If you’ve never been to the annual Marketo Marketing Nation Summit, it’s three jam-packed days of best practices, trends and new technologies from an impressive roster of global marketers and other luminaries. The first day, keynote speakers set the bar high with nine inspiring quotes to last all year long. The conference continued with even more great learning and lessons.
Throughout the conference, several key themes and topics rose to the top — including the importance of the customer, good data and taking risks. I’ve gathered six articles that highlight what CMOs should know about some of the most talked-about #MKTGnation topics.
Digital Enables Being Data-Driven
“Gary Briggs, CMO of Facebook asserted that now is the absolute best time to be a marketer. Why? Because digital is no longer a trend or the future, it’s now and it’s how you communicate with the 1.6 billion people on Facebook each month. We’re in the era of people-based marketing, and marketers are better equipped than ever before to understand people and communicate with them in ways they never have before.” – Read more at Marketo.
Use Frameworks to Make Sense of the #MarTech Landscape
“To tame the complexities and capitalize on the potential of a digital world, marketers need to embrace software-smart management frameworks, explained Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO of ion interactive and editor of chiefmartec.com. These concepts — from agile marketing to bimodal marketing, from collaborative design to big testing — are the foundation for marketing success and matter more than ‘shiny new tools,’ he said.” – Read more at CMS Wire.
Build Next-Generation Customer Experiences
PR Newswire CMO Ken Wincko said, “Trust is the new currency for engaging with today’s self-obsessed consumer and brands will need a combination of credibility, reliability and intimacy if they’re going to win them over… Designing customer experience tends to be considered in terms of one-to-one and personalisation. But marketers now need to think in terms of network-to-network and focus on building advocacy in order to be community-centric.” — Read more at CMO.
Use “Now” Data for Seamless Digital and Physical Experiences
“It’s about making transactions easier for the consumer, taking away the hassle, inconveniences, inconsistencies and making the experiences seamless and interesting. The companies that do that look good and people spend more money with them. Doing this right takes a lot of data and what we like to call ‘now’ data. There are a lot of brands saying they use data but that’s data from six months or a year ago, which isn’t relevant. As a brand you need to know what your consumer is doing right now if you want to have a conversation with them.” – Read more at Contagious.
Prioritize Aligning Sales and Marketing
“Ultimately, marketing and sales have the same goals: increase revenue. This means that sales needs to be effective, but marketing needs to empower sales to do so by ensuring they’re investing their efforts reaching out to high quality leads. A strong sales and marketing alignment can result in:
- Increase in revenue
- Shorter sales cycles
- Improvement in conversion rates
- Validation of forecast accuracy.”
– Read more at Marketo.
Focus on Sales Enablement
“Sales enablement is the new black: It’s clear as well that marketing’s ownership of proactively, strategically supporting sales productivity and opportunity-to-close conversion rates is one of our biggest, most leveragable opportunities. It will be a competitive differentiator in the short-term at minimum, and likely a core part of the B2B marketing organization’s focus for years to come. It’s also clear that most B2B marketers aren’t ready for this, and have work to do in order to more effectively collaborate with sales after the leads have been passed along.” – Read more at Heinz Marketing.
The post Trending Topics from #MKTGnation appeared first on Allocadia Marketing Performance Management.