By Evan Vuckovic
(Aragon Research) – The Aragon Research marketing team attended Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit 2017 and in lieu of coffee, the audience was presented with an energizing dance troupe of performers. Steve Lucas, CEO of Marketo, followed and welcomed the crowd of over 6,500 fellow marketers by presenting the theme for Marketo’s summit, engagement.
In addition to marketing engagement, topics such as marketing automation, the engagement economy, artificial intelligence in marketing, and a new Canadian law called CASL were some of the major talking points at the breakout sessions. This blog summarizes the five key takeaways from the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit.
1. From Automation to Engagement
A key theme that still pervades Digital Marketing and its supporting technologies is marketing automation. In 2017, marketing software has added an additional layer to marketing automation by including marketing engagement capabilities, and this was a much-talked-about topic at this year’s MKTGnation.
Most sales and marketing leaders are aware of the ABC (Always Be Closing) acronym taught during sales training. The Social Selling session presented by panelist Jill Rowley, Social Selling Evangelist and Startup Advisor, suggested ABC should stand for “Always Be Connecting.”
While marketing automation technologies have become increasingly streamlined and sophisticated, we need to remember that today’s customers get inundated with content, and that’s why smart engagement is key. Sales and marketing will have to continue to work together to find more effective methods to engage.
2. Understanding the Engagement Economy
Ariel Kelman, VP Worldwide Marketing at Amazon Web Services (AWS), introduced the secret sauce for AWS when it comes to encouraging customer-based obsession. The idea of improving the customer experience has always been present, but any organization can tout how great their clients say they are. But trust is not built off of what the brand says; it’s formed from word of mouth communication from one customer to another.
Another spice in the AWS recipe was not what, but, how much throughput can be added to the customer experience, which includes marketing tactics and testing to continually improve the experience.
Kelman informed the audience that AWS found its customer journey was a better one when the potential buyer was engaged with at every step of the buyer journey, and was unofficially coined “the customer engagement approach.” Reportedly, Amazon Web Services sends about 10M marketing emails via the Marketo platform and continues to improve its lists by considering the engagement economy and approaching potential buyers and clients with relevant email content at the right time. A customer engagement approach is also centralized on giving customers the opportunity to become evangelists for your brand to build trust with your potential buyers.
3. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
Why does Artificial Intelligence (AI) matter? AI sorts through unstructured data much faster than any human can and also presents data in digestible ways for sales and marketing professionals. What both teams can take away from AI is that they now have the ability to test and to implement new marketing campaigns from the data brought to them by AI algorithms.
Although still in its beginning phases, “adaptive or intuitive engagement” was mentioned as a key feature for AI in marketing, and is expected to be coming to Marketo’s Engagement Platform. Adaptive/intuitive engagement leverages predictive algorithms to test channels and content among other parameters, but more information and use cases will be needed to assess its potential.
If you’d like to understand more about the business impact of modern AI/cognitive computing, you can attend our upcoming Aragon Research webinar: Modern AI and Cognitive Computing: Boundaries and Opportunities.
4. CASL and Marketing to Canadians
As anyone with an email account is aware of, there is an overwhelming amount of marketing messages and emails sent to us, and Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) aims to minimize the irrelevant electronic messages. CASL is a new Canadian anti-spam law that applies to any Commercial Electronic Message (CEM) sent from or to Canadian machines. This regulation applies to any computer or mobile device to enable users the choice to opt-in to promotional offers in form of instant messages and emails. The law does not include fax machines or messages.
CASL brings to point two types of consent that marketers must be aware of, and they are implied consent and express consent. Implied consent would be a recipient that has purchased a product or service with your organization in the last 24 months. Express consent is obtained by presenting recipients a clear and concise description for the purpose of obtaining consent, a description of the message(s) they will receive, their contact information, and a method to unsubscribe.
What marketers must be aware of when sending to and from Canadian computers and devices:
- From July 1, 2014 to July 1, 2017, messages sent to recipients are legal if they have implied consent.
- Starting on July 1, 2017, messages sent to recipients are illegal if they only have implied consent, but, messages sent to recipients are legal if they have expressed consent.
- Companies not following the CASL law are subject to fines up to $10M.
5. The Best Marketers Are Constant Students
During her fireside chat, Queen Latifah offered the audience at Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit 2017 some practical advice that is often overlooked in marketing.
The first key piece of advice was to “be a constant student, you’ll never be too large for you britches.” This is relevant for Marketers as it’s an ever-evolving profession and if you continue to learn you’ll be surprised with how far you can go. The other tip from Queen Latifah was that “you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for nothing.”
My take on her advice is that there are many marketing trends to follow, but marketers only have so many resources and they will have to take a stand on the ones that will make the biggest impact for them.
Bottom Line
All in all, it was a great Marketing Nation Summit. Lots of ground was covered and marketers left more engaged with ideas to take their campaigns to the next level from automation and AI to the engagement economy.