Marketing Trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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