Marketing Trends

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. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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.    Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

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.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.