Marketing Trends

Marketing is all about trends, what’s hot and what’s not. What’s trendy and what’s a thing of the past. After all, the name of this show is Marketing Trends. And to be the best in the field, you have to grasp what sticks. But while marketers attempt to chase the hottest new thing, their jargon is often filled with buzzwords. Daniel Incandela is the CMO of Terminus, a company built on the backbone of ABM, and he had to learn first-hand that not everything — including the term ABM — is just a turn of phrase and that there is real merit to some buzzy ideas.“At first I had a certain level of disdain for ABM. I thought it was another buzzword coming through, and what I've learned over the years, and certainly now, is a lot of people associate account-based marketing with just targeted ads. That is certainly a component of it. But if [targeted ads] is the expectation of ABM, then you're never going to see the full value of it.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Daniel details new strategies for how ABM marketers can stick out from their peers and move past the bias that might exist around account-based marketing. Plus he digs into why storytelling is the backbone of any successful campaign. And he updates us on his new role with Terminus and how he approached his first 90 days.Main Takeaways:More Than a Buzzword: ABM is more than just a buzzword and marketers have to stop thinking about ABM as just targeted advertising. While ad placement is a component of every great ABM strategy, the core component of any ABM strategy should be storytelling. Start focusing on the story of your ABM campaign and how your customers will interact with it.Formula For Success?: B2B marketing has a tendency to be repetitive and uninspiring and more times than not, B2B campaigns have a hard time differentiating themselves from their competitors. Just because your product speaks for itself, doesn’t mean things such as branding, messaging and the customer experience don’t matter.Just Shoot Me a Text: As a marketer, messaging and understanding where to reach your customers has never been more important than it is today. Don’t get bogged down and only attempt to reach your audience through one channel. Experiment and try different touchpoints, such as text messages, phone calls, or emails.---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.

There’s no doubt that metric reports are valuable for marketers. After all, those numbers offer insights that greatly influence decisions around where a company should be spending its money. But what happens when two completely different programs, such as an NBA game and network television drama, draw similar audience metrics? How do you differentiate the two? Or does it not really matter? After all, if both programs are drawing the same number of viewers, they have to be equivalent, right? “There's a number of variables that you would look at to evaluate whether something is meaningful, but it all depends on what the consumer target is that you're looking at. So you can put in any variables that you want to decide what they are, such as which program you would choose, but you're not just looking at spots and dots like we have in the past. You're evaluating that programming based on whether it will resonate with the audience, and whether it's in the right context for that audience.”All those spots and dots, they are important in their own right, and on this episode of Marketing Trends, Erin Flaxman, Global Chief Growth Officer for Havas Media Group, explains why. Erin discusses why it’s important to dive deeper into all the numbers on your metrics report in order to better understand your target audience. Plus, she gives some practical tips on how brands can create meaningful content based on what the metrics reveal in order to more fully connect with consumers.Main Takeaways:Brand Matters, Right?: Not according to a study done by Havas Media Group. If 80% of brands completely disappeared, most consumers would not care. What consumers do care about is if the product and company engage with them in a meaningful way.More than Just Spots and Dots: It’s important to remember that not all ratings and metrics are positive for your brand. Just because two separate events draw similar results ini audience size, those audiences are not always equal, so you have to be thinking about which audience is right for your brand. An audience for an NBA game is completely different than one for an episode of Breaking Bad. As a marketer what you need to be looking at is how your product or service fits into that audience and how you provide meaningful content to them.Not Just Another Zoom: One of the biggest challenges for companies today remains how marketers present pitches to clients. When putting together a pitch, marketers have to start thinking about new ways they can be creative and show that they have a plan to keep the audience on the other side of the screen actively engaged.---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 frank: the app store is overwhelming. There are far too many options and too many barely-differentiated apps. When everything looks and feels the same, how can you possibly stick out? The key, you already know, is advertising. But these days you can’t just put out a banner ad, or stick an ad on a landing page or a newsletter and expect to see success. You need strategies that go one step beyond just getting a download, but instead lead to deeper conversions. To do that, you need to do a bit of Inception-style marketing.“When you have millions of apps that consumers can choose from, being able to advertise to users and other apps to create awareness and get them interested in engaging in our app becomes super important. You can't just create a good app and throw it out there and hope for the best. You really need to support that through effective advertising. And if you've got an app, you're going to want to be advertising your app inside of other apps.”Those are the words of Dennis Mink, the Vice President of Marketing at Liftoff, a one-stop-shop for programmatic user acquisition. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Dennis details effective strategies marketers should be using to get the most out of their apps, and why your KPIs have to be more about conversions and engagements and less about downloads.Main Takeaways:What’s the Value For Me?: When designing advertisements to promote your apps, your designs should be less flashy and more focused on how your app actually works, the benefits of the apps, and the value the app is going to bring to the user.Just Do Your Job: The job of a mobile advertisement is no longer simply to convince users to download an app. The role of an ad has shifted where the main responsibility is now to convince users to actively convert inside the app.Let’s Get Technical: When deploying machine learning tactics, you need to focus on a few main things. The first is that the data that you are feeding your algorithm is clean. And the second is that your techniques are helping you accomplish certain goals, like driving in-app engagement and conversions and doing those two things at 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. 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.

Eric Siu likes to say he was never successful athletically. And while he might have struggled between the lines, there was one arena in which he thrived: the digital one. Eric always found comfort when it came to video games, where for years,  he dominated as a successful esports player. For Eric, success in gaming was rooted in the mindset that failure was his and his alone, but that regardless of the struggle, the next level was always within reach..That mantra is something he still follows today.“I think marketers have to understand that there are levels to everything, and there are levels of your career, there are levels to when you're working out, and there are levels of games. If you can reframe life into a game, if you can reframe business into a game, it just becomes a lot easier and a lot more fun.”Eric is an investor, founder and advisor to companies. He is also the Chairman of the digital marketing agency, Single Grain. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Eric dives into what it means to have a leveling-up mindset and some of the steps that marketers can take to move up in their careers.  Plus, Eric details the two key areas marketers should be honing in on when it comes to optimizing their website.Main Takeaways:Built for Speed: When you’re trying to optimize your website for search, you have to be thinking about the things that matter most, which are content and links. Part of having good content is having a great user experience, and that means having a fast website. Always be thinking about how you can make your website faster and easier to consume.The Right Mix: It’s important when you are sourcing talent to find the right mix of employees who can excel in multiple areas. It might sound simple, but it’s not. Most marketers are not great product people and the same can be said for product personnel. Look for people who can manage both sides of the coin.The Long Game: At the end of the day, you have to always be thinking about long-term success and not what is happening in the short-term. Constantly be thinking about where you can get the most untapped potential and then leverage that into something that will benefit you in the long-term.---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.

If you’ve ever flipped on an NBA game in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed one small little detail embroidered on the left shoulder of your favorite NBA superstar. A logo. Sponsorship opportunities are plentiful in professional sports, and the relationship between a team and the community in which it plays is a critical aspect to take into account when it comes to their jersey patches and what brand gets that prime real estate. The Orlando Magic partner with Disney, the Milwaukee Bucks stay true to their roots and have a relationship with Harley Davidson. For the Charlotte Hornets, which are owned and operated by basketball’s biggest star, Michael Jordan, the partnership it has with LendingTree is rooted in the brand’s history in the community. “Sponsorships are more of an investment in the greater good of the community and the long-term relationship with your consumers…. You make the investment with the understanding that you're going to get unaided awareness and aided awareness. Aided awareness is seeing the logo on your chest. You see the benefit and aided awareness from that logo being on their chest, and when they're on television. When you see those jerseys in there, it's spread across the country. The unaided awareness, that's a bit slower. And we've just determined that the value of those points over time, coupled with the things that we're going to do offline is where the value lies.”Cornell McGee is the Senior Vice President of Marketing for LendingTree, an online loan marketplace based in Charlotte, North Carolina. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Cornell opens up about the company's long-standing relationship with the Charlotte Hornets and the value that brings to the brand and its customers. Plus, he explains how marketers need to be thinking about partnerships more generally, and how every marketer can deliver high-value content to their consumers.Main TakeawaysAir Jordan: Some partnerships are meant to simply drive brand awareness, while others serve multiple purposes. When thinking about partnerships, make sure you are investing with the understanding that you are going to get both unaided and aided awareness from your partnerships. Your aided awareness will consist of your visibility and you will see immediate benefits. Your unaided awareness will build at a slower pace but will help over a longer period of time.Are We Exclusive: The lifetime value of any particular customer should be a fundamental baseline to your customer success strategy. Once you think about their long-term journey, you move past simply reaching a customer at the point-of-sale, and you create a more long-term problem-solving relationship with them.Just Give the People What They Want: It’s a simple notion, but can never be overstated: Feed your customers the content that they crave. Make sure you are constantly listening and understanding what their needs are and then act appropriately. Don’t act based on your own intelligence or desires. Produce your content based on what the consumer is asking for in order to meet their needs, delight, and serve them.---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.

Here’s the deal, customer service gets a bad rap, but the truth is that when done well, solving customers’ needs is awesome, and when you can actually give them a good experience and make their day, that’s just icing on the cake. Reaching that outcome takes work, though, and the market for how customer service outsourcing is conducted has been changing over the last few years.  Companies such as Alorica are emerging in this industry thanks to its ability to adapt to the changing landscape of our world and deliver a service that takes some of the hard work out of the customer service process. “The market for customer service outsourcing is changing dramatically. What has been a fairly well-established model — where we could operate call centers on behalf of our clients and manage that customer experience more effectively — is getting disrupted. And a big part of that is the way that technology is supporting more personalization, new channels for customers to engage with brands, and thinking through how to bring together a value proposition that takes a massive distributed labor force and enables them with technology that then delivers an outcome, utilizing proven processes and techniques.”Those are the words of Colson Hillier, the CMO of Alorica, and on this episode of Marketing Trends, he discusses the radical shift in how large scale customer service departments — such as call centers — are being forced to alter their format and where Alorica comes into play. Plus, Colson details how personalization efforts continue to put the customer experience at the forefront of every decision.Main Takeaways:The Good ‘Ole Days: The market for customer service outsourcing is changing significantly. The well-established model of operating call centers on behalf of clients has been disrupted due to new personalization methods and how consumers can easily interact and engage with brands at a quicker pace.Bring the Value: The overall value proposition that brands are bringing to their clients is no longer rooted in products, but rather the overall experience and how the customer is able to utilize the service.The Big Chair: The role of the CMO is no longer about nit-picking products and campaigns, but rather a broader scope of responsibility and not just thinking about the overall product portfolio, but rather product development, marketing, and how the company tells the overall story of the organization.---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.

More than likely you’ve come across your favorite YouTuber dropping their favorite line, “this episode is sponsored by [Insert brand name here].” And while that tag might be an annoying sidetrack to the content you came for, there is something bigger at play with that message than what you see and hear on the surface, especially to the marketers who set up that sponsorship. “The feel of your brand coming out of the mouth of somebody who has a respected audience is valuable. It's better than just appearing on a no-name editorial or piece of content. It's better if it touches them more. So that's the foundation. That's the underlying principle of why that potential reward is dramatically outsized. ... when you have a hit, you hit big.”Those are the words of Daniel Conn, the CRO and Co-Founder of ThoughtLeaders. Daniel joined this episode of Marketing Trends to discuss why marketers are suddenly starting to look at sponsorship opportunities as a separate and valuable channel, and he breaks down why the right-partnership, paired with the proper voice, can have endless opportunities for your brand.Main Takeaways:A Whole New Channel: Marketers and strategic planners are now beginning to look at sponsorships as a legitimate channel that is an important part of their media mix. No longer are sponsorships viewed as single tags at the end of a bowl game. Instead, they are fully-integrated partnerships paired with strategic partners who connect with a target audience better than other kinds of advertising.Authenticity Matters: Any brand and content creator can partner with each other. But when you are partnering with podcast hosts and YouTubers that already have built-in audiences, make sure their message and audience are authentic and connected to your brand. The power of influencers speaking for your brand on a daily basis is that they capitalize on the opportunity to connect with users in a way traditional advertising does not.It Sounds Simple, But It’s Not: Success rate is the metric brands have to rely on when measuring the value of a sponsorship. It seems obvious, but it’s true that you cannot put too high a value on the success rate, and what it means in terms of ROI.---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.

Jonathan Yaffe is not joking when he says our economy is changing. No, he isn’t talking about the rise and fall of the stock market or the way consumers distribute their money. What he is talking about is a culture shift, from a things economy to one focused on experiences. Jonathan knows this because he saw it shift first-hand during his days with Red Bull, where he learned the power of experiences, but also the deficiencies within the experience industry — especially when it came to ROI.“We were spending billions of dollars a year on experiences and it clearly worked. But what drove me absolutely crazy is that we had no data. We had no ROI. We believed that we were changing people's behavior by creating these massive large-scale experiences all over the world. But we had no idea how they were actually working real-time.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Jonathan, who is now the Co-Founder and CEO of AnyRoad, discusses why it's time for marketers to stop focusing on their products, and instead think about r how to turn their brand into an experience that will drive lasting lifetime value. Jonathan also details wheat makes for successful experiential marketing strategies and which companies are doing it best.Main Takeaways:It’s a Lifestyle: Most companies will need to shift their focus toward marketing experiences and away from actual products. As more and more consumers begin participating in experiences, their brand loyalty is more likely to grow, which will lead to more sales from that consumer over time.Are You Making Money Though?: One of the biggest issues currently facing experiential marketing is that most brands do not have a comprehensive strategy behind how to understand the ROI their experiences are bringing in. In order to successfully understand experiential marketing, you need to have a 360-degree view of who your customer is, what drives their buying behavior, and how you can build loyalty with that customer over time.Changed Behavior: Experiential marketing is not about pushing products but rather it’s about changing a consumer’s behavior so their buying habits naturally increase over time. If a consumer only visits a yoga class once a month, marketers need to begin to figure out ways they can alter that same consumer’s buying behavior so that they will visit that same class multiple times a month.---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.

Matt Epstein was three years removed from his days at UCF when he decided he’d finally had enough of the job-hunting process. Endlessly sending out resumes without as much as a response had worn him down and he had to take a hard look at why, as a marketer, he couldn’t make himself stand out. marketer,  So he changed his strategy and instead of doing what everyone wanted him to do, he pivoted and took a risk.“If whatever you're doing, you're not feeling a little uncomfortable, then that means you're not taking risks. And the worst thing you could do as a marketer is not take risks. If you're not zigging while everyone else is zagging, well then guess what? You're not going to stand out. And the worst thing you could do as a marketer is not stand out.”The risk Matt was about to take meant he’d use his entire life savings on one specific campaign: to market himself to tech giants such as Google by using a clever website, GooglePleaseHire.me, which was complete with a video resume designed to make him stand out. Believe it or not, Matt didn’t actually get that job at Google, but the risk still paid off and on this episode of Marketing Trends, Matt explains how.  Plus, Matt details how the early marketing strategies he used helped lay the groundwork for his future campaigns, and how marketers should be taking risks these days.Main Takeaways:Be the Bigger Company: When it comes to competitive advertising, the only instance in which you can go directly at a competitor is if they have significantly more market share. You need to think about the optics of the situation. Companies that are perceived as leaders within their market could be perceived as petty or bullying if they go at a competitor. So a good rule of thumb when it comes to competitive advertising is to punch up, not down.Messaging That Works: One of the first things marketers should be doing when they join a new company is to identify a message that not only sticks out, but also cuts through all the noise. If your message is getting lost in the crowd, whatever you do beyond that point will not be successful, regardless of the ad spend you put behind it.Are you a Risk-Taker?: Whatever strategy you are pursuing, should make you feel uncomfortable. If you are comfortable as a marketer and as a department, it means you are not taking a risk, which means you are not going to stand out from the crowd. Constantly be challenging yourself and your team to be thinking of new ways that deviate from what everyone else is doing.---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.

Ushering a company through a rebrand is a daunting enough task. Now try walking that tight-rope when your company is pivoting from a non-profit impact-driven organization to a for-profit company focused on making sure its clients receive accurate data to power their A.I. Sounds challenging, right? A.I. has become something of a buzzword in marketing circles, the technology has merits if you understand what it needs to make it successful. “There is an idea that without that data artificial intelligence wouldn't exist. There's synthetic data creation, and there's now models that can train off of very little data. But at the highest level, A.I. just doesn't exist without training data. And quite honestly, trading data at this point, doesn't exist without a massive human workforce. And that workforce is often overlooked.”Those are the words of Heather Gadonniex, the VP of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at Sama. She is a marketing and data expert with a mission to deliver actionable data to power marketers’ ambitious A.I. goals. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Heather discusses why marketers need to know where their data is coming from in order to know how to properly use their datasets. She also shares stories on how she helped Sama pivot from a non-profit organization into the world of for-profit business, the challenges of their rebrand and the importance of impact.Main Takeaways:What Matters: There are a few core things that really matter in any business: personnel, culture, revenue and impact. Those four pillars all require different departments being in alignment with each other. Without any kind of alignment between your product teams, marketing teams, or sales stakeholders, you don’t have the ability to grow, scale or make the most impact that an organization can have in the marketplace because you’re not all focused on the same goals.Data 101: A.I. will continue to be one of the most important tools moving forward, but marketers must understand not just how to enable those insights to power your business, but where that third party data is coming from. Is the data set that the company is providing trained on your data or is it coming from another data set? The answer to those questions will impact the predictions you receive from your tech stack.How to Train Your Data: There’s this notion that A.I. and machine learning are going to replace marketing jobs in the future. However, that is simply not the case. What is often overlooked with new marketing technologies is the training data that goes into these tech stacks. At the highest levels, A.I. doesn’t exist without training data, which does not exist without a physical workforce behind it.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 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.