You’ve decided to make the move to Marketo. Congratulations on making a great decision on your journey to marketing maturity. While Marketo is built for speed and efficiency—in many cases you can technically get the system up and running in a matter of weeks, seamlessly moving from a previous marketing automation platform to Marketo is about more than flawless execution. It takes careful consideration and coordination so you don’t sacrifice your marketing efforts in the process. Having performed dozens of migrations from all sorts of platforms (Eloqua, Hubspot, Pardot, just to name a few), I ..read more

On a scale of one to 10, most people rate themselves at a seven or better. The phenomenon, known as “illusory superiority,” has been studied for years by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell. This is just one of multiple studies finding that people generally think they are above average in many areas of their lives. Illusory superiority can also describe the overly optimistic opinion some companies have of their customer experience (CX) offerings. In reality, they are often missing the mark with respect to providing excellent CX consistently, at every stop along the customer’s buying jour ..read more

There’s a reason why they say content is king — it’s more than just words on a page; it’s a powerful marketing tactic. The right content marketing strategy can do amazing things for your business. It develops brand awareness, builds traffic to your website, generates leads and ultimately drives more revenue. If you’re not using content to generate leads, you could be missing out on a huge business opportunity. If you’re new to content marketing, here are seven tips to keep in mind when getting started. Tip #1: Identify Which Topics You Are a Thought Leader In No matter how much content you pr ..read more

Marketing Operations is a function that’s relatively new to the corporate world. It was created to address the increasing complexity of running a marketing department, which now depends on effective data management and analysis, and advanced software systems to operate effectively. Marketing Operations encompasses the people, processes and technologies that empower an organization’s marketing strategy and activities, and supports the entire marketing department’s efforts as they engage, attract and convert customers. Key functions include: Ensuring Marketing teams have the right technologies ..read more

Marketing budgets are slowly returning to pre-2020 levels, with 25.4% of spending dedicated to Marketing Technology (MarTech). Yet today, industries face another stumbling block: a downturn in economic conditions. Additionally, the Great Resignation and tight labor market continue to affect team structures, documentation of processes, tool adoption, which can be costly. During a time when businesses need to tighten their belts in other areas to avoid passing inflationary costs onto consumers, evaluating non-human components like your MarTech stack can help save money. The Forbes Technology Co ..read more

Let’s talk about accessibility in email. Email accessibility seems to be one of those topics that companies either don’t consider, don’t think it applies to email or assume they are already implementing. When accessibility is brought up in a discussion, it is often set aside for a later discussion or next-round implementation due to a misconception in the level of effort it can take to implement. Making our emails accessible not only helps to comply with laws and regulations, it also allows everyone the ability to see our messages as we intended. Fortunately, there are a few easy practices ar ..read more

Did you check your social channels today? I’m guessing you did. How many advertisements for products and services did you see? Did any of them catch your eye? Did you click through to learn more? Did you go so far as to make a purchase? Most of us don’t stop to think too hard about what inspires us to act on a call to action, however this is a fact: Your response to any ad is a result of your level of engagement with the brand and the content presented. The likelihood of you even noticing an ad as you scroll through your social feeds depends on: Whether the ad is relevant to you What interac ..read more

Every existing customer in your business is also a potential future customer. In fact, they are arguably your most important potential customers — listen and learn from them, nurture and delight them. Soon, you’ll have a revenue engine humming with an ongoing, evolving base of advocates and repeat clients. One of our recent blog posts talked about Demand Expansion: the “unsung hero” of revenue growth for marketing and sales teams. Demand Expansion is retaining and expanding a customer’s lifetime value and opening new advocacy opportunities. Since 90% of a customer’s lifetime value is generate ..read more

Businesses are still feeling the pandemic’s impact where it hurts the most – their budgets. And unfortunately, an economic recession is likely. Growth is projected to slow from 6.1% last year to 3.2% in 2022, and Fannie Mae reports that the U.S. will likely enter a recession in Q1 of 2023, shrinking about .4% for the year. While recessions are certainly troubling for consumers, they can be particularly unnerving for business leaders. Reduced consumer spending – and even just the fear of it – can result in businesses scaling back what some believe are unnecessary expenses, such as marketing an ..read more

The benefits of aligning marketing and sales teams are well known at this point. One of the elements of a strong marketing-sales relationship is having a seamless integration between their tech tools, like the one between Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce. These integrations make it easier for separate teams to collaborate and share lead data in real-time, thus accelerating the buyer’s path to conversion. Plus, integrating applications helps them take advantage of each other’s data so they can strategize for growth with confidence, not guesswork. However, as companies adopt these new applications ..read more