Archive | October, 2013

Does money make your marketing?

Does money guarantee good marketing? Ask this man. Gleb Budman bootstrapped Backblaze to profitability without spending on marketing. He dreamed of having a real marketing budget to grow faster. Faced suddenly with $1 million to spend, things didnt turn out quite the way he expected. Learn lessons from his bruises that you can apply whether you have a marketing budget or not.

Marketing Technology: A Key Asset for Success

 “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself” Peter Drucker.  For 99% of businesses, achieving this goal (a requirement for surviving in today’s hyper-competitive environment) requires the right investment in Marketing Technology. If you want to optimize the performance of your Marketing organization and become more efficient and successful, you must know how to identify which technologies are need, in which order, and how to effectively implement and use the tools.

There are over 300 companies in 45 categories in the marketing technology space. So, it’s hard to keep up! As the number of tools and solutions for marketing has grown, the marketing technology landscape has evolved.  Today, we need to know both the types of technologies available, as well as how to implement and leverage them as a holistic system.

Marketing Technology and the Work of Marketing

The marketing landscape can be confusing, and the acronym alphabet soup used to describe these technologies only adds to the conundrum: DAM/MAM (digital asset or marketing asset management), MOM (marketing operations management), MAP (marketing automation platforms), and MRM (marketing resource management). In their study, “Realizing the Promise of Marketing Technology,” ITSMA defined marketing technology as “the software for improving marketing and sales processes to achieve business objectives.” This definition provides a way to frame the marketing technology landscape, which currently consists of a very large and growing list of players.

Read More

Its exciting to work with tech

Linda Summers, Director Marketing & Operations for Mobile at Skype, discusses how exciting she finds working with tech startups, the need to take and share more risk across the tech sector and the importance of talent in delivering success, particularly in the creative communities.

The Future of Marketing Infographic

Optimal Targeting’s CEO David Konigsberg shares his insights on the future of marketing with this new metaphysically inclined infographic. It effectively explains how we have evolved in communication and continue to do so. The infographic further demonstrates how people remember and comprehend information better with a fusion of images, and text, and how it has become a great tool in the future of marketing.

Using Video to Amplify Your Content Marketing

 ADAM Videos ) is designed to work seamlessly with the Brightcove platform.

This was one of our most popular webinars, and you can view a recording of the webinar here.

During the webinar, Shiri Friedman shared several statistics that demonstrate the growing importance of video in the enterprise marketing mix.

  • Web pages with videos attract 2x to 3x more visitors than pages without videos, and they generate a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines.
  • Website visitors who view a video are 85% more likely to buy than those who do not.
  • 76% of marketers plan to add videos to their websites (which makes video additions a higher priority than Facebook, Twitter, or blog integration).
  • Overall online video consumption is growing at 30%, but video consumption on tablets is growing at 360%, and video consumption on smartphones is growing at 300%.

These statistics are impressive, and they echo other data regarding the importance of video content that I discussed in an earlier post.

For me, the most important takeaway from Shiri’s presentation was that video content can be used in a multitude of ways that will help enterprises achieve a broad range of marketing objectives. Video is great, of course, for building awareness, but as Shiri pointed out, video content is also a powerful tool for converting viewers into customers. The sensory richness of video content makes it both compelling and “shareable.” As Shiri said in her presentation, “Have you ever heard of a white paper that went viral?”

Shiri’s presentation includes many examples of companies that are using video content in innovative and effective ways. The featured company is Puma, but the presentation also includes examples from Red Bull, Oracle, Boeing, and many others.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage video content in your marketing mix, this webinar will be well worth your time.

Access the recorded webinar here

Evolution of a superhero

As a marketer, it is one of our tasks to safeguard brand identity. Do we use our logos in the same way, do we use the right logo, things we find important. Our brand must remain recognizable, right? But dont we stress too much about it? A good logo is still recognizable, even if it changes over time. Batman can teach us a lot about this, look once more to this poster. Funny how its logo changes allmost every year and we still recognize it, isnt it?

Todays CMO is being Redefined

Egon Zehnder hosted its third annual Marketing Summit addressing the future of the customer-centric business and the role of marketers in directing the agenda.

The CMO is central to the course forward for todays customer centric organizations and Egon Zehnder queried some of the worlds top CMOs to ask them their thoughts on their changing role and setting the marketing agenda in todays complex environment.

Siteworx and ADAM Software Team Up

The US-based Siteworx, LLC and the Belgium-based ADAM Software have announced a partnership. The two companies partnered up to help enterprise clients implement and improve their digital asset management (DAM) solutions.

 “Siteworx is one of our go-to partners in North America. Our enterprise customers depend on the expertise of independent partners like Siteworx for key services, from consulting and integration to ongoing technical support and training.  We’re pleased to welcome Siteworx to the ADAM Partner network, “said Pieter Casneuf, ADAM Software’s Chief Executive Officer.
Siteworx offers proven expertise in implementing, customizing, supporting, and training on the ADAM platform.  Because Siteworx applies equal emphasis on implementation, digital governance, and change management, Siteworx and ADAM joint clients gain the advantage of faster decision-making, quicker user adoption, and higher rates of project success. From pre-selection technology analysis, to product selection and integration, Siteworx helps clients in areas of requirements gathering, product feature business requirement match, and system architecture.
“The management and control of rich media content such as video, audio, and images is now more important than ever as our enterprise clients look to deliver integrated, immersive digital customer experiences,” said Siteworx VP of Technology and Alliances, Gage Short. “Today, digital asset management is an enterprise problem that requires a best-of-breed enterprise solution such as ADAM Software.”

Disruptive Technologies and the Practice of Marketing

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy. The objective of this research was to identify technologies that have the potential to make a major impact on how people live and work, and on industries and economies over the next two decades or so.

The McKinsey report discusses 12 disruptive, game-changing technologies. The researchers estimate that, collectively, these technologies will produce a global economic impact of between $14 trillion and $33 trillion per year in 2025.

Two of the technologies described in the McKinsey report – the mobile Internet and the “Internet of Things” – are particularly relevant for enterprise marketers.

Read More

NZ Marketing Summit Mildie Meyer-Els | Barfoot and Thompson

Perpetua Productions and Pravda Communications hear views from Mildie at Barfoots on marketing at the recently held NZ Marketing Summit.