define what a segment is? What is an account? Who are the customers? Who do you want to reach? What are the contexts within each of those accounts? Who goes into your tier one bucket? And then who's kind of your catch-all for what you want your one-to-one for your tier one accounts. You want your tier one accounts to receive more of a personalized experience, but you don't want to overdo it. If you're going so extreme that it feels forced, people are going to reject the marketing material. There's definitely a place for it, but it's really about finding the right balance.”“Speed is tough and the thing that I've found the most difficult is balancing the speed at which you accelerate growth and operational excellence is it's not hard to go fast. It's hard to go fast and not break things. And so that is where we've found probably the biggest challenge is how can we continue to accelerate growth, but at the same time, establish a foundation that is going to scale. And so with marketing, that's incredibly important because you need the right operational pieces. It is acceptable for some period of time to do things manually, but you can't stay there. You have to put operational pieces in place so that you can scale. Finding the right balance is very challenging.”BioAdri Nowell is VP of Marketing at Rev.com. In this role, she serves as the executive leader accountable for the strategy and execution of marketing programs across all segments - individual users (B2C), Enterprise/Mid-market (B2B), and developers. She provides leadership and management oversight across Product Marketing, Performance Marketing, Email Marketing, Demand Marketing, Content Marketing, Web, Brand, and Creative for the company.Before joining Rev, Adri served as the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Bazaarvoice and before that as Director of Marketing at Volusion. Prior to that, Adri held a variety of roles at engineering technology provider National Instruments including Product Marketing Manager and Support Engineer. Adri began her career at the University of Oklahoma as a Software Developer in the Robotics Institute of Machine Learning. Adri holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from The University of Oklahoma, in Norman, OK.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

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

You may not need to invest any marketing dollars in a new Tiktok channel. If you’re like Nico Dato, the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Podium, you’re thinking about the best ways to not only get the attention that those new well-known channels bring, but also gain the trust of SMBs in order to win them over as clients. But the reality is, there is no right or wrong answer to where you spend your ad budget. The truth is, the only thing that actually matters is what’s performing. The channel mix is evolving every day and it’s important to think about where your clients are and develop a relationship with them, and second, stay abreast of third-party apps that are emerging as new marketing platforms in the U.S. “We do a ton of trade shows, which is something that not a lot of people do. We do a lot of direct mail. We do radio; we do everything you can imagine. For us, it takes three or four touches on average to get someone's attention in the way that we want. A lot of times that comes from a combination of digital, traditional, radio, print… We're marketing and selling to plumbers, insurance agents, car dealers, and, and people who are out there physically working in the real world all day long. Like what a lot of people don't realize about Podium is, if I'm selling to an HVAC contractor, like most times they're like checking out Podium at like nine 30 at night, because they were fixing air conditioners all day, or unclogging toilets, Making sure we get that right channel mix is critical. [Conversions are] They’re not always going to come via Google search.”In this episode of Marketing Trends, Nico and I unpack the best way to grow a team from seven to over 1,000 and peel back the curtain into how Nico has transformed himself from a marketer to a marketing leader. Staying on top of all marketing channels, new and old, is how he stays on the cutting edge. All this next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysHire for People not just for Needs: When you grow and hire, sometimes there will be a temptation to hire quickly, and in your rush, you may be thinking more about hiring candidates who can help stop the bleeding, so to speak. Instead of hiring for the task you need to be done now, you should be hiring the individual who can best contribute to the company overall. Find someone who can grow with the company, that fits into the culture, and it just might take a couple of extra weeks to find them and train them up. Gaining Trust of SMBs: Small and Medium-Sized businesses are usually the subject matter experts in their communities. For example, the dentist is trusted, personally, by the people that he services. That dentist and his front office staff likely aren’t marketing experts, and it takes an understanding of the trust that they themselves garner, in order to understand the level of trust you need to build with them. Their business is a passion and they need to know they can trust you to be on their team. Increased Utilization of Third-Party Apps in the US: Third-party communication apps like Whatsapp are being used with ever-increasing frequency in the U.S. which is arguably behind this trend in other countries like Brazil, and Japan. This is a whole new channel for marketers to tap into and add to their mix. Key Quotes“I've been super fortunate to learn on the fly. I didn't necessarily have all of this classical training in how to run a marketing team and how to build a comms function and a product marketing function. I've just been so fortunate that my career has just kind of snowballed. [Going from a marketer to a marketing leader] is a huge transition. When you're an individual contributor, you have control over the destiny of the thing that you own. And it’s up to you to work as hard as you want, to strategize as much as you want, to learn from outside sources as much as you want. [Then] all of a sudden you're having to guide a team in doing that one thing that you think you can do really, really well. The secret is that oftentimes they know how to do it much better than you do.”“[The] transition [to leadership] was really hard. I'm not perfect at it by any means, but I think I’ve grown by way of leadership over the last couple of years. It’s a transition that you don't need to make unless you really want to make that jump. t's not easier. There are great career paths in any of these disciplines that don't necessarily mean management.”“[Marketers] are worried about SLS. You're worried about contracts with your customers. You're worried about all of these things. The thing that our CEO has done a really good job of is that, he's tried to keep us focused on the things that matter most. As you're scaling quickly, [identify] the five priorities to align with and get all of the subsequent teams to also align to, in order to make sure that those things are perfect.”“My hiring mantra has always been to hire people, not for the role, but you need to find the right person. I would rather take a longer amount of time finding the right person than having to restart in three months or six months or, or whatever it is. My intent is to find the right person for the role and, and know that the longer-term impact of finding the right person is going to be much greater than filling the short-term need. That may just be a two or three-week difference.” “The one thing that I have found every year becomes more and more surprising -- and probably it shouldn't be a surprise because it continuously happens -- I think that the channel diversification that's happening here in the US and I should be inclusive of Canada, but largely the U.S. is changing. Historically the best way to reach them [was] via email, and then all of a sudden it started to become texts. We are a huge advocate of texting, but what's interesting is we've started to enter the world where consumers are using third-party apps as well to communicate. It's something that you see internationally; you go to Brazil, you might see it with WhatsApp; you go to Japan, you might see it with Line, and et cetera. The data shows in [our] report, 40% or something similar, are starting to use third-party apps on a daily basis to communicate with one another. It's a huge opportunity for brands. There's channel diversification that's happening, and you should take advantage of that.”“At the top of the funnel, we work to try and be everywhere and show that we are honed in, on local business for these businesses. It's why we do a ton of trade shows. We do a ton of trade publications. We do a lot of display advertisements or radio advertisements. A lot of times they just want to know you're legitimate. The hardest thing for local businesses is getting their trust; they've been burned so many times because they are so vulnerable. It's really important to us to make sure they know that we're going to be a partner to them. It's hard to do and there's not one answer that solves all.”BioNico Dato is the EVP of Marketing for Podium, the leading interaction management platform that enables companies with a local presence to conveniently connect at critical touchpoints and help them strengthen their business. Dato grew up in Bountiful, Utah, and attended the University of Utah, where he graduated in 2013 with a degree in economics. Prior to Podium, Dato helped run demand generation at Teleperformance and then managed Zane Benefits’ marketing team.After joining Podium in 2015, he assisted in taking the company through Y Combinator in 2016 - becoming one of the highest revenue-generating companies ever to attend the accelerator. As a part of the executive team, he has also helped secure funding from IVP, Accel, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Summit Partners. In his free time, Dato enjoys golfing and spending time with his wife, Rachel, and daughter, Penelope.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Predicting exactly how much growth to expect (or strive for) in your business can be tricky to forecast. This week we look to Amy Cook, CMO of Simplus, Amy has grown, scaled, and been a part of many merging teams throughout her career. Their growth has been rapid and expansive, which definitely required great leadership. “Simplus was doing a few million and had just barely done a series A. [We had]  a growth rate of over 300% year-over-year. I attribute so much of that to our CEO who really empowered each team member on the executive team to do the very best that they could. And then he kept it all together with his vision and focus on culture. It was really an amazing opportunity; since then [in] the past 18 months we've been acquired by Infosys. That has been another humongous learning curve to learn how to be part of a massive organization of 250,000 people.”Regardless of the size of the team or the title on your email signature, Amy is all about finding the best marketing solutions to her questions. Her success in marketing can be attributed to her openness and collaboration. In this episode of Marketing Trends, Amy dives into, scaling and growing a marketing business to enterprise size, and as a part of that keeping the marketing part of the business integrated with the whole organization. Prepare to benefit from Amy’s optimistic and collaborative attitude about growth and best marketing team practices up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysScaling Well and Growing to Enterprise Size: Focus on culture when merging two companies; the larger the company, the more important being able to integrate both teams becomes. Keeping a strong line of communication to the whole organization about the mission and vision is critical to help everyone work together more effectively. Looking around to see what other companies of the same size are doing can be helpful. Replicating the best methods and practices you see in their organizations is a big time-saver. Agencies Can Help if you’re Struggling with Retention: If you lose someone on your team, or can’t scale the team as quickly as you need, agencies are a solution to your problem. It’s still best to keep the heart of the marketing department in-house, but farming out smaller portions of the marketing mix that can be executed by an agency can help you address bandwidth issues on your team. Marketing as an Integral Part of the Whole Organization: It’s important to stay closely connected with the rest of the company in the marketing department. Alignment across departments spans more than just sales and marketing. Siloing yourself off in a bubble will keep you from valuable insights that the rest of the team could impart. Building relationships at every level internally and externally can help you reach more customers with a message that solves their problems.  Key Quotes“Simplus was doing a few million and had just barely done a series A. [We had]  a growth rate of over 300% year over year. I attribute so much of that to our CEO who really empowered each team member on the executive team to do the very best that they could. And then he kept altogether with his vision and focus on culture. It was really an amazing opportunity; since then [in] the past 18 months we've been acquired by Infosys. That has been another humongous learning curve to learn how to be part of a massive organization of 250,000 people.”“ [Agencies] work really well if you're having trouble retaining people, then an agency can give you that unlimited support. You can fire your agency at any time if they're not performing well for you with no consequences. At the agency, we go by the hour. And so there's a hundred percent utilization out of your team. So if the price is low enough and the utilization is a hundred percent, there's a really good case to fill in some of those gaps“When marketing [takes on] more of an ancillary role, then you lose a lot of the positivity that you can have from marketing. I have finance meetings with the team each week.. Not only do you have to connect internally [with teams], but you also need to connect with your partners with your customers and do joint co-marketing with your partners to reach the same customers. It's a whole lot of relationship-building, even more than I would have expected when I just started doing marketing deliverables all those years ago.” “I know that I'm only going to get event ROI if I empower sales leaders to lead the event. And [sales] knows that [they’re] only going to get marketing support if those salespeople [are] accountable for the event. So there's a really great understanding of each other.”“Every sales leader is a little bit different and you have to be adaptable. Marketing has to take a support role, aligned behind the sales leader,  and say, ‘I'll use your playbook. What does your playbook look like?’” “I approach marketing [believing] everybody's got good ideas; the delivery team's got amazing ideas; our legal department gives us great marketing ideas; we can all flow together and collect our marketing knowledge.” “As you [grow] more into the enterprise you can see what other lines of business are doing. For us, a 30% growth rate is now what we're achieving, or what we're desiring to achieve because the account sizes are so much larger. So when you're a little company, you can expect an insane growth rate. And then when you're in an enterprise your growth rates are going to be more like 30%. When you're forecasting, [do] some underwriting on what other companies like you were doing and setting your goal, maybe 10% higher, so you can crush your competition.” BioAmy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., is the Chief Marketing Officer of Simplus, an Infosys Company. At Simplus, she led the marketing efforts from Series A through acquisition, helping the company achieve a 3-year growth rate of 1,578% and acquire seven companies before being acquired by Infosys for $250M. Amy is also the founder of Osmond Marketing, which has been named one of the fastest-growing businesses in Utah by MountainWest Capital for five years in a row. She is an adjunct faculty member at BYU-Hawaii and has taught business and communication courses at BYU, University of Utah, and ASU intermittently for the past 25 years. Amy is a columnist for the Daily Herald and a regular contributor to Forbes, the Orange County Register, and other publications. She received her doctorate from the University of Utah in Organizational Communication, and her research interests, informed by Critical Theory, include organizational identification, communication ethics, and gender dynamics in the workplace. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Let’s go to the moon!’ ...is a great and lofty goal, but it doesn’t mean much if you or I say it. Why? Because, just guessing, you don’t have an actual plan for how to do that, or the means, for that matter. Point is, you need an actual plan, with real numbers and defined goals, and set time frames in order to achieve your goals. My guest this week, the CMO of GTMhub, Jeremy Epstein gets this and is passionate about the usefulness and importance of OKRs in the marketing department to help teams build plans to get them to where they want to go“Google is usually held up as the poster boy/girl/non-binary person for OKRs, because in the in the Bible of the OKR industry is what's called ‘measure what matters.’ John Doerr introduced OKRs to Google. OKRs have this deep history going all the way back to Andy Grove at Intel, based on Peter Drucker. By my calculation, OKRs will be embedded in every successful organization in some form or format by the end of this decade. They are that game-changing capability-wise from a strategy execution perspective.” And changing up the game is exactly what Epstein is best at. In this show we’ll get into some of the lessons Epstein learned during his time at Microsoft and Sprinkler, discuss some best practices for managing a remote workforce and unpack some key principles of great leadership in marketing. Don’t worry, we’ve already invited him back on the show. I can’t wait for you to enjoy this episode about the simplified and data-driven marketing methods of marketing guru, Jeremy Epstein.Main Takeaways:Evolving Leadership Process: A great leader is one who can take feedback and alter course to stay on the best track for the business. Becoming a leader will demand a new skill set and an ability to look at the bigger picture. Thinking about the work and the mission with a broader perspective will help you keep everyone moving in the right direction. The Role of OKRs in Business: Companies in the future will all use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. This method of precisely defining the goals and providing clear data is maximally effective. Setting forth a simple and easy-to-understand plan to accomplish a difficult mission is the first step to succeeding, and that’s what an OKR does. Future of Blockchain in Marketing: The Apple cut-down on cookie use is just the beginning of the end of marketing with PII or Personally Identifiable Information. When more and more people get on and start using and trading in new markets, and for different purposes, you’re going to need to find a way to reach the right people. ‘No more cookies,’ is the way of the future. Document Processes: If any aspect of your business hinges upon one link in the chain, your whole business is at risk. Every role should be so well documented and laid that a new hire could come off the street with no prior knowledge of your business and be able to understand the job. Also, when you have everything written, there is a source of truth. Things get said in meetings and promptly forgotten. Documenting what was said in a meeting and immediately sharing that with the attendees can help move action items forward and create productive meetings. Key Quotes:“I got some really, candid feedback along the way from that my style for a lot of people was not working. It was too micromanage(y). It was too overbearing and people didn't like it. The best player doesn't always become your best coach. I needed to make that shift from player to coach. And I had to think about the game if you will, in a very different light. It's still a learning journey. And fortunately, I've had some great teachers along the way and most importantly, I tried to create an environment where my team feels safe and comfortable to tell me what a total screw-up I am on a regular basis.” “Marketing is all about differentiation. hat's the core, the single best book I've ever read about marketing is called ‘Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd Book by Youngme Moon’. It's about being different. My CEO at Gtmhub said it to me best when I came into the role he said, ‘You have to have infinite patience with people.’ If you get 1% better every day, by the end of the year, you're going to be 97xs better.”“It’s not about me being ‘the chief’. I almost reject that name. I’m the marketing enabler. I'm just trying to support everyone and make everyone better. I've asked almost everybody on my team, ‘what's your long-term career goal?’ And I view it as my responsibility to help them get further.”“Google is usually is held up as the poster boy/girl/non-binary person for OKRs because in the Bible of the OKR industry is what's called measure what matters. John Doerr introduced OKRs to Google. OKRs have this deep history going all the way back to Andy Grove at Intel, based foundationally on Peter Drucker. So, yes, I have skin in the game but by my calculation, OKRs will be embedded in every successful organization in some form or format by the end of this decade, or else, those companies may not even be around. They are that game-changing capability-wise from a strategy execution perspective.” “I'm a maniac about documentation of processes on our confluence. I call it, ‘what if you get hit by a bus document.’ If you get hit by a bus, Yes, I'll be sad but the business needs to continue. Someone else off the street [should be able to] come in and read your document [and] know how to do this person's role.” “In a web 3.0 world, you know nothing about your customer, aside from what their blockchain address is, what their wallet contents hold, and their transactions. There is no such thing as PII (Personally Identifiable Information.) This world already exists and you have to market to this world where that's all you know about the person. [This is] where we're going to end up anyway.”“How does the function and discipline and strategy around marketing evolve because of the arrival of this disruptive technology? There'll be expectations that customers co-create and co-own the brand with you. Why don't they have a stake in it when you have Bitcoin, you own one 21 millionth of the network. So why not own a part of the brand? And you could decentralize that and you can decent and you can co-create assets and, and not just give them a $2,000 award, but give them provable cocaine that represents 1% ownership in, you know, diet, Coke, vanilla cream, cherry pie, whatever kind of thing.”Bio:Jeremy Epstein is the CMO of Gtmhub. He has six years of corporate experience at Microsoft and has experienced high-growth marketing during his time as VP of Marketing at Sprinklr as they grew from a $20mm Series A valuation to a $1.8 billion level over 4 years.He has worked with top minds in blockchain, crypto-economics, smart contracts, and decentralization as an advisor to Open Bazaar, Zcash, DAOstack, SingularityNet, & Dapper Labs. He has keynoted Fortune 50 executive-level events on topics including social media, blockchain, and A.I. Jeremy shares his thoughts at blog.neverstopmarketing.com To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

Do you notice the minutiae details in everyday life? For example, have you ever recognized the way that other people hold their cell phones? If you do, your mind works similar to that of Jeffrey Nicholson, the CEO, and Co-founder of Tracer. This level of attention to detail has helped him throughout his career, particularly when it comes to picking up some of the latest trends, which he told me about in this episode of Marketing Trends.“I start with natural curiosity. I still, to this day, will do my own research and Google brands, and go through their experiences, and understand what other people go through. When you look at the consumer research on people, they use eight apps or less; they [have] very specific behaviors. I used to look at people's phones and [could] tell very quickly just on their layout, how they operate with phone position and thumb position. You have to start with curiosity, no matter who you are, from analysts all the way to CEO. You've got to know what's going on.”Under the tutelage of media giant, Gary Vaynerchuk at VaynerMedia, Jeff and his co-founder Leighton Welch, built Tracer with the plan to launch separately once the development was complete. Leighton developed the structure of the software while Jeff was operating the customer-facing side, servicing Vayner clients and using the software. VaynerMedia is still a client of Tracer and more companies every day are realizing the value it offers in solving complex data equations. Excited for you to glean some real nuggets of wisdom from this marketing leader. Up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Developing Good Talent on your Team is Exponentially Beneficial: As your team grows, the more people you have that are closely aligned with your business mission, vision, and execution expectations, the better that will help everyone stay on the same page. Scaling a team up in the right way might take a little extra time, but the investment upfront will pay dividends later. Curiosity Leads to Excellence in Business: As a CEO being curious is critical to keeping a good view of the big-picture. Developing a natural curiosity around your work can lead to you discovering some basic but important ways you can improve your business operations. As you go through the customer-facing experience of other brands and products, notice the sticking points, the areas you could improve upon, and learn some potentially hard lessons the easy way. Designing Teams around Individuals with Various Skill Sets: Every member of your team brings a vast array of talents and skills to share with the company. Think about who you already have on your team and what other roles you could use support for when hiring to build out the most complementary team. Key Quotes:“I start with natural curiosity. To this day, [I] will do my own research and Google brands, and go through their experiences, and understand what other people go through. When you look at the consumer research on people, they use eight apps or less; they [have] very specific behaviors. I used to look at people's phones and [could] tell very quickly just on their layout, how they operate with phone position and thumb position. You have to start with curiosity, no matter who you are, from analysts all the way to CEO. You've got to know what's going on.”“I'm a big believer in talent and making sure that talent breeds talent and I think about it as a pyramid. Typically you're starting with your co-founders. The reality is that every level of that pyramid is imperative to the success of your business. I'm a big basketball guy. You need a power forward, you need a shooting guard, you need everybody to have different skill sets. That's going to be complementary to make you win. So you're a good communicating and functioning team… I've spent probably more time than most of the people I know in regards to just recruiting and retention because I do believe that, you know, people are the difference between winning and losing.”“I underestimate how difficult it is to be responsible for other human beings. As an early manager, I got some good advice and bad advice and you're just learning on the fly. I think now I feel a lot more comfort in being a leader in dealing with things.”“I spend a lot of time on [my work] because I care and I want to win. And honestly, I want to make sure I don't let anybody else down on the team. It's an easy motivation to keep yourself motivated, to make sure that we make the right decisions and spend as much time as I can researching and recruiting and, and doing the things.”Bio:Jeff Nicholson is the CEO and Co-founder of Tracer. Nicholson has been innovating in the media and tech space for 15 plus years. Before joining Tracer, he was the first Chief Media Officer at VaynerMedia, where he spent five years scaling the business globally. He has also served as the Head of Ads at SocialCode, which was the largest spending agency on Facebook in North America. Prior to that, he was VP of Ads at LeadKarma, which sold to BankRate for $30MM. Currently, he sits on the advisory boards of Roku, Pinterest, and NextDoor. He teaches at universities including Babson College, New York University Stern School of Business, University of Virginia, and Miami Ad School.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

When there’s a problem, the sooner you know about it, the better. And this doesn’t just relate to high-level problems. The quicker you can identify that something is an issue and rectify it, the quicker you can get to making a meaningful difference towards your end goal. This is the case for email marketing. If the subject line of your email is causing a trend towards a lower than usual click rate, you’ve got to improve that in real-time. To do this, Cynthia Price, the VP of Marketing at Litmus, focuses her attention on good content marketing. How does she do this, by analyzing and reacting to data based on real-time campaign performance? The end result is a content marketing campaign that originates from high-performing blog posts.“Over the course of the past three months, that campaign that started as a blog post turned into a giant revolving door of great content. We've now done two webinars that map up to it. Sales is consistently sending updates to prospects. We hope everybody who touches that content becomes a customer, but ultimately we see the value in sort of the bigger picture of just providing something to the industry that is hard to untangle in order to figure out.” Untangling complex email campaigns and getting the most you can out of them is imperative in today’s marketing world. In this episode of Marketing Trends, Cynthia explains to me why email continues to prove its value in the marketing mix, how marketers can maximize its ROI, and you can turn those declining open rates into success. I’m excited for you to learn more about how to stay on the cutting edge of email. Let's get to it!Main TakeawaysContent Marketing and Thought Leadership: If you can put your mind to the task and address the new problems that no one has addressed before you can assume a role of thought leadership while focusing on some of the broader issues the industry is seeing. Don’t wait for someone else to be the leader on how to address new industry changes, industry regulations, and any unforeseen circumstances. Outline a reasonable roadmap of solutions and create an entire content campaign around it to achieve the ultimate marketing goal, giving real value to your audience.Strategic ABM Marketing: If you’re going to try to tap into the powers of ABM marketing you need to be very selective about the scope of customer you’re targeting. Use data, not feelings to make the best list of prospects. It’s okay to have lofty goals on your client prospect list, but stay focused on the size of businesses that you can best serve. You’ll both be getting the maximum benefit out of this relationship.Bringing Community to the Scattered Email Marketing World: If your company can be a leading voice in your industry, that’s a big win. The way things were designed for email marketing campaigns wasn’t like the way they’re done for web pages or really anything else. The email world was a bit scattered before Litmus brought marketers together, creating community, bringing resources, and giving a definite answer to things that there was a lot of confusion around before.Key Quotes“Over the course of the past three months, [this] campaign started as a blog post; it wasn't really a campaign per se. It turned into a giant revolving door of really great content where we've now done two webinars that map up to it. We've got a big downloadable piece of content and sales is consistently sending updates to prospects. hen we can react to what's happening in the world around us and really provide some value, we certainly hope everybody who touches that content becomes a customer, but ultimately we see the value in sort of the bigger picture of just providing something to the industry  that is hard to untangle in order to figure out.”“One of the reasons I joined Litmus is that Litmus did a really good job over the years before I was here of being a leader in the space and being a voice. Email marketing is such a complicated, weird world to live in because the people who are designing emails know this inside and out, but mail designed for email is different than designed for the web. It's somewhat archaic. There are over a hundred email clients that they're trying to design for. There's just all this confusion. Litmus had done a really good job over the years of finding a place for that community to gather together both virtually and in live events, finding resources for them that really speak to things; there wasn't a definitive answer on a lot of these things out there and let us sort of help ‘uncloud’ some of the murkiness there.”“We went back to the drawing board and let the data inform who should be on that list [of prospects]. You look at your close one report from the last year, and we're only going after those industries. We're only going after those size companies. Start really small, as small as ABM will allow you to go and then build from there and, and still have some of those wishlist customers on the list, but the bulk of the list needs to be informed by data.” “We made the critical mistake of 1.) doing a lot of building before we tested anything out and 2.) we didn't put a solid marketing plan together for it, nor did we have a plan to iterate for it. We wanted it to have a bigger impact  on marketers than it did. And I think part of it was that it was, it was fun. It was quirky, but it probably wasn't providing a value on the back end for them to share it with their friends and, and think about it in a bigger way ...Also, we didn’t really have a plan B.““We just put out an email engagement report that looks on the backend of everything.  It looks like open rates. We always say, don't take this and everybody send an email at 8:00 AM in the U S because then it breaks [down]. [There’s] interesting trends where, first thing in the morning is the best time in the US for open rates, whereas 3:00 PM is the best time in the UK. That's just behavioral information about people. I think as we get further and further down this A.I. path, depending on what third party data does or doesn't allow us to do, we're going to get a lot smarter about those kinds of things as well.”BioCynthia Price is the VP of Marketing at Litmus. Her team grows and supports the Litmus and email community through content marketing, demand generation, and events. She has been in the email marketing industry for over 10 years, previously as VP of marketing at Emma, an email service provider. She has a passion for authentic communications and the power of email at the heart of the marketing mix.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.   

A good company is built with good people and as simple as that sounds, when it comes to finding the right person for the right job, sometimes you have to look beyond what’s written on the reume.. With her decades of experience at companies such as eBay and Skype, Michele Don Durbin, now the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Evernote, knows how to get the most out of herself and her team and that all stems from her emphasis on culture building“You're certainly going to be judged on what you get done, but how you get it done is just as important. When you spend your time, your career, surrounded by driven ambitious people who are always trying to do more and have the next best idea and make more money, whether it's self-imposed because they're real smart and ambitious, or it's part of a larger culture, there are some people who will use, I don't know, less than ideal tactics to get things done. And I really appreciated the idea that eBay said, ‘It's not just what you're getting done. It's how you're working with others. It's how you're taking the community to account, it's what your colleagues think of you and how you're really helping the business overall.” On this episode of Marketing Trends, Michele gets into all things marketing and takes us on a deep-dive into her strategy for hiring, she also unpacks the paid media strategy at Evernote, and shares a fun story about her work launching Skype with Oprah Winfrey. This episode is packed with great advice from an engaging leader. I know you’re going to enjoy this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysA Good Team and Culture Lead to Good Idea Execution: Good ideas abound, at least until you put them to the test. It takes a team that can implement good ideas well to succeed. You need a team of doers around you, not just high-minded theorists. The people that you hire and work with on your team need to be the kind of people who can show up every day with enthusiasm to get things done. The energy and power of a good team isn’t just setting the company culture, it’s setting yourself and your company up for success. Flexibility over Plans: You need to read the data, and decide from there what your plans are, but always remain flexible with your marketing campaigns. There is real value in being able to shift, pivot and adapt to new data, and reactions to ongoing and new campaigns. Re-Focus Your Attention on Customers Already in the Funnel: Sometimes we get so excited and focused on getting more emails in our systems that we forget to maximize the spend of all those contacts we already have. Focusing on serving your customer base can lead you to innovating new products and solutions for them, also driving outside buy-in to your product. Key Quotes“There are two things that jump to mind immediately that I remember from the eBay days. The first one is that nothing got funded without data. We had an incredibly efficient process for prioritizing resources. Ideas are great and people have ideas all the time, but the team allocating the resources wouldn't even consider something until a reasonable set of assumptions, for a clear understanding of what success looked like was presented. And that is really important because ideas are one thing, but if you have no way to execute those ideas and you don't know what success looks like, you don't actually know when you've arrived and you don't know when you failed and getting the funding for something meant pulling together that use case that business case what you expect it to happen. And it's a good exercise that I continue to ask all my teams to do today.”“I was tapped to move over to Skype; it was an internal transfer at that time and I started helping run the marketing team. We had only 13 people to run all of the Americas. The things that we got to do were, as you said, in the beginning, I was very lucky to be at the right place at the right time, because it was just outstanding.”“You're certainly going to be judged on what you get done, but how you get it done is just as important. When you spend your career, surrounded by driven ambitious people who are always trying to do more and have the next best idea and make more money, whether it's self-imposed because they're real smart and ambitious, or it's part of a larger culture, there are some people who will use less than ideal tactics to get things done. And I really appreciated the idea that eBay said, ‘It's not just what you're getting done. It's how you're working with others. It's how you're taking the community to account, it's what your colleagues think of you and how you're really helping the business overall.” “It all comes down to this idea of a foundational marketing principle that great ideas don't really mean much without great execution. So it's not that I don't value ideas, but I don't worship them. I think I'll get more out of a good idea, executed ruthlessly than a great idea that's executed adequately.”“It’s about being flexible in what you think you're going to be able to do. So make plans, back those plans with data, put really good people in charge of those plans, and then be prepared for those plans to change, and that's one of the reasons why Evernote was so interesting for me and why I'm still there.” “The biggest channel that we have for new users is our existing base and that is how it has always been. This is why the community is so important to us. What we're doing, now that we have the apps and infrastructure rebuilt, is we're really focused on providing education in real life use cases and packaging that up into snackable portions.” “We got this call from somebody on the production crew of the Oprah Winfrey show. And she wanted to host the largest ever book review for her book club. And she wanted her audience to be able to talk to her....so we did this partnership with Oprah Winfrey and we [would] get this call. It'd be like, ‘You need to ship a laptop and a camera and a microphone and a headset to this address. And it needs to be there tomorrow.’ And we had tech guys on contract who would actually go to somebody's house and help them set up their equipment so that it would be high quality for Oprah. And we did this for, I think it was six or eight weeks. She loved it so much.” BioWorking with a mission began for Michele Don Durbin years ago, when she helped small business owners and start-ups build their own global businesses and create communities on eBay. Later, as the head of global customer acquisition for Skype, she turned my passions towards connecting the world via video calling — reuniting friends, keeping families close despite vast distances and helping companies build global teams to achieve their goals. As the VP of Marketing for Inflection, Don Durbinhelped transform its small, quiet background check company, GoodHire, into an industry-recognized, award-winning challenger brand. But it was Evernote’s deeply held belief in the infinite potential of any idea, big or small, world-changing or personal, that intrigued her most. To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

You may have some fear or feel a sense of resistance when you hear the phrase “affiliate marketing.” Especially if you had ever been burned by this form of marketing in the past.. Like most sectors, a lot  has improved in the affiliate space and that development has stemmed from the creation of tech tools.  On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kevin Osborne, the Senior Vice President of Client Strategy at Acceleration Partners, gave us  the low-down on how affiliate partnerships can be thought of as more than a last-ditch effort to milk remaining dollars out of the market. Management, implementation and fraud resistance are all areas of modern affiliate marketing that have vastly improved as of late. “People tend to pigeonhole “affiliate marketing” as the last mile. Get that last click drive, that last sale. But again, we really encourage these bigger brands that have a broader perspective on what this channel can do and how it can operate across other traditional media channels already running.” But a successful affiliate marketing strategy is’ more than just having the right tools, or the best new gadgets. A big part of the value that Acceleration Partners brings to its customers is by providing guidance on best practices as you roll out your program. Kevin and I dove into how using data, tapping into tried-and-true marketing channels, and reducing friction on the back-end have given modern affiliate marketing the power to be a key tool in your marketing mix, not just an afterthought. Main Takeaways:Old School Affiliate Marketing Systems are Out: The time and labor intensive old school model of affiliate marketing was a big lift, even for bigger companies to pull off successfully. Now with evolving technology, the launching and management of a profitable affiliate marketing program is much more cost effective and less staff intensive. The affiliate system is now more efficient and scalable. Direct Mail can be an Affiliate: Don’t limit yourself to the old way of thinking about affiliate partnerships, even in terms of where that initial impression comes from. With some businesses, such as the restaurant industry, direct mail can be the most effective affiliate lead tool. Re-engaging with existing customers: As you think about reigniting that affiliate marketing program, look at your existing customer base as the first well to tap into. Re-engaging with existing customers through affiliate marketing can bring them back to new products or services you offer.   Key Quotes:“We look at brands that are trying to acquire subscribers, sign ups, sell shoes, whatever it may be, and at the end of the day, affiliate is simply a channel that's able to pay partners once an outcome takes place. Once a sale takes place at the end of the day, I think a lot of marketers are trying to get to that final accountable metric, which is, ‘does this drive sales?’ “You could use this tool, partnership marketing and the different players that are involved in it to drive any part of the consumer journey that you want. You can drive awareness, you can drive engagement, you can drive conversion.”“People tend to pigeonhole “affiliate marketing” as the last mile. Get that last click drive, that last sale. But again, we really encourage these bigger brands that have a broader perspective on what this channel can do and how it can operate across other traditional media channels already running.” “There's some sophisticated technology platforms out there that are great at looking at these deeper analytics. Whether that's attribution, whether that's certain measurement systems based on the partner type, whether it's different commissions based on the interaction that a customer has with the brand, that technology enables us to actually push forward a lot of these new strategies that encompass broader marketing.”“One of the key elements of our services partner development.  We have guys that are going out there and forging new relationships based on a brand strategy. We worked with a food delivery app that was trying to acquire new restaurants. There's certain ways that those restaurants engage with media and take action, and direct mail was actually one of those. So working with direct mail service to actually get that brand's message in front of those restaurant owners was really effective.”“One of the spaces that's most interesting, that's been growing the fastest, is B2B, especially the SMB. They have these teams that are business development teams and business development. And that universe is pretty old school, right? It's guys with a Rolodex that are calling up certain partners or certain individuals that might run an accounting firm that are trying to get people to sign up for QuickBooks. And it's pretty disjointed and it's a big world, right? Some of these firms have 20, 30 people on these business development teams and they're willing to invest because they're really efficient, right? These partners can really drive a significant amount of sales for a pretty reasonable cost.”“As far as the industries that are growing the fastest within affiliate marketing there's these traditional, direct to consumer These guys were living off social and SEM for years.  They were maximizing those channels. They were driving new customers. They were doing it really cost efficiently.fn the last year or two years, it's become inefficient There is a point of diminishing returns where your bids have to go up and the value goes down. And at some point you need to explore other channels. Over the last three, four years, we've seen a huge adoption by those specific companies coming into a failure because it provides scalability, cost efficiency and new audiences that's where we've seen massive growth with those companies moving into affiliates and really changing the landscape and bringing on new innovation.”Bio:Kevin has served in a variety of sales roles at renowned companies, including AOL, Openbay and IAC. He has received numerous accolades for his leadership, sales training, and mentorship along with his digital industry expertise. His passion for startups and entrepreneurship has led to his working with some of the best and brightest companies in the startup space. Through his passion, charisma, determination and win-win approach to problem-solving, Kevin consistently earned the trust and respect of his clients.Prior to his successful career in sales, Kevin volunteered as a teacher with Citizen Schools and played professional hockey in Paris. If you catch him in the right mood, he may even tell you his favorite French expression.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

Through time, some of the strongest relationships have led to the biggest successes. Cory and Shawn from Boy Meets World were a dynamic duo, Turk and JD from the television show Scrubs are the traditional sitcom-bromance most friends envy. But what happens when friends become business partners? A powerful co-founder relationship is not just needed but relied on — especially when you leave a successful career to do your own thing. You need someone you can lean on, trust, and go to when things are rocky. That’s what Courtney Baber did when she launched The Route Beauty with best friend and now co-founder, Nancy Pellegrino. Courtney left a successful career with some of the biggest beauty brands in the game, Sephora, L’Oreal, and Urban Decay to bring her own skincare solutions to the counter in a big way. “When Ulta said, ‘yes, we want to launch you.’ I can't explain that feeling. I just laid down on the floor of my daughter’s room and just started gyrating, I don't take anything for granted. I built strong relationships in my career and people believe in what I can do; it's all about working hard and giving the retailer and the customer something that they need and they want.”Featured on Oprah, promoted by Khloe Kardashian, and sold on HSN, The Route Beauty is making big moves in the beauty world, now available on the shelves of big retailer, Ulta. I’m excited to bring you the story behind Courtney and Nurse Nancy’s beautiful and thriving partnership as co-founders of The Route Beauty, up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Test out New Tools: There are so many new marketing tools and channels to get your message out there to the right people. Be creative by testing out new platforms. Not all of them will be here to stay, but the opportunity to be first on a new platform could be a great advantage for an emerging brand.Pivoting to Fill the Needs of a New Business: Think through all of your business options and have a sense of where you can take things if something happens to plan A. For example, you may find yourself needing to shift your plan from selling or marketing  B2B to D2C suddenly, or retail to online… complications occur for a multitude of unforeseen circumstances. Sometimes you get caught behind some insurmountable roadblocks and you’ve got to have a sense of where you can turn to keep the business thriving.Getting It Perfect: Especially as a new brand, with a limited number of skews on the market, it’s important to take the time to get every little detail of new products perfect before putting them on the market. You only get one first impression and making a good one is worth the extra time so don’t be afraid to push back on launch deadlines to get things dialed.Key Quotes:“I hit a point after we sold Urban Decay to L'Oreal -- I stayed on for four additional years as their head of marketing and merchandising -- and I was passionate about what I was doing, but I was tired of building dreams for other people, and I wanted to try to do it for myself. That's really why I took the leap of faith.”“I would have probably never done this by myself. I have a BFF, my skincare BFF, my BFF in life, “Nurse Nancy.” I've been her patient for over 10 years. And we always, when I would be visiting her to help fix my skin, And it was with these medical grade products and she would always talk about it. She always wanted to work together. And we both hit the same point at the same time. It was kind of this magical moment where we said, ``Well, let's do something together.”“When they said yes, when Ulta said, ‘We want to launch you.’ I can't explain that feeling. I just laid down on the floor of my daughter’s room and kind of just started gyrating, I don't take anything for granted. I built strong relationships in my career and people believe in what I can do, it's all about working hard and giving the retailer and the customer something that they need and they want.”“I couldn't be happier with the partner that I chose, but you really have to find that yin and yang and in a partnership like that, it's no different than a marriage.”“We’re going to test a new platform called Comments Sold  later this year, which is really interesting to me. It’s live streaming to your social channels and people can buy right then and there. It’s like Amazon live, like HSN, but it's really more targeted at your unique followers.”“It's kind of a challenging world, the influencer world. It’s gotten very hard to play in that space without spending a lot of money. When I was at Urban Decay we could get people to do things for us by just giving them early access to a product. You can't even talk to somebody without first paying the agent. So what we've decided to do is go kind of a much more micro route and really kind of build relationships at a grassroots level. And then also we've really built this group of what we're calling our “Routies” they're really are true brand devotees who have been with us from the beginning and they are influential. They're not millions of followers because but this group of individuals, we kind of have an affiliate program where they get some kickbacks from us. They love the brand, they love talking about it, but we also want to reward them for continuing to do that. So it's a small group of people like that. And then we're really how we were really growing our awareness and following and email list through working with like-minded brands that aren't skincare brands. They're hair brands or they sell chocolate that is high-end, or one wine brands  -- we all want to scratch each other's backs and all win together. And so that's been really successful.”“I'm not looking a lot at what other people are doing. I'm looking at what's right for our brand and what is innovative in other industries and the medical world. And because that's how we're going to be able to stand out and have a point of difference.”Bio:With more than 25 years of experience, Courtney Baber has built brands for some of the beauty industry’s top heavy hitters like Sephora, Urban Decay, Estée Lauder, and more. Courtney’s passion for skincare, makeup, and fragrance has led her around the world to help evolve the face of beauty—literally. She pioneered the path to debut up-and-coming beauty brands for Sephora internationally and was behind the global roll-out of Urban Decay to 30+ countries.She is a former Miss Ohio USA, and her mom was also a beauty queen. For Courtney, competing in Miss USA was about so much more than winning a crown, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that helped instill independence, perseverance and self-confidence. It pushed her outside her comfort zone—she believes if you are uncomfortable, you are growing.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

Having the right elements and the right design is critically important to reaching the right people the right way. Detria Williamson, the CMO of IDEO, has years of experience working with clients to create meaningful impact through design, and throughout that time she has seen the world of design shift and the buyers’ needs change. To meet those needs, Detria says it’s all about listening carefully to what customers are saying. “The new design buyer, they're CMOs, they're CEOs, they're CTOs, they're Chief Diversity Officers. So we really needed to make sure that we were expanding our listening ability and in terms of making sure that our services were known to other leaders across the C-suite. Articulating all of our communities and deeply listening internally and across all those communities. On this episode of Marketing Trends, I was excited to hear more about what it takes to actively listen and respond in today’s world. Plus, Detria and I got into how  she is helping to not just create more inclusivity, but allow it to become common practice across the industry. Detria has a revolutionary way of thinking about building her team of designers, seeking maximal creativity and diversity of ideas as the primary focus, and she explains it all in this episode. All this up next on Marketing Trends! Main TakeawaysInclusive Customer Experience: Break away from the idea that it’s only important to focus on diversity and instead think more about inclusion. You can fake diversity but true inclusion is harder to imitate. The New Design Buyer: As design has become more democratized and the design-buyer has changed, it’s more important than ever to tune into what they are asking for. Some of the leaders in these positions may not even know about the resources available to them, so there is an educational part of the process as well. Don’t Over-stack: The explosion of MarTech tools means that marketing solutions are abundant but it’s important to maintain a healthy balance in your budget to  ensure that you have the people and the resources to put it to use. Make sure you are constantly evaluating your tech stack based on what is performing and what is not. If something isn’t performing, get rid of it in favor of a tool that is a driving force for your business.  Key Quotes“The most well-known digital tool that I created while I was there is called inclusive customer experience. It really fell out of a design-thinking workshop that we were doing. So again, design-thinking has always been this kind of three-way savior.  I would say through my career, it's a safety net.”“Diversity can be engineered, but inclusion can't.”“There are so many CMOs that don't have the luxury, the privilege, or sometimes even the awareness to have design built into their budgets. So when you say design for inclusion, that requires intention and requires you to allocate financial resources and team resources behind it. What you gain from it is beyond imagination. Having a more inclusive brand and a more inclusive experience has to be designed for.”“The new design buyer they're CMOs, they're CEOs, they're CTOs, they're chief diversity officers. So we really needed to make sure that we were expanding our listening ability and in terms of, you know, sort of making sure that our services were known to other leaders across the C-suite. So articulating all of our communities and deeply listening internally and across all those communities.” “Three things from a design perspective: One is designing for inclusion. Two is designing for privacy, and three is designing for experience. CMOs have to do that.”  “You can't hire your way through [inclusion]. I don't think that that’s the only, or the quickest or most agile way to solve for CMOs answering to big challenges. Designing your way through them is the way forward.”“[I’m] not just looking at diversity in terms of gender diversity, in terms of ethnicity -- those to me are table stakes. When you hire radically inclusive leaders, those things just happen. They should happen automatically. But diversity in terms of, you know, how they gain their skills. If you go, and you actually recruit everybody out of San Francisco, that's grown up the same way that's come out of the same type of households. It's had the same track through the UC schools, — no knock against UC schools or the schools there — You're probably going to get people that approach a problem that come day to daya with the same sort of approach, they come with the same stories, the same way they attack problems. “You have to stay inspired and stay nourished. Because our agendas are wicked. They're just crazy. So that's one thing. It sounds again really simple, but if you want to stay confident, then you have to stay nourished. You have to stay inspired in order to maintain and sustain inspiration to your teams.““Make sure that your infrastructure is in place so that you can use MarTech to really align sales and marketing. It doesn't matter if you are a company of 20 or a company of 200,000, there's a stack out there for every size company. And MarTech is really the answer to aligning.” “There's new software platforms, there's so many, I call it the spaghetti stack. I think when you are trying to make that [MarTech] choice, it's really important to make sure that you have the support that you need from the new software tools. Make sure that you have that through line, especially I would say for smaller mid-sized companies.”BioCombine the outlook of a visionary with the rigor of a high-performing athlete and you’ll begin to get a sense of IDEO CMO Detria Williamson. She has spent more than 20 years as an innovative brand experience marketer who gives companies a brave push forward, bringing the discipline and mindset needed to create new brand ecosystems while building on the resonance and value the brand already has to its audiences.It’s an effort underpinned by two core beliefs: that focusing on diversity and having a growth mindset are important but far too narrow alone, and that inclusive experience is the center of gravity for a brand. This has led Detria to create the ICX (inclusive customer experience) approach. It’s a way to integrate all elements of the customer experience—how people are targeted, how products are designed, and how audiences and communities are shaped and formed—and to make sure the thinking is inclusive.While you are likely to hear her quip “we’re good to grow,” Detria believes a change mindset is the true requisite for new-age marketers. It’s one that is fixated on openness, not daunted by curveballs, and totally liberated through things that are new. How that has come to life: As Global Business Director for Emirates Airlines, Detria spearheaded transitioning their multi-million-dollar sports sponsorship budget from the time-tested practice of logos on jerseys to cultivating global sports communities using the power of media, video, digital, and sports celebrities.She joined IDEO as CMO with an outlook shaped by her experiences living and working in the US, London, Singapore, and the Middle East. It has given her a strong basis from which to build international teams with a global mindset, enabling brands to reach audiences and form communities across geographies and markets. With a proven record of developing high-value, high-impact brand experiences, as of 2020, Detria has grown over $5B in brand equity for clients across a variety of industries and categories, including Google, Capital Group, Discovery, and AT&T.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

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

On the show we hear over and over again that marketing and sales need to find alignment and that data needs to be a big part of that. Kevin Tate is the CMO of Clearbit, a company that is taking an entirely different approach when it comes to data quality and coverage.  Clearbit is a tool for marketers to use to better understand customers, identify future prospects, and personalize marketing and sales interactions. And if there is one thing Kevin knows, it is the importance of quickly aligning the marketing team’s vision with the customer perception and the needs of the business.  I was curious how tried-and-true marketing pillars have influenced the way Kevin runs his marketing department, so I asked him…“One of the things I've learned being on both sides of the sales and marketing equation is that there has to be a balance between marketing's vision for how we want to be viewed in the market and here's how we want people to think about and value what we do. Then there's the sales reality of [being] on the phone with this person, and they're asking for X, and there has to be a really close alignment between how do you help reframe or guide the conversation, but how do you also understand and listen to what that customer is asking for?”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kevin and I go deep on why static or stale data is leading marketers down a precarious path when it comes to their data management. We also touch on how Clearbit is not just another data vendor, but a company that’s doing radical things when it comes to empowering marketing. I hope you enjoy this episode. Main Takeaways:Combining Sales and Marketing Knowledge: There can be challenges related to aligning the marketing vision and sales objectives. Often there needs to be some time spent reframing with the client to guide them towards mutual interests. The marketing department has objectives for reach, the sales team has goals for moving the product, and the client on the phone has needs that you need to service. All three of these things need to work in concert. Content Marketing to Marketers: Content that is useful to your clients can be a great marketing tool. Blogs, eBooks, how-to guides, and reports are all good tools that can add value to your customer or prospective customer.   Funnels are Dependent on Good Data: To be able to hone in on what changes you need to make in your marketing mix requires that you have immediate and good data about your potential consumer. Especially with Product Led Growth companies the funnel that you build needs to have the most accurate information about what consumer are responding to and what they need. Connection Between Your Email Efforts and Ad Efforts: The most valuable thing you can have is a first party mechanism that will give you the most accurate data about the way that your email marketing campaign is supporting and working with your other marketing efforts. All of your marketing channels need to work together for a cohesive and effective marketing strategy. Key Quotes:“There's two parts to Clearbit, there's the data -- and we have data about every company with a website that we collect from hundreds of public sources. Then there's what you do with the data, which is the platform we have to put that data to work in your ad campaigns. Personalizing your website, shortening your forms, enriching all your other systems. We're trying to remove friction. Then on the operations side, having rich real-time data from the front to back of your revenue operations, that ends up mattering a lot. That's what people are doing with Clearbit.” “Clearbit is getting pulled into a company that is implementing an ABM strategy and needs the data and more importantly, the integrations to put that data to work at all the different points in that marketing and sales funnel.”“Product Led Growth companies [have] built funnels that depend on really good data to know of all the people trying [the] product and all the people giving intent signals, and all the people experiencing the product through its life cycle. ” “ The value that a company creates is linked to its product roadmap. You can extend the value beyond that roadmap. One is building things on top of it, and that's what we're doing in the growth engineering team.”“One of the things I've learned being on both sides of the sales and marketing equation is that there has to be a balance between marketing's vision for how we want to be viewed in the market. And here's how we want people to think about and value what we do. Then there's the sales reality of [being] on the phone with this person, and they're asking for X, and there has to be a really close alignment between how do you help reframe or guide where you can the conversation, but how do you also understand and listen to what that customer is asking for?”“We're using marketing technology to sell marketing technology technologists. First from a market perspective, I think we're fortunate to be in a really interesting and fast moving time where almost anyone would agree that the B2B funnel switching toward digital and online buying has really raised the importance of data and understanding. Now that much of the sales experience is mediated through these touch points/  Maybe it's chat, maybe it's email, maybe it's the website, all those need data to perform the best they can. A lot of times that comes down to how can I reduce friction or increased speed or increase the relevance of that, of that app based interaction.”“There's apps that are doing all those interactions, and then there's the data that's providing that foundation and making sure everything is as smart as it can be when it's doing that. That's the world we see on the horizon. Trying to be really thoughtful around growth, how do we make sure that we're creating and capturing value in the most important ways in that landscape? You can do a ton of things with Clearbit, but what are the things that are going to have the most and the most lasting impact on our customer's pipeline, on their ability to predictably create revenue.” “If you've got a first party mechanism to understand the connection between your email and ad efforts, and what's happening on your website, and then you can tie it back to a data platform with Clearbit, that makes a huge difference.”“Part of what Clearbit does is we have eBooks, we have a lot of blogs, recipes, and how-to guides. We have things like the Visitor Report that provides insight as a free to use tool.So we learn a lot by seeing who is engaging with those things, in what way, and where does that suggest they might be on their journey. I believe that one of the things that is invaluable about the shifts we've seen in B2B buying is that they are going to be in control of their own journey, right? They are going to learn how they want to learn, and they're going to raise their hand when they're ready. We try to be as attuned as we can to where they are in the process and where we can help.”Bio:Kevin Tate, the CMO of Clearbit has amassed 24 years of Sales, Marketing & Product leadership experience with firms serving G2000 brands and agencies. Kevin has led go-to-market for Software (SaaS), and Professional Services and Hardware-enabled SaaS companies. He is a sales and Strategic Marketing executive with deep domain expertise in Enterprise SaaS, eCommerce, Digital Marketing, Social Media and IoT. Kevin is a graduate of Stanford University. To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  

Here’s an age-old marketing truth: sex sells. But marketing sex, or sexual wellness for that matter, can be a tough subject to bear. Within today’s oversaturated marketplace, marketers are fighting not just for attention on shelves and landing pages, but also for customers’ eyeballs. But when you’re marketing a taboo product, such as a sexual wellness cream, those challenges are magnified and building product awareness becomes your number one goal.“This is a category that people don't even know is something that they're missing. There is no need-gap. You're filling as much as building an aspiration. There is a product here that's going to improve your sexual function. And this is something it's a first of its kind, it's a breakthrough. That’s Bulbul Hooda, Head of Brand and CMO for Vella Bioscience, a CBD-infused pleasure serum designed to act as ‘Viagra’ for women. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Hooda joined me for a candid conversation on the challenges she faces as a marketer marketing a product that consumers might want and need but could be nervous to approach. She discussed the need to normalize products such as pleasure serums, how Vella Bella manages goes about product awareness, and to succeed in a competitive eCommerce environment. Enjoy this episode.Main Takeaways:Marketing a category that people don’t know exists: When you have an entirely new product category, you have to get the word out about what the product is before you can convince people that they need it. Doing unbranded campaigns in a market like this can go a long way to educating your prospective customers.  Marketing to Gen Z: As the next generation, Gen Z, has more spending power, their unique interests, and purchasing priorities are starting to affect markets and the products on offer. Gen Z is tending to use wellness categories, self-elevation, and self-improvement. Test a variety of channels before launch: Test your systems to ensure everything is correctly in place before launch. Run a silent campaign to see if things get rejected. Test whether email might be a stronger channel and shift resources away from social or put effort into retail play. This mixing and matching are better the more and you also need to be analyzing that. Power of Agency Partnerships: The debate about whether or not to use a marketing agency or to keep everything in-house has pros and cons any way you cut it. The benefits of hiring an agency include tapping into their resources both in terms of manpower, time, expertise in a specific field, and relationships they already have in the market.   Key Quotes:“This is a category that people don't even know is something that they're missing. There is no need-gap. You're filling as much as building an aspiration. There is a product here that's going to improve your sexual function. t's a breakthrough. To create that I needed to have those skillsets in my arsenal. Believing in my intuition, obsessively knowing my consumer. The third bit is building a brand together, piece by piece and that is something I truly learned at Unilever.” “Two things were happening because of the pandemic. Beauty was declining in color cosmetics. North America is a color cosmetics market. Second, what we are seeing is Gen Z becoming a critical purchasing group. Younger kids have more money, they're buying stuff, and they are leaning towards wellness categories, self-elevation improvement.” “[Social advertising issues] were definitely a small setback, learning every time we put an ad out, our website would get blocked. [Then] you [have to] wait out seven days. Thankfully we were testing this two months before launch. We use social both for organic community, but also for advertising. We collect email signups through our ads on social media. So we now know that we are only talking to people who are genuinely interested and therefore email marketing has, I can't say that it has completely replaced social media advertising, but it has arrested a lot of that loss for us. It’s 30% of our revenue channel. Beyond that, we use paid search. Ads on Google, both display shopping and search words, and then what we use social media for is advertising through influencers. Influencer strategy combined with email strategy has helped us navigate the restrictions on Facebook ad blocks.”“I do come from and believe in agency partnerships. My entire marketing team is external. We’ve got somebody who looks after just PR and influencer strategy. There is another agency that does social media, community management, and yet another that’ll do the website and all the updates. Digital marketing, that's a separate leg. The fourth one is a creative agency. While I truly believe in grooming and leading the team, and I've done that, there was just that need in the startup structure to get to market as quickly. Now we are starting to look through the structure and build the internal team. I deeply value all the four agency partnerships that I have.” “[Because certain] payment processors do not allow CBD products what you need is an additional app [for that] and we use Pinwheel to navigate that. The second [issue] is in paid search. If the product has CBD, the ads cannot be targeted to people under 18 years of age, which for us was not a problem, given the age of consent is 18. There is a third: shipping the product internationally. In a lot of countries, you cannot ship CBD products, Canada even. So we will need to set up a manufacturing plant in Canada.” “Everything is first set out as KPIs and then measured for paid advertising. For Google, we set out a return on advertising, spend ROS, KPIs at the beginning of every month. That takes into account competitors' performances, the landscape itself if there are any advertising regulations that have changed so on and so forth. And at the end of every month, we will evaluate where are we versus our goal? Exactly for that email marketing, we sent out, what are we hoping to achieve? It should give me a lift of 23%- 24%.” Bio:Bulbul Hooda is brand creator and chief marketing officer at Vella Bioscience. She has nearly 15 years of experience building & growing award-winning brands by devising their strategic positioning and creative vision along with commercial strategies for long-term revenue growth with a strong commitment to product innovation. Over the course of her global career at powerhouses like L’Oreal, Unilever, and Shiseido, Bulbul has proven success in assessing and meeting consumer needs, engaging target demographics, and directing powerful multi-channel campaigns.Hooda holds an undergraduate degree from Delhi University, along with an MBA from MICA, a top business school in India, and a master’s degree in Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing & Management from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.Hooda is a fierce advocate of diversity and inclusion. As a woman of color, raised in a military family that fostered in her a strong sense of self & individuality, she understands that the privilege of her upbringing requires her to support and uplift other women’s voices and experiences, particularly in the beauty and wellness industry.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

Double-tap — or in some cases just tap — to like. Those little filled-in hearts and thumbs-up used to be the currency of marketing campaigns. How many did you get? Then bots disrupted, and the market for selling likes got out of control. Brands started wising up to the super high customer acquisition costs they were seeing in their marketing reports and they wanted to trim the fat, to know more about who was seeing what and for what reason? Passionate about intricate marketing details like these is Dave Fink the CEO & Founder of Postie. He’s seen a lot of change in the social media marketing landscape in his times on the scene. “We were starting from an authentic place, which was a need for more control over our growth - beyond the behemoths that are social and search. Watching those channels take more and more power, and marketers lose more and more power over their growth trajectory, but not wanting to acquiesce and give up all of the technology and tools and data and measurement and predictability that comes from those channels.”The realization that social media marketing on Facebook was extremely volatile and based solely on large corporate algorithm decisions made by the tech giants sobered Dave into action to move away from relying on paid social media and into the physical mail sector. On Marketing Trends, hear more about how Dave built Postie into one of the most data-driven marketing platforms and how companies within the Fortune 500 are using Postie to level up its customer experience. All this next on Marketing Trends.  Main TakeawaysAdvantages of Direct Mail to Marketers: There is so much data and 100% of the possible market to be reached, physically with direct mail marketing. So much focus has been spent in recent years on tracking clicks and cookies and other digital marketing metrics that the cost of direct mail marketing has gone down and the effectiveness of it remains high.Generating Data for Direct Mail Campaigns: To be effective in direct mail campaigns you need a lot of data that can support predictive modeling and auto-optimization. All of this data can be fed to computers thereby increasing the effectiveness of machine learning. Direct mail in the modern era is about using data to micro-target the best possible consumer.Invest in having good mentors: The difference between business owners that have and utilize the wisdom to be gained from mentors is significant. Be aggressive and seek out the mentorships and curate those relationships, as it will be of great advantage to you. Key Quotes“We were starting from an authentic place, which was a need for more control over our growth - beyond the behemoths that are social and search. Watching those channels take more and more power, and marketers lose more and more power over their growth trajectory, but not wanting to acquiesce and give up all of the technology and tools and data and measurement and predictability that comes from those channels.” “We think about data and insights probably in two different buckets. The first bucket is direct mail. It’s a channel that can provide big data, both first-party data, and third-party data for all sorts of miraculous things —  predictive modeling, auto-optimization. The same kind of characteristics that social has. You get better with bigger data and you get better with testing and insights. A core focus of Postie is big data and machine learning, The biggest product focus that we spend our time on is thinking about how to give all advertisers access to the same data and mathematical advantage that they get from other channels.”“We think about monster companies like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft -- those are still emerging brands, innovators, and disruptors -- then there's the Fortune 500 that almost always falls in the enterprise -- we service both sides. The other is, ‘Is this a brand that's currently invested in indirect mails as a core channel, or is the brand on the complete opposite of the spectrum?’ Depending on what quadrant a prospect or a client falls in will determine how we engage with them and what the education process looks like and how we think about their trajectory in the direct mail channel.” “Think about direct mail as a very specific individualized channel. It's a part of your marketing mix. Those advertisers that I see taking advantage of it with the best performance, with the most scale, most control, are those that start not thinking about just ‘How do we make direct mail work?’ But, ‘Who is our customer base? What are our core marketing objectives?’ Then thinking about a holistic plan for attacking those goals and affecting the achievement of those goals positively. Direct Mail can be a high performance, highly scalable component, but it all starts with markers and understanding, and being honest with themselves around what they're looking to achieve both in the short term and the long term.” “Remember the days when Facebook advertising was all about building your fan page and buying likes? That wasn't that many years ago and at that time I was involved in many brands that had seven, in some cases, eight-figure annual budgets building monstrous fan pages and investing in even bigger budgets of in-house content creators to engage those fans through storytelling. Then Facebook decided to reach those fans, we're going to charge you. That was the warning sign.” “A start-up is a living breathing entity, and it's a journey, and there are good moments and bad moments, good days and bad days if you're in that bunker with someone else. As a co-founder, that's invaluable. One piece of advice is you've got to have multiple mentors and you have to invest in those relationships. The difference in people's careers that I've seen when they have had mentors versus when they don't have mentors, it's a night and day difference. BioA 15-year consumer-internet veteran Dave Fink, CEO & Founder of Postie, is a revenue-focused entrepreneur. With a passion for creating disruptive business models and unique monetization strategies, Dave focuses on discovering opportunities to drive rapid growth. His creative, yet data-driven approach to marketing and monetization has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for ad-tech, lead generation, and commerce companies. Over the last decade, Dave has launched and scaled over 20 consumer-internet businesses. During the early part of his career, he created performance-marketing platforms helping brands as diverse as Walt Disney World, Proctor & Gamble and The Gap adapt to the rapidly changing digital media strategies available in the internet world.At Intelligent Beauty, he incubated digital media and eCommerce brands targeting fashion, beauty & health verticals. While leading the monetization strategy at the celebrity-commerce company, BeachMint, Dave established the customer acquisition strategy that successfully launched consumer brands with celebrities including Kate Bosworth, Jessica Simpson, Rachel Bilson, and Mary- Kate and Ashley Olsen. At Science, Dave leads the marketing and monetization strategies, platforms, and teams to help the growing portfolio of businesses find a path to rapid growth and scale.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

There are few things in life that are not volatile. The stock market rises and falls, much like a pendulum swinging from left to right. Crypto is viewed as a rocket ship, but it’s returns remain mostly inconsistent, and the housing market has seen its fair share of crashes over the years. But if you’re looking for one asset class that bucks the trend when it comes to volatility, fine art might just be it.For centuries art has been seen as an avenue for the rich and famous to flex their wealth, but Masterworks believes it’s business model of allowing everyday consumers to invest in multi-billion dollar pieces of art, is shattering that glass ceiling and democratizing art for all.“We consider ourselves fiduciaries or financial advisors. We're doing that because art is a very confusing and brand new asset class. We're the only ones enabling access to this $1.7 trillion market. From a suitability standpoint, to let someone Yolo their life savings into a Banksy is not something that we want our customers to do. We don't think it makes sense for someone that has a $5 million retirement portfolio to put in a hundred dollars. So we'll tell that person, just keep your money; keep the cash; put it in stocks. So we're really getting people, not only to understand what is art as an asset class, why is art important, but to make sure they're investing responsibly and investing a part of their portfolio, that actually makes sense.”Michael Wenner is VP of Marketing and Director of Business Development at Masterworks, a platform that lets everyday consumers invest in pieces of art such as Banksy, Kaws, and Basquiat. Michael joined me on this episode of Marketing Trends to discuss how Masterworks is using centuries of data to its advantage to not just identify which pieces of art the company invests in, but also why they are opening that data up to everyone. Michael also dives into why he is bullish on content marketing, and how Masterworks views itself more as a financial institution rather than an art gallery.  Enjoy this episode.Main TakeawaysData Strategy: When you need to get the attention of your prospective audience in a big way, you need to offer them something that is useful to them. Creating a large set of data about your field or industry that you can leverage to engage clients and leave a good impression with them is a great way to make a splash. Marketing a new asset class: Education is the keystone of grounding a good marketing campaign for a product or service that doesn’t have a market yet. You’ve got to get creative and think about what you can do to bring value to your potential consumers.Content Marketing Doesn’t Work: There is an argument to be made that annoying your customers, and prospective customers with an array of content emails, that can trigger bounce rates to go up, is not worth that loss. Those email addresses represent dollars and you should take every opportunity you have in front of your customer to serve them with your products. The most effective approach can be that of brute-force. Be direct with your potential clients; do whatever it takes to get their emails.Key Quotes“We always talk about how Facebook it's such a great platform, that people have given so much information about themselves. LinkedIn is giving you much more relevant information. You can tell exactly how wealthy and how successful someone is. So we don't really do role-based targeting or job-based targeting, but it's really incredible that by what you're able to do by brute force. [Linkedin’s] technology's obviously not as good as Facebook, but you can figure out how to set up targeting campaigns. You can get to the wealthiest, most successful people on earth. It’s going to cost you, but if you can convince them it's the best way to do it.” “We consider ourselves fiduciaries or financial advisors. We're doing that because art is a very confusing and a brand new asset class. We're the only ones enabling access to this $1.7 trillion market. From a suitability standpoint, to let someone YOLO their life savings into a Banksy is not something that we want our customers to do. And we also don't think it makes sense for someone that has a $5 million retirement portfolio to put in a hundred dollars. So we'll tell that person, just keep your money; keep the cash; put it in stocks. So we're really getting people, not only to understand what is art as an asset class, why is art important, but to make sure they're investing responsibly and investing a part of their portfolio, that actually makes sense.”“Our data science team has been doing incredible things. We have the largest proprietary data set of art market returns. We took 50 years of art auction results that were all published physically in the Sotheby's and Christie's pamphlets. We had a team of about 25 interns go in and [enter], this piece of art was bought for this and then sold for this. And we created this huge database to bring it all together. No one else had done it because it's a pain [to do so].. So we created this database, and our data science team was then able to look at using A.I., all these different, fascinating insights, which artists markets are returning the best, which years within those artists markets, even which type of art. We were able to single out contemporary art, post-World War II art, coming from this time period. We're seeing that it has this type of returns.” “You look at is as art or it's a $1.7 trillion market. And until Masterworks, there was absolutely no way to invest in it. hose who did want to enter it,, who wanted to build a diversified portfolio would need tens of millions of dollars. You could buy one piece. And if that one piece went down in value,you'd spend a million dollars on it and you weren't diversified, it's not really a secure asset or a strategic asset class.” “Our goal is to educate people on art as an asset class. If people get excited about investing in art and they Google it, we're the first search result and we always will be. We are so happy to give our research away. We're working with other banks in investment platforms to educate them, give them all of our data, give them our price database, show them how different artists markets have different loss rates in different correlations, because we want to educate everyone. Not only are we getting new people into the asset class, but we're also growing it at the same time. We can actually have a huge impact on the market and we consider ourselves one of the top buyers in the art market.” “I used to do content marketing and I really disliked it. e just don't think that has any value. I'll tell you why: our user base is very interested in two things, diversity and returns. Diversity, meaning investment diversity diversification. So when we email them we want to give them those two things. We only email people with new investment offerings. We don't want to bug them. Something that's really important to us is our email list. So if we're sending content (which we have in the past, and that gives us higher unsubscribed rates.) We're just not going to do it. We think of our email list as currency. If we're going to do something to devalue our currency, we're not going to do it.““I see NFTs not having a similar impact. I do not believe NFTs are a strategic asset class. Strategic asset classes are ones that have been around for awhile. It can be part of a portfolio. NFTs have a false sense of scarcity. You're basically putting a JPEG on the blockchain and calling it scarce, even though you don't own any of the IP. I am short on NFTs.”. BioMichael Wenner is Vice President of Marketing and Director of Business Development at Masterworks. Michael began his career in finance doing sales and trading for five years. Near the end of this time, he started shifting towards doing more marketing, especially digital. He started a newsletter called MarketSnacks that was eventually acquired by Robinhood. Then he went to work in FinTech at YieldStreet before stepping over to Masterworks. To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

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

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

There’s a growing concern bubbling beneath the surface of marketers feet. Third party cookies are going by the wayside. This has been a really effective tool that marketers have utilized for years to target specific populations they deem are more likely to be interested in and purchase the products they’re selling. Moving forward, marketing in the digital space is going to look a bit different. Some say it’ll be survival of the fittest, others argue your data strategy should already be so robust you shouldn’t be reliant on off-the-shelf data. Everette Taylor is the CMO of Artsy, an ecommerce platform that allows users to buy art from anywhere in the world with the click of a button. But while most marketers are doing a deep dive into their cookie strategy, Taylor’s focus remains elsewhere.Main TakeawaysFocus on What Works, Not What is Not Working: Marketers have a tendency to focus too much on the products and services they offer that are not working. While it can be a good idea to address areas of weakness in your marketing strategy, it’s also important to invest your energy into the aspects that are are doing well.Your Content Reflects Your Strategy: Your content has to be a direct representation of your target audience. This means you have to have a grasp on who your customers are, what they are buying, and what is important to them and make sure that your content reflects those pillars. When you create blog posts and videos around things that do not reflect your target audience, it diminishes your brand perception, which should always be your number one priority.Act Like a CEO, Talk like A Marketer: When you ascend to the role of CMO, you can no longer think like a marketer. While it’s important to have a grasp on things such as brand perception, and awareness, it's more integral for the business if the CMO has an understanding of how problems its departments impact the overall business.Key Quotes“Sometimes marketers get distracted by the things that aren't working instead of where things are really working. What we realized is that our biggest growth channel was through affiliate marketing. Believe it or not, there's a huge economy of courses, of people teaching people how to grow a business or do this or do that. We realized that those were some of the best affiliates because people are taking their courses, trying to build their businesses and our product was great for people trying to build their brands and build their businesses.”“One of the things that I'm seeing in digital marketing is a lack of innovation, because people will become,so number focused. ‘We're going to do this thing. This thing works, we're going to scale, you're doing this way.’ People lose sight of how important brand perception, brand marketing, brand equity is in the grand scheme of things as well. It's interesting to see that shift, but it's, it's more than just the numbers for sure.” “There's a difference between being a great marketer and a great CMO. As a great marketer, you can grow the company. You can do things in the first year, but to be a great CMO, and be a great leader of a marketing organization, it takes longer.” “Before Artsy existed, no one was buying art online. People had to physically go to a gallery, and go to a show, or have the connection to a potential art advisor or a gallery. Now we've provided the ability that any, and everybody can collect art from around the world. Our average artwork gets shipped 3000 miles from gallery to [destination]. For us, the ability to really democratize the space, create a more open space for people to buy art, to make art businesses more fluid in the way that they do business and to reach new people....That just opens up the game for everybody.”“At one point, Artsy used to write about everything, and create content about everything. Then we learned very heavily into the market and made sure we served experienced collectors. Now we're leaning into that middle point of understanding there's something about brand-building. Building brand perception and reaching an audience that may not be as savvy as the experienced calligrapher. So building content for that too, but our focus is going to be on the experience collector, and that data and that wealth of data that we have to share and the types of things that they want to see, but also understanding that content is also important for brand perception and brand building as well.” “People don't know what they're capable of until they do it. One of the things that I try to do with my marketing team is always inspire them to go outside of their comfort zone and realize what it is that they're truly able to do and what they're truly able to accomplish.” “We have the audience. Right now our top of funnel has been as strong as ever, even in a cookieless world. I'm not going to give away secrets, but we are crushing it. On top of that, the biggest opportunity for us is that we have amassed the world's art collectors. How do we re-engage them? How do we inspire them? How do we make them want to use Artsy on a daily basis? That's the biggest opportunity. I ain't worried about no cookies.” “People are getting saturated with digital advertising. The things that catch my attention are real world things, like out of home, direct mail, experiential, and cool partnerships. Things that you got to continue to hit the pavement with. Your digital marketing and paid acquisition and things that you have to do. But at the end of the day, it's really like 360. You've got to think about how you're going to touch people everywhere.”Available EverywhereApple Podcasts: {{Apple Podcast URL}}Spotify: {{Spotify Podcast URL}}Google Podcasts: {{Google Podcast URL}}To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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