Last updated on September 21st, 2016 at 08:32 am
Marketo’s Marketing Nation Online conference (#mktgnation) was on Wednesday. There are two things I love about this conference 1) it’s free 2) it’s online. I don’t need to spend hours traveling somewhere, and I can still pick and choose agenda items that mean something to me.
It was all about strategy for me, as I listened to a few sessions:
A Women-Targeted Strategy
The opening keynote was delivered by Lara Balazs, SVP North America Marketing at Visa. She talked about her passion and commitment to female leadership in business and how it helps ensure that as marketers, we keep one of the most powerful audiences top of mind in your marketing strategies. Over and over I saw people tweeting one particular statistic. Did you know that 50% of products marketed to men, are purchased by women?
Lights, Camera, Action! How Top Marketers Use Video to Boost Engagement and Drive Demand
Despite its ability to deliver higher click-through, engagement, and conversion rates, most marketers struggle with how to effectively use video content to produce amazing results and measurable ROI. Tyler Lessard from Vidyard talked about the latest trends and best practices in modern video marketing.
Video content is the ultimate in visual marketing, and a perfect way to deliver a brand story. Video can be leveraged across all marketing programs, and will convert more leads. Did you know that personalized video campaigns increase conversions by more than 400%?
Tomorrow’s Marketer: The Three T’s for Success in the Digital Age
Yesterday’s marketing was a support function serving leads to sales. Tomorrow’s marketing will be a strategic function, driving digital transformation and owning the customer experience. But how do marketers get there? The landscape is evolving at lightning speed, so we need to make radical shifts in the techniques we adopt, the people we hire and how teams are structured, and the technologies we implement.
Chandar Pattabhiram, CMO at Marketo, talked about a new framework for becoming tomorrow’s marketer – an approach he has developed during his 20+ years of marketing experience.
Brand Storytelling and the Future of Content
Tom Davis, CMO at Forbes Media, delivered a session on new means of content production for digital, mobile-minded audiences. The enabled customer is educated long before reaching out to a company.
He discussed how marketers can deliver content that readers actually crave, and gave examples of how brands can use video, social, influencers, and digital platforms can bring storytelling to a new level, and how data is informing content creation to enable better user experience and engagement. “Brands and customers are becoming smarter together.”
Building Your People-Based Marketing Strategy
Martin Gilliard, Head of Enterprise Martech, Data & Audience Partnerships at Facebook, gave the closing keynote, discussing his vision of omni-channel, and how brands can have a truly seamless experience across all devices.
Communications and delivery to customers must be customized, or brands risk being left behind. The brands that thrive will be the ones who delive, regardless of whether they’re retail, TV, or B2B.
