Pro Tip: A look back at some notable tips from our martech community in 2019

Here are 8 tips from our martech-focused marketers worth a second look.

Chat with MarTechBot

Over the past year, our community of expert marketers have shared a variety of insights to help fellow digital marketers. Here’s a roundup of a few pro tips that were popular with readers in 2019.

1. Is your social media policy agile?

“Social media is by its very nature meant to be two-way communication and its critical that even large, regulated companies are able to trust and empower people to react and respond in real time,” explains Stacey Ackerman of Agilify. “If employees are required to get approvals, communication is delayed and customers will feel ignored and undervalued. If you have a legal team that is used to responding to all of the company, a better structure in agile marketing is to have a representative affiliated with teams. While social media policies began as ways to protect the company and controlling how we respond, we need to loosen the reins and take into account the risk of not being there for our customers. It’s time to focus on relationships with our customers and tearing down the guard rails we’ve put up during the last decade.” MORE >>

2. Hitting the pause button on email

“Email gives recipients the ability to pause a conversation. The pause can take multiple forms, and here’s where marketers need to pay attention,” explains Len Shneyder of Twilio SendGrid. “There are good pauses and there are bad pauses. A good pause is one that can be communicated through a preference center. The more robust a brand’s email preference center, the more utility it can provide the recipient to customize the cadence and frequency of conversations. Poorly designed preference centers will by default give recipients the impetus to use a different form of pause – marking a message as spam. When that happens the overall sending reputation of a brand takes a hit. So which would you prefer? Delivering less email that’s regarded as high quality enough to keep in the inbox, or being banished?” MORE >>

3. Trends need to be watched for brand safety

“New and varied trends like slime or ASMR need to be watched carefully. When content views skyrocket around particular events or themes, there can be serious brand safety risks if brands try to ride the wave without adequate monitoring,” cautions Tony Chen of Channel Factory. “A recent focus on the role of comments on YouTube shows that even innocent content can contain elements that brands will need to review and refine regularly, especially when parts of the category appeal to kids.” MORE >>

4. AI and the emerging ‘Do It For Me’ economy

“While intelligent machines are being empowered to make some decisions, marketers’ jobs are not in danger – at least, not those who are willing to learn to work with them,” explains CMO advisor Andy Betts. “In fact, intelligent automation can act as a great complement to and even dramatically improve human performance, when used… well, intelligently. What’s more, humans can enhance the value of a software application by specializing in it and helping others reap the greatest benefit from using it. Some have referred to this opportunity as the ‘Do It For Me’ economy and it is creating new revenue streams. Rather than software-as-a-service, each using automation complemented by a secondary level of human expertise – deliver software-with-a-service. In making experts available to power the machine, they help customers get the maximum value possible from the program. DIFM is not an entirely new phenomenon, but the tech-powered evolution of business process outsourcing or managed services. Once reserved for the wealthiest and largest brands, the new managed services are a hybrid of intelligent automation and specialized human services that deliver both the scale and expertise it takes to meet consumers’ heightened expectations.” MORE >>

5. Only collect data you can use to deliver value

“To adopt a leaner data strategy, brands need to hyper-focus on the needs of your target customers, and that starts with asking the right questions,” explains Jeremy Korst of GBH Insights. “1) What data is essential to improving CX and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) over time? 2) When customers provide you with their personal data, what value are you offering in exchange? 3) What sources should we use for the data? 4) How can we minimize the amount of data our company collects (minimum viable data)? By asking these questions and sourcing the right data, we better understand target customers, purchasing behavior, habits and preferences, and in turn deliver better products, experiences and marketing offers. By creating focus, CMOs can also vastly improve ROI for their marketing analytics investment.” MORE >>

6. Why account-based marketers need to focus on engagement, not CPMs

“When it comes to advertising, B2B marketers have been sold metrics that have nothing to do with business impact,” cautions Peter Isaacson of Demandbase during his session at the MarTech West conference. “They are told they should focus on CPMs, purchase inventory as cheaply as possible and focus on click-through-rates, even if those clicks have absolutely zero chance of buying your products. This is often why marketers lose credibility with their C-level peers. Chief Revenue Officers and CEOs don’t care about CPMs or click-through-rates but publishers and ad tech vendors push this because they are the only metrics they can sell. As B2B marketers, and Account-Based Marketers specifically, we should care about what percentage of our target accounts are actually engaging with our content, which of our target accounts are making it onto our website and what percentage of those target accounts that saw the advertising are making it a pipelined business.” MORE >>

7. With the right strategy, video can help local businesses

“Video is intimidating for a lot of local businesses. It costs more and takes a much broader skill set than most other types of online marketing. But, there’s a bright side to this,” explains Jacob Baadsgaard of Disruptive Advertising. “Anytime something is hard to do, there’s a business opportunity to be found. In this case, the fact that video is hard means that most local businesses aren’t doing it. That leaves the field wide open for any companies that learn how to make video work. So, if you take the time to figure out a workable video ad strategy, you’ll often be way ahead of the competition. Even if the competition is already doing video ads, if you can get in on the game (or figure out how to do them more effectively), you’ll be able to stay relevant and maintain your competitive edge.” MORE >>

8. CMOs need to lay the groundwork for new realities, now

“Today’s CMO needs to be part reality-checker and part soothsayer, helping the board accept new realities,” explains MarTech Boston speaker Kristina Podnar of NativeTrust. “1) Having the right products at the right price matters far less than it used to. Customers want to feel like the stores they visit care about them. They want a relationship and the personalization that follows. 2) Customers know businesses are tracking their every move, and most are willing to accept it if they get something of value in exchange and are comfortable that their data is secure. 3) There’s a wealth of insights to be gained from all of that data, but extracting those insights is exponentially harder than it used to be and requires new approaches applied by people with new skills. 4) Some competitors are already pushing the envelope. If their initiatives succeed, we’d better be prepared to catch up fast – so let’s lay the groundwork now.” MORE >>


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Wendy Almeida
Contributor
Wendy Almeida is Third Door Media's Community Editor, working with contributors for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. She has held content management roles in a range of organizations from daily newspapers and magazines to global nonprofits.

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.