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Good morning, Marketers, and what’s the perfect recipe for a marketing team?
I spoke this week with David Postill who heads up marketing and customer experience for the food infrastructure giant AGI (the full interview is here). After talking about the massive digital transformation the company has undergone, at lightning speed, Postill brought up the subject of our recent reflections on the fit between marketing operations and marketing.
“I’ve always described the marketing team structure as three spheres of excellence: a technology sphere, which is really your marketing operations folks; a content sphere; and a brand strategy sphere,” he said. “Bringing those three expertises together, with an outer ring of vendor partners and software solutions, I think is the ideal marketing structure today. Marketing is a magic ingredient right now.”
He added: “I love your tagline, MarTech is marketing because I think the same thing. Martech is the same as marketing, there’s really no difference.”
Kim Davis
Editorial Director
Table of Contents
Real Story on MarTech: The new stack
In the first of a new series on MarTech, the Real Story Group, a vendor-agnostic research and advisory organization that helps organizations make purchasing decisions on marketing technology applications and digital workplace tools, presents a new reference model for the martech stack.
“Properly employed, reference models serve less as less strict instruction manuals and more as guidelines to spur a discussion and hopefully a consensus about current status and future plans,” writes Tony Byrne. “You need to adapt any model to your own circumstances. “Yet any good reference model should also be directional, and there are at least three key lessons implied here.”
The three lessons? Your stack will become omnichannel, foundational services should be deployed across the enterprise, and consider investing lower in your stack rather than relying on a big marketing suite to do the whole job for you. “This is a services model and not a platform model,” writes Byrne.
Two surefire ways to improve your presentations
The first mistake is about the presentation topic itself. It needs to be narrowly defined. I can’t emphasize that enough. I think it’s natural to want to fit a ton of information into your presentation, but realistically you can’t teach everything about keywords or link building or any other general topic in 30-45 minutes. You want your viewers to walk away with one or two clear things to do, something they can implement in their own business right away to improve a process or increase ROI.
How to fix it. Think about your goal for the presentation. What one or two things do you want your viewers to do after they leave your presentation? Once you know, present that information and only that information.
The second mistake is focusing on why the topic of your presentation is important and what viewers should do rather than showing them how to do it. When someone chooses to attend a session or webinar that indicates that they are interested in your topic and think it’s important. Other than a brief opening statement or a statistic to get their attention, there’s no need to go into many details about why people should care about the topic. They already do. That’s why they’re there.
How to fix it. Describing what viewers should do is important but don’t stop there. Telling someone what to do is not as useful as showing them how to do it. So don’t just tell them, provide steps, a process, examples and details on how to do something.
That circles back to the first point, know what one or two things you want your viewers to walk away with knowing how to do, then show them exactly how to do it. Questions or comments? Feel free to reach out to me at kbushman@thirddoormedia.com.
It’s time to submit your stack
Summer approaches! (Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.) Fresh air, sunshine, and frolicking outdoors have never felt so viscerally appealing, after a seemingly infinite year indoors. I hope you get time to walk in the woods, roll in the grass, or dip your feet in the ocean.
But there’s still work to be done! Marketing continues to advance, adapting to the “new normal” of innovative digital customer experiences and digital business operations. We’ll educate and celebrate this at the next (virtual) MarTech Conference at the end of summer, September 14-15. And a big part of the celebrations will be The 2021 MarTech Stackie Awards.
Yes, this year’s Stackie Awards are now officially open for entries.
The Stackies are arguably the most educational awards program in marketing. Each year, dozens of organizations enter a 16×9 slide that visualizes their “marketing stack” — the collection of martech software they use — and how they think about its structure. We then publish them all, ungated, for everyone in marketing to learn from these examples.
Zoom announces all-in-one events platform
The booming video communications firm Zoom today announced that it would make Zoom Events, an all-in-one platform for virtual experiences, available this summer. Combining Zoom meetings, chat, and video webinars, the platform is intended to be a comprehensive solution for staging ticketed virtual events for internal and external audiences.
What it does. The platform will cater for events of all sizes, from large user conferences to the kind of small-scale, monetizable immersive experiences which had been using OnZoom. It will allow the management of ticketing, billing and access from a single portal, and will track registration, attendance and revenue.
Why we care. Everyone is trying to forecast the future of events, and everyone we’ve spoken to believes they will have a virtual component, and that pure virtual events will have a strong after-life even once the pandemic is under control. Zoom already rode the wave of remote video communications to great effect, and it’s now trying to catch the next big wave.
Quote of the day
“Social experiment time: just accepted 90 pending LinkedIn invites — most of them without a message attached — and going to track how many of these folks now write to me as a result. I’m going to guess it’s less than 10%, but let’s see!” Jeremy Goldman, Principal Analyst, Insider Intelligence
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