It’s not that content marketers aren’t interested in tech. We are! It does mean, however, that leaders are wary of spending right now. Contributors include the tepid economic expectations this year, coupled with the fact that marketers aren’t using the lion’s share of the martech capabilities they already have. The result is C-suites are continuing to ask marketers to do more with less, a trend we also saw last year.

What does that mean for the hot technologies in marketing right now? A year ago, we reported on our own survey findings showing the ways in which content technology investments mirror our functions’ biggest challenges.

Research from third-party sources for this year shows many of the same tech trends that make us more efficient and more impactful. Unsurprisingly, it all starts with AI.

Generative AI really is affecting content marketing trends!

There is a predictable pattern in technology — a hot new technology grabs everyone’s attention and attracts major investment, only to be followed by a period of disappointment after it fails to produce immediate returns. In the case of generative AI, however, the pattern looks different.

Two years after the release of generative AI, marketing leaders are still excited about its promise and payoff. A survey from Boston Consulting Group finds that 70% of marketing functions already use it. McKinsey estimates that the economic benefits of adopting generative AI could result in between $6.1 to $7.9 trillion in value.

According to multiple surveys, AI is already enabling content marketing teams to produce more content faster and with greater accuracy. Given the fact that creating enough content to meet demand is among content marketing’s top challenges, generative AI’s biggest benefit, regardless of content type, is helping us to keep up with growing expectations. It is not replacing human talent. Nor is investment slowing down. On the contrary, casual experiments are giving way to more formal adoption.

Content marketing teams need customer data to optimize impact

AI’s extended reach is creating an opportunity for marketers to up their customer data game. After all, AI runs on data. In addition, parallel trends related to data privacy and the ongoing retirement of third-party cookies make it clear that businesses need more maturity in customer data and analytics.

Thankfully, one of the benefits of higher-quality data programs is that content marketers can do even better. By “better,” I mean produce more targeted content that results in higher customer engagement.

Customer data will result in better AI-generated content

Most marketing functions adopting generative AI so far have used off-the-shelf solutions. Even as content marketing teams are embedding those tools into their workflows, the most tech-forward organizations are building their own large language models using their own data (LLMs are the foundation on which gen AI platforms operate).

Not every organization has the resources to build its own model. Yet organizations can still augment standard models with in-house data for better outputs that require less manual fact-checking or style refinements.

Customer data drives better content marketing engagement

Beyond improving generative AI outputs, data maturity will also enable content marketers to more effectively use predictive analytics and machine learning to uncover insights into customer needs.

A perennial challenge for content marketers is emphasizing the right content to drive impact. One of the primary ways we have to stay ahead of copycat content is to write about what our customers want to know.

We may find that out by collecting and analyzing direct and indirect sources of customer data. Direct methods include surveys, voice of the customer programs, focus groups, and others. Indirect methods include channel tracking and social listening.

Interest in customer data is not new, but it continues to rise as a critical technology-driven content marketing trend because content teams still struggle so much to use it. For example, your organization may house the data you have in disparate systems. Or, relevant sources of data may belong to other functions that don’t want to or know how to share them with you.

For those reasons and others, businesses have increased investment in customer data platforms (CDPs) to centralize data and gain a single view of the customer to drive marketing practices.

Future tech will enable more efficient creation

Even with generative AI on their side and better data informing their work, content teams will need to up their game with sound processes and an easy-to-use technology stack. So, even as you embrace the hot technologies of the year, don’t forget to leverage your content marketing platform to get the most out of what you do to drive collaboration and streamline workflows.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs

How are marketing budgets expected to change in the next few years?

Sources like the semi-annual CMO Survey predict that if economic conditions improve, marketing budgets will gradually increase. In the meantime, content teams only increase their relevance by optimizing how they work and showing positive returns from current investments — including in your content marketing.

What are the potential drawbacks of relying heavily on generative AI for content creation?

One potential drawback of using AI for content is creating high volumes of low-quality content that includes misinformation. To avoid this risk, make sure to keep a human involved in the content creation process, and implement strong fact-checking practices as part of your content processes.

How can I leverage data to improve content marketing?

Leveraging data is not just about knowing your customer (though that is critical). It is also about knowing what is working in your content marketing program and what you need to stop doing to get the most out of your budget. That requires you to continue to leverage data to understand your audience, while also tracking content performance to identify opportunities for amplification.

To stay on top of B2C and B2B content marketing trends as they happen, subscribe to The Content Strategist and follow us on Instagram.

The post Tech Advances That Are Impacting Content Marketing Trends appeared first on Contently.

That theory became a reality at Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit, the annual conference/party that celebrates all things marketing. Contently attended the conference this year for the first time as a Gold Sponsor, and besides talking with some companies trying to overcome content chaos, we learned a lot about where marketing is right now and where it’s headed.

Content at the center

A majority of the tools at the conference promised promised automation, artificial intelligence, lead scoring, or some mixture of the three. While there weren’t many content tools on display, it was clear that every company is beginning to see content as a major bottleneck.

Marketo, for example, debuted Sales Engage, a new tool built from the acquisition of ToutApp. It helps sales, sales development, and marketing coordinate their efforts deeper down the funnel. One of the major selling points is the ability to create “playbooks”—content campaigns that can be automatically customized and sent to prospects based on different attributes such as industry, sales-readiness, and so on. Teams can then measure the playbooks based on their effectiveness.

What Marketo didn’t mention is the content feeding these campaigns have to come from somewhere. Not only that, there needs to be enough of it to match every kind of campaign a salesperson could theoretically send. Of course, these assets also need to be valuable and meet brand standards. That all requires a lot of content.

I’d argue that creating, managing, and activating that content to different channels is more challenging than getting salespeople to engage and target the right prospects in the first place. Enterprise companies like BBH, which presented with John Fernandez, our VP of revenue, during the event, are beginning to develop tech stacks that simplify the challenge. The BBH stack has five tools in total, and only three are used regularly: Contently, Marketo, and Salesforce.

"97% of marketers agree you need a content strategy, but less than half actually have one." – @jfernandez packed the house for our @marketo #MKTGnation session and delivered some important insights! pic.twitter.com/ifnKDmBS2f

— Contently (@contently) April 30, 2018

Each tool aligns with a different aspect of BBH’s customer engagement: content (Contently), delivery (Marketo), and conversion (Salesforce). As companies continue to struggle, similar martech stacks will become standard.

A few other takeaways

1. Marketers still haven’t mastered data. When I attended the session “Realizing the Promise of Data-Driven Marketing,” hosted by SiriusDecisions’ John Donlon, he defined the three attributes of being truly data-driven (accessible data, data as culture, data you can trust). Then asked if anyone felt like they met all three. No one raised a hand.

2. All of martech is converging. It’s increasingly difficult to separate martech solutions into categories. In the race for market share, it seems like everyone wants to be everything to anyone. That can’t last.

3. Artificial intelligence has lost all meaning. If you hear a company bring up AI or machine learning while making a pitch, take it with a grain of salt. In an attempt to keep up, brands slap buzzy labels onto traditional automation features. Don’t buy it.

4. Marketers love free stuff. We brought a lot of pens, water bottles, socks, and notebooks to Marketing Nation Summit. They were all gone by the end.

5. Conferences should have massage chairs.

The post 1 Big Takeaway and 5 Quick Observations From Marketing Nation Summit appeared first on Contently.

That push is all about relevance. The ultimate goal of advertising is delivering the right message to someone at the right time. In many sectors, that’s already happening. Sephora tracks how much money customers spend on its site and automatically enrolls them into a VIP club once they hit a certain amount. Car companies like Nissan can now send drivers automated reminders of when they should get their car serviced based on the date you bought your car.

Based on my conversations with agencies, tech companies, and consultancies, this level of technological innovation is only going to increase. Here are three trends that marketers working in Europe should be thinking about for the future.

Seeing the consumer, not the devices

Part of the promise of online marketing has always been to understand the customer journey better. The rise of attribution modelling has given marketers more insight into how different types of content lead to conversions. But as smartphones and tablets become the primary means of accessing the internet, understanding how users move from device to device during the purchase process is a significant issue right now.

For marketers, cross-device marketing a matter of efficacy, making sure consumers see content in sequence, no matter how many devices they use. Meanwhile, consumers are annoyed by ads that feel irrelevant or from seeing the same ad too many times.

To improve the efficacy without frustrating users, marketers are turning to two solutions: identity resolution and device graphing. Identity resolution is the process of linking fragments of personal data from different sources to gather a complete picture of a customer. A device graph looks at an individual’s digital habits holistically, based on all the devices he or she uses.

Device graphs are already a common part of digital advertising in the U.S., but the tactic is only now starting to pick up across Europe as advertisers put more emphasis on managing attribution throughout the customer journey.

“The elephant in the room is that the CRM world and the digital world need to come together,” Jed Mole, European marketing director at Acxiom, told me. “We know customers happily live in both the physical and digital worlds. Linking those data sets completely is not possible, but it can be done to a worthwhile degree.”

Think of it this way: If you’ve just purchased a TV in a store, the last thing the retailer wants is to advertise the same TV to you online. When a publisher’s ad exchange offers them the chance to advertise to you, brands want to be able to say no or advertise a complementary product. A data on-boarding company will take the retailer’s data, anonymise it, and use it to let publishers know that if you come to their website, they shouldn’t bid on TV ads. This approach should lead to a better experience for customers and more effective advertising for marketers.

Are the robots coming?

The need for increased automation means marketing departments will have to evolve, quickly, to adapt to new demands. For some companies, that means turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning, topics the media loves to hype up.

Artificial intelligence may present incredible possibilities, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what skills are needed and how viable such technology really is. A 2016 report published by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research revealed that 55 percent of CMOs worldwide expect AI to have a greater impact on marketing than social media. When that happens is still anyone’s guess.

Jason Warnes, digital marketing partner at Deloitte Digital, thinks AI will be great for efficiency. He sees it as a key resource for optimisation, perhaps by making marketing spend more effective. But he also cautioned that it will replicate human experience, for example, by refining the process a car salesperson goes through with a customer to serve up the right product.

“A big concern is marketers committing to the technology but not getting the return because the business isn’t ready.”

Beyond that, AI could help marketers corral its vast pools of data, some of which may be quantitative and unstructured. When people make comments about a brand on social media, technology could gather that data and make inferences about what the users want. “Search trends can be used as the basis for assumptions, for example, so that you’re not starting from a blank piece of paper if you don’t have structured data about a customer,” he added.

At Mindshare, a media agency, global head of programmatic Adam Ray sees machine learning as the third corner of a triangle with planning and creativity. It’s the missing element that will let marketers target the right customer with relevant content, at a time when programmatic is making media buys more complicated.

“Machine learning is the critical factor,” Ray said. “Typically a brand will look to have twenty or thirty different buying strategies at any one point in time, but what we’re moving to is having hundreds of thousands. This changes how we think about media, operate it, and learn from it.”

The shift to service

Perhaps the most significant trend in marketing automation this year isn’t about new technology. Rather it’s the growing recognition that technology isn’t enough on its own.

“A big concern is marketers committing to the technology but not getting the return because the business isn’t ready, or because they haven’t done the required due diligence, or because they don’t have the skills required,” said Zuzanna Gierlinska Oracle’s director of data management platform EMEA. “I think the idea of service will be big this year.”

The situation is further complicated by the sheer numbers of suppliers and products available. Per Netskope, a cloud security company, the average marketing team uses 91 cloud services. While some businesses are happy to mix and match technology from different vendors and add to their stacks, today’s marketers are daunted by the overwhelming choice and complexity of all available options.

Gierlinska believes the effectiveness of all this software is as much about finding someone to run the platform as it is about the platform itself. For now, media agencies, consultancies, and an emerging wave of solutions experts have the skills to manage the technology.

All of these developments ultimately suggest that martech is only going to get more complex. “For marketers, it’s data and it’s creativity; giving the customers the best experience and getting the best return,” Gierlinska said. “All the current innovation is around those two spaces.”

The post 3 European Martech Trends Affecting Brands in 2017 appeared first on Contently.

Brinker has done an amazing job identifying and categorizing all the vendors in a space that’s expanding so rapidly. But despite the growth, there is stability at the top. Brinker found that less than 7 percent of the 5,000 vendors qualify as enterprises (which he defines as companies that have either gone public or have more than 1,000 employees).

At Contently, we decided to put together a different kind of content marketing landscape—one that looks at the royal houses of martech, if you will. Yes, Game of Thrones is back this summer, and we’re already turning everything into a Starks-versus-Lannisters metaphor.

Click on the graphic below to enlarge the map. And let us on know on Twitter @Contently if you’ve ever come across anything nerdier than a Game of Thrones-inspired marketing technology map.

The post We Made You a ‘Game of Thrones’-Style Map of the Marketing World appeared first on Contently.

When I started at Contently, it didn’t take long for me to realize this wasn’t just a freelance problem. The internet has made it so easy to reach people, but there’s still a lot of inefficiency in the way we communicate with editors, prospects, customers, etc. Whether we’re freelance creatives or enterprise marketers, we all want more visibility when it comes to issues that impact our business.

I was reminded of all this recently when I came across a survey about the benefits of marketing technology. In February, Squiz, an Australian software company, and Morar Consulting, a market research consultancy, asked senior marketers in Australia, the U.S., and the UK to identify the primary reasons they use martech.

The most important reasons can be simplified into three categories:

1. High-level insights

2. Time management

3. Data collection

As brands continue to invest heavily in content, the benefits of marketing technology become clear: They make organizations more knowledgeable and efficient. There’s a snowball effect at play. If a company can gather useful data on its customers, it can find patterns that connect certain behaviors to purchasing decisions, and then automate processes that serve those behaviors. For instance, if we notice that our prospects sign contracts shortly after downloading our “Content Methodology” e-book, then we can test that hypothesis in Salesforce over a few months, and set up an email template for salespeople to send the e-book to their contacts at a certain point in the customer journey.

Instead of guessing what works, employees can spend more of their time on creative and strategic tasks. Technology that closes this gap is incredibly valuable.

As a freelance writer, I was always trying to save time and make better decisions through data. What times did editors look at emails? When did they respond? Did they click on my links? How long did they read my work? (There were some tools, like Yesware, that helped me do this.) I was constantly searching for ways to ensure that I had more time to actually get things done. Today, marketers use tech to obtain similar data from prospects, just on a larger scale. They’re also building marketing stacks that capture insights on the customer journey and automate everything from content calendars to lead attribution.

These companies don’t have time or money to waste guessing what customers want. As marketing technology gets better, maybe we can eliminate that fear of the unknown for good.

The post The 3 Most Important Reasons Marketers Use Marketing Technology appeared first on Contently.

Einstein. Sensai. Watson: Three important words for the future of martech and artificial intelligence. Salesforce’s Einstein launched late last year, Adobe’s Sensai two months later, and IBM and Salesforce announced a partnership to sell their AI together, earlier this month. As an IBM representative told TechCrunch, “Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies.”

However, not everyone is impressed. Henry Schuck, CEO of marketing and sales intelligence platform DiscoverOrg, thinks the AI arms race isn’t a new phenomenon. According to him, many martech companies are just rebranding technology that has been around for years. He isn’t the only one feeling skeptical. In a recent article on The Content Strategist that examined AI hype, Sameer Patel, CEO of the smart automation software company Kahuna, said: “There’s just a lot taking old technology [and] plastering AI on it.”

As artificial intelligence continues to grab headlines, I spoke to Schuck to get his take on evolving skill sets for marketers, where salespeople fit in an automated future, and why some marketers struggle with marketing technology.

I know you’ve expressed some skepticism about artificial intelligence. Do you think it’s going to be a big part of marketing’s future?

I’m certain AI will be a part of marketing’s future. But part of my perspective on this is the way companies use the word “AI.” It’s like a fancy word to describe something that marketers, particularly B2B marketers, have been doing for years now. It’s really just predictive lead scoring.

Marketers have been doing that for the last decade with website tracking and their own leads, all without using AI. It’s really over the last four or five years that there have been dozens of predictive lead scoring companies that have added machine learning to that process. They bring in a bunch of different data elements to help you look at your customer base and then identify which customers are your “A” customers, your “B” customers, your “C” customers, your “D” customers, all based on a complex statistical model that looks at the activities that your customers and non-customers have done. Then they identify what your ideal customer looks like.

So I think it’s interesting that there’s all this buzz around something that’s been around the B2B marketing world a long time.

Do you think in some cases it’s marketing technology companies rebranding something that has already existed, or do you think there actually has been a change in the technology itself?

No, I think they’re rebranding. My guess is, post-Salesforce announcement, the companies in the predictive lead scoring space began to rebrand themselves as companies who are in artificial intelligence.

That would not be too surprising. It seems that happens a lot, not just in marketing, but in technology in general.

Salesforce leads the way on a lot of that. DiscoverOrg was always a platform that was available on the web, but in 2010, when companies got really excited on the idea of the cloud, that’s just what we rebranded as: your data service provider in the cloud, everything in the cloud, all of your tools in the cloud. It was really because that’s when Salesforce was pressing on this cloud thing harder than they ever had before.

Do you think there is going to be a time in the future, say five years from now, when a proper AI technology can really change things?

First and foremost, I don’t think that AI ever fundamentally changes the need for a salesperson. In B2B sales, especially in the mid-market and enterprise side, there is a true skill to what a salesperson is able to do. A salesperson is able to comprehend the needs of a customer, make pattern recognition to what this customer needs compared to another customer, and so on. I don’t think that AI ever gets to a point in the near future when it replaces the art of what a salesperson does.

I don’t think that AI ever fundamentally changes the need for a salesperson.

I think what it will do, and what it’s already doing, is taking away some of the most mundane tasks that sales reps have to do. Calendar management is a place where you can see AI doing a great job.

In our business, we curate high quality information on companies and buyers that sell to companies. We have machine learning that’s built throughout the technology that we use. But one thing that we found is the last five yards, ten yards that you need, machine learning just doesn’t get you there. And sometimes those last yards make all the difference.

When you talk to some marketers and look at studies on how marketers are implementing tech, marketers are having problems with integrating everything and making sure it actually functions. Do you think that’s because marketers are not as technologically savvy as they should be, or is that more the fault of vendors not building products that are easy to use?

It’s two things. One, the industry has changed so quickly that the marketers who have those talents—who know how Marketo interacts with Salesforce, how to do campaign attributions, and how to look at different stages in the sales funnel—the number of people with real experience in that is very few. The entire universe of people who have done marketing attribution at scale is probably a couple hundred people in the United States.

Two, most of the technologies trying to help marketers are pretty new. Plus, the problems that marketers face are rapidly evolving, and the software’s trying to evolve alongside it. But it’s obviously a little bit behind.

With all AI, there are always humans behind these tools, and humans can make mistakes. Do you think there are potential problems where maybe the initial data input isn’t correct or there’s a wrench in the system that messes everything up?

With any AI, any predictive lead scoring, and really any of these analytics tools out there, they are only as good as the data that goes into them. So if you have a predictive lead scoring tool that defines a model and looks at your customer data, it’s entirely dependent on the quality of data that goes in. Once you have a bunch of the wrong contact types or incorrect industry labels, then the model is pretty useless.

With any AI, any predictive lead scoring, and really any of these analytics tools out there, they are only as good as the data that goes into them.

If you talk to any marketer about a predictive lead scoring tool, the biggest project is normalizing the data and filling holes. You spend a lot more time making the data normalized and filling gaps of the data with your own data than you do actually getting the data in and having it do the analysis.

It all comes down to how disciplined you are gathering your data, keeping your data cleansed, and making sure your data is in a format that can be easily translated into multiple systems.

So if you’re an average marketer and maybe you don’t work for the most tech savvy firm, how should you prepare for the increasing automation?

I think what you’re going to continue to see is people in marketing are going to be required to have a real technological skill set that maybe a decade ago they didn’t need to have. They could be creative and artistic and clever and probably get away with being a good marketer, but today’s marketer needs to be data-driven, technology-savvy, and able to pick up new concepts quickly.

If you look at the martech landscape, it’s almost tripled in size in the last three years. There are thousands of new marketing technologies that are coming online. Having a sense of what those things do and how they play in your environment really requires technological savvy.

We did a study where we looked at companies that grow fast and companies that don’t. For the companies that grow fast, one of the top characteristics that they looked for in salespeople that they hire is technological savvy. That contrasts against slow-growth companies that look for experience and discipline. I think it goes to the point that technologically savvy salespeople and marketers are the ones who are able to get the most out of today’s B2B sales marketing world.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post ‘Today’s Marketer Needs to Be Data-Driven’: DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Martech appeared first on Contently.

After years of swift technological development disrupted marketing to its core, CMOs and their teams are now responsible for a bevy of critical company functions: optimizing the sales process, improving customer experience, and marketing the product across a complex array of channels. Meanwhile, CEOs understand that technology allows for accurate tracking of marketing dollars spent, creating immense pressure on CMOs to perform.

Now, another technological breakthrough is on the horizon: artificial intelligence (AI). According to many experts, AI has the potential to be the most revolutionary technology since computing itself—and marketing is first in line for disruption.

Should marketing leaders panic or celebrate? It depends on who you ask.

The artificial intelligence hype machine

2016 was a big year for artificial intelligence.

Google’s AlphaGo program defeated the world champion in the complex game of Go, a landmark in AI development. Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all made significant investments in AI. Wired proclaimed that the world’s biggest tech companies are “remaking themselves around the technology.” In marketing, Salesforce and Adobe announced new intelligence programs, called Einstein and Sensai, respectively. We’re in the midst of an AI arms race.

“I’m astounded in how AI is going to transform every industry,” said Leslie Fine, VP of product at martech giant Salesforce. “Companies today face an imperative to integrate AI into their products and services, or risk becoming less competitive with companies who are applying AI to improve customer experiences and make more intelligent business decisions.”

But what is AI exactly? And how does it apply to marketing? The answers aren’t as simple as you might think.

Everyone seems to have a different definition for AI. Typically, though, it’s an umbrella term that refers to software that carries out tasks that would normally require human intuition. Think recommendations on Netflix, Google Translate, software powering self-driving cars, and even GPS map services such as Waze.

Marketers tend to apply the term to a variety of processes such as automation, machine learning, and optimization. But that has led to a muddled understanding of the technology. And martech vendors aren’t exactly taking steps to clear up the confusion. As AI takes its place as the industry’s buzzword du jour, companies everywhere are hoping to ride the hype.

Henry Schuck, CEO of DiscoverOrg, a sales and marketing intelligence solution, believes that Salesforce’s Einstein announcement in 2016 was mostly a rebranding of what the company formally called “predictive lead scoring.” According to him, the new terminology has led to a hysteria of “rebranding” from companies desperate to keep up.

Sameer Patel, CEO of the B2C smart automation software company Kahuna, worries this widespread adoption could have real consequences. “There’s just a lot taking old technology, plastering AI on it, putting a nice gloss on it, and saying, ‘Hey, great, I’m AI,'” he said. “No, you’re not. It’s going to give AI a bad name, ultimately, because the results won’t come out.”

Unfortunately, there is no authority that defines what exactly is and isn’t AI, and companies will likely use the term’s loose definition to hype their own products or undercut competitors. AI’s definition will always be broad—what really matters is what the technology can do.

The rise of AI

Jon Epstein—CMO at Sentient, one of the most-funded independent AI firms in the world—believes AI will be more revolutionary than the internet.

But artificial intelligence has been around for years. The difference is that recent technological innovations have propelled its rise to the front of the marketing hype train. As Scott Brinker, founding editor of ChiefMartec, wrote last year, “The horsepower and data to efficiently run AI algorithms is now within reach of everyone.”

AI is already visible in a number of marketing disciplines. Ad tech companies use AI to power programmatic ad exchanges, automatically optimizing ad campaigns that once required intense menial labor. Marketing automation software, such as Marketo, also takes care of tasks that once required hours of labor, such as sending nurture emails or qualifying leads.

“Any part of the marketing world where a marketer has to read data and make decisions based on that data will be affected by AI in one way or another in the near future,” Schuck said.

“With any AI, they are really only as good as the data that goes into them.”

While machine learning and automation tools can simplify marketing processes, many of today’s AI companies are also focused on how technology can improve customer experience. Sentient, for example, uses its “distributed AI platform,” which runs on an incredible network of 2 million CPUs and 5,000 GPUs (the horsepower in a computer), to help retail clients optimize the customer experience. One of its two marketing products, Sentient Ascend, does A/B testing in real time at massive scale.

“Normally when you’re testing … it’s pretty slow and painstaking.” Epstein explained. “Instead, using a different type of algorithm, you can test ten, twenty, thirty changes at a time, and it solves not only what changes to make, but what combination of them to achieve the highest level of response.”

To visualize this, think of testing colors and fonts on a lead form, the centerpiece of many marketing tool kits. Epstein told me that after one company used Sentient to test 380,000 form designs, its lead form conversion rate increased by 45 percent.

“The fact that you can pick up that kind of gain from what you would think of as tweaks, it’s pretty profound,” Epstein said. “We think there’s a lot of money being left on the table.”

At Kahuna, which serves mostly B2C clients, Patel values AI for the way it can help customize customer experience, using machine learning and signals to optimize for individual needs. Some companies are already showing that this customer-focused approach works.

“If you look at how quickly you can call for an Uber or pick a movie on Netflix, our tolerance and our attention span right now as consumers is wildly, wildly, wildly shorter than it used to be,” Patel said. “You’re dealing with a world where they’re expecting that you know who they are, you can understand their needs, and you can fulfill them in real time.”

From teen to neo-Nazi

While it’s easy to get caught up in the hype, AI still comes with issues. These software products rely on integrated and accurate data collection systems, but not every company has the digital infrastructure in place to take advantage of such advanced technology. Since martech is a young space, many marketers still use poorly integrated systems that lack oversight.

“With any AI, they are really only as good as the data that goes into them,” Schuck said.

In 2016, Microsoft built a Twitter bot called Tay meant to resemble a teenage girl that could communicate with users. In less than 24 hours, the bot tweeted messages like “Hitler was right I hate the Jews,” and “I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.”

Since the bot was programmed to take signals from users, internet trolls overwhelmed it with offensive messages and quickly turned Tay into a neo-Nazi bot. The controversy was an embarrassing example of AI’s potential to spiral out of control.

AI also dregs up criticisms often leveled at the adtech industry: namely, the reliance on over-personalization. Privacy concerns about too much targeting could lead to an “uncanny valley,” where customers are creeped out by AI’s abilities to predict their wants and needs.

However, most marketers remain confident the value outweighs these concerns. “I feel like we’re getting to a place where, as long you’re not messing with the user’s trust, people want personalization,” Patel said. “I think we’re moving from being okay with that to actually expecting that.”

The ghost in the machine

So here’s the big question: Where does artificial intelligence leave the marketer? Technology has already reshaped blue-collar industries, eliminating the need for jobs. Won’t automated systems threaten to destroy traditional marketing roles as well?

AI proponents concede that technology will replace some roles, but they believe AI has the potential to create just as many new jobs. Plus, they argue, software could free up marketers to focus on creative, strategic work rather than day-to-day processes.

“Ninety-five percent of the people who came to marketing did not come to this data-driven world. They came for the soft side of marketing. ” Patel said. “Because of AI, you can be that creative person you always wanted to be. You now have systems that don’t require you to become a mathematician.”

“Because of AI you can be that creative person that you always wanted to be.”

Perhaps there’s a compromise in the future. Patel and Schuck both expect a new breed of marketer to emerge—someone part data scientist, part creative, who can work directly with AI systems.

“AI will significantly simplify the user experience for many of the martech tools that marketers use, as well as automate a tremendous amount of the ‘manual’ labor associated with marketing programs today,” Brinker added. “It’s unlikely that we’ll be lounging around while robots feed us grapes.”

Currently, Sentient is working on building an “AI that writes AI,” a holy grail that could exponentially accelerate the sophistication of existing software. What happens if a competitor gets its hands on such technology while your company cannot? As AI develops, marketers will have to adapt quickly, and some of them may not be prepared.

“We’re at the very beginning of something,” Epstein said. “Seeing what our own technology can do, the stuff we’re doing research on—we ain’t seen anything yet.”

The post Marketing’s Artificial Intelligence Revolution Is Here appeared first on Contently.

With nearly 4,000 options available, how many martech solutions does a brand use? Conductor, a web presence management and search engine optimization company, polled 387 marketing executives to find the answer.

The results, collected from a November 2016 survey, show that most companies work with an abundance of tools. Sixty-nine percent of respondents use at least six solutions, and 31 percent rely on more than 10. Then there’s the 2 percent of marketing executives who don’t even know the size of their marketing stack, which is its own separate headache.

These supersized marketing stacks underscore the need for brands to consolidate and integrate their operations wherever possible, for the sake of budgeting and efficiency. Contently falls into one of the larger groups, as our marketing stack hovers around 20 separate solutions. In October, we even broke down each tool’s function with some Drake-themed role playing.

While the rapid martech expansion can intimidate everyone who works in the space, brands willing to get creative with their approach can reap the benefits. Most of these companies publish boilerplate content marketing to sell their software, but audiences need a differentiator in such a crowded field. Companies that offer original advice and robust resources will have a big advantage when establishing a voice and standing out from the competition. With 3,800 tools and counting, audiences have no reason to settle for a good enough solution when great is out there.

At some point, that number will (probably) plateau, and with it marketing stacks may grow more stable. But for now, the proliferation of choice leaves marketers with tough decisions, as they figure out what tech to adopt and what’s worth leaving in the cluttered flock.

The post How Big Is Your Marketing Stack? appeared first on Contently.

The more that martech evolves, the more it sounds like some far-off future. Automation, AI, predictive analytics—what was once the realm of science fiction has now become reality for marketers.

One company leading that futuristic charge is software giant Salesforce, which announced its new AI late last year, aptly named Einstein. Though the project is still in its early stages, the company, like many Silicon Valley giants, sees AI as central to its future. This is particularly true for Salesforce Pardot (pronounced par-DOT), the company’s marketing automation software product, which has data and advanced analytics as core features.

Mike Kostow, who has been working at Salesforce for six years, is certainly no stranger to the complicated world of enterprise software. Now the SVP and GM of Pardot, he has been in the enterprise software business for more than 20 years.

During an in-depth interview, Kostow talked to us about the future of marketing, how Einstein will affect Pardot’s capabilities, and whether marketers should rely more on data or intuition.

To start off, can you run through how your year went with Pardot and what you’re excited for in 2017?

We have had an amazing year at Salesforce and an amazing year at Pardot. We are now the fastest growing and most widely deployed marketing automation solution for Salesforce customers, which is really exciting.

As I look to 2017, we’re seeing a lot of change in the marketplace. A lot of that, from my perspective and talking to customers, is driven by the B2B cycle changing dramatically. Now by the time prospects are coming to a company to buy something, they’ve done a lot of their research online, and they’re really close to making a purchase. Because of that changing behavior and because they’re able to do all that research online, it makes those engagements that companies are having with these prospects even more important than before.

I’ve been reading a lot about this movement where marketing becomes less about selling and more about creating this customer experience. How are you thinking about that with regard to Pardot?

Pardot is really centered on customer experience. We believe that marketing and sales alignment are the most important things to that customer experience.

If you have marketing and sales working off a single platform—if you have them operating in the same place—then that handoff between those two teams is critical to being able to actually close business, right? Because if marketing and sales are disconnected and operating out of different systems, then it’s very difficult in this new B2B buyer’s journey to convert prospects into customers. That’s really what we see.

With AI, you’re able to free up a marketer and you’re able to free up a salesperson to focus on things that are more strategic to the business.

As we look forward, we see that buying cycle changing even more. There’s the buyer’s journey change. That’s really one phase. The next phase is about AI and predictive analytics. That’s a big deal for our customers, and it’s a big deal for us.

For example, say you’re a salesperson: We’re going to be able to score leads in a way where it’s predictive, so salespeople are going to be able to follow up on the right leads at the right time and prioritize their work based on all of that rich information that Salesforce captures.

Is that all part of the Einstein AI program?

Exactly. With Einstein we’re able to look at all of this information that’s being generated across all of Salesforce’s customers to then see whether or not it’s the right lead for a salesperson to follow up on. Then salespeople and marketers can make much better decisions based on all of this rich data that we are able to generate and accumulate.

Another big trend has been account-based marketing. How are you building it into the platform—if you are—and how important do you think it is to B2B marketing’s future?

It’s funny because I talk to customers all the time and I get the question, “Hey, what does Pardot do for ABM?” and my retort to a lot of them is, “What exactly do you want to do?”

I think it’s really important for companies to think about what it is they’re trying to accomplish before deciding whether or not an ABM strategy is the right one for them. More often than not, it leads back to bringing marketing and sales together on the same platform. With that, you can have a single place to gather all of these interactions that these customers are taking on their buyer’s journeys and make sure that you are able to hit them at the right time as they move from a prospect to a customer. ABM, to us, is really just an extension of that.

Since we’re talking about AI and predictive analytics, I’m curious if you think there is ever going to be a time when marketing automation becomes so powerful that it can remove the marketer from the process, or at least put them in the backseat instead of the driver’s seat?

I think of it in a slightly different way. With AI, you’re able to free up a marketer and you’re able to free up a salesperson to focus on things that are more strategic to the business.

I think the shift is less about the marketer becoming irrelevant or the salesperson becoming obsolete, and more that they can really prioritize the things that they’re focused on that are higher value than they could before.

More and more, we as marketers are being told, “You have to look at the data to make decisions.” How much of your thought process and decision-making should be based on data versus just intuition?

My view is the vast majority of what you’re doing as a marketer and a salesperson should be based on data. If you’re a marketer, it’s very difficult for you to decide where to invest your budget this year if you don’t know what is generated or returned last year, right?

The vast majority of what you’re doing as a marketer and a salesperson should be based on data.

Marketers, more and more, are tied to pipeline goals, B2B marketers especially, and they’ve got to move very quickly and make sure that they’re generating a return on the investment. So I believe that, from a marketer’s perspective, everything is really data-driven and will continue to be. From the salesperson’s perspective, that’s the case as well. Salespeople really need to understand what is happening in their respective territory, like which lead they should follow up with first in order to make their quota.

Where do you think content plays into this? At Contently we always talk about how marketing needs to have the right content at the right time for the salesperson, so what are your thoughts on content’s role in the whole B2B marketing process?

I agree that you have to generate and build the right content to put in front of the right prospect at the right time. Our view is that content is really powerful for a marketer to put out into the market via a website and other content channels, but we also believe it’s really important for the salespeople to understand how people interact with that content.

A big part of our strategy is putting the power of marketing automation in the hands of salespeople. We have a product called Salesforce Engage, and with it a salesperson can actually see in real time how her prospects interact with her content. When that salesperson has a conversation with that prospect, that conversation is a whole heck of a lot more relevant because she knows exactly what that prospect is looking at.

For example, say you’re a prospect and you’re looking at the pricing and packaging page. If I’m the salesperson, then I know you’re doing that. So when I call you, I’m going to have a very different conversation with you than if you’re reading an e-book. We believe it’s really significant for salespeople to be able to understand how prospects interact with their content, engage at the right time, and have the right conversation.

Salesforce created a lot of talk last year by looking into acquiring Twitter. I don’t know how involved Pardot is with that, but could you give me your thoughts on social media, specifically how there seems to be more of a convergence of social media and martech companies?

I certainly see a lot more of our B2B customers using social media as a channel to market their brands. A lot of our B2B customers use social media to generate leads. But again, you can do all of the lead generation you want—what it really comes down to is how do you convert those leads that you are generating through a place like social media into someone who actually turns into a customer? That’s really what is most important to us.

What is the biggest challenge today for your typical B2B marketer?

The one that I hear more often than not when I talk to CMOs and marketing leaders is just all of the different solutions that are out there. Right now, marketing and sales solutions, more often than not, are really disconnected. So it’s very hard for them to see the full picture of what’s happening.

We co-commissioned a study with Harvard Business Review, and we asked marketers that question. More than 80 percent of them said they thought that having a marketing solution directly connected to their CRM was really important. When I talk to our customers, they’re really focused on how do I bring marketing automation and CRM closer together because when I bring those things more closely together, I know what’s happening in all phases of that buyer’s journey. So we believe putting marketing and sales into the same space, on a common platform, is the best way to drive results.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post Salesforce’s Mike Kostow on Why Marketers Should Trust Data Over Intuition appeared first on Contently.

I’m a disorganized person.

I’ve heard this since kindergarten. “You’re going to have to learn to organize your stuff better if you’re going to make it in the first grade,” my teacher, Miss Jessica, told me. Her eyes lingered on my half-open backpack, stuffed with color-by-number worksheets, cracked crayons, and dry elbow pasta, which was garnished with a bursting bottle of Elmer’s glue.

But I was a bright kid, so I beat the odds and made it through first grade. It took me longer than anyone else to find my stuff, sure, but I always compensated by getting my work done quickly. Each year, the warnings from my teachers continued—you’ll never make it in second grade, third grade, middle school, high school—but I survived.

I then chose a small liberal arts college, Sarah Lawrence, which was the kind of place where you were never the only one with sticky elbow pasta on your notebook. Using a jack-o’-lantern bucket as a backpack was all part of the creative process on campus. I thrived. I wrote constantly and developed a couple of columns for my college newspaper. I broke some big stories too. At the end of my freshman year, I was named the editor-in-chief.

And that’s when it turned out all of my teachers were right.

***

Running a publication is a marathon of organization—hiring, budgeting, scheduling. Getting drafts to and from writers and editors. Making sure they fit into layout. I started my tenure as editor-in-chief pumped up, recruiting writers with speeches I stole from Friday Night Lights coach Eric Taylor. “Clear eyes, full hearts, break stories!” didn’t exactly have the same ring to it, but it worked well enough in the beginning.

But a few weeks later, I was drowning in the vast, confounding ocean of my own email account. Signing in gave me the pangs of a mild panic attack. My messy life no longer seemed so glamorous. Each week, I’d stumble into the newspaper office at 7 a.m. on a Friday and stumble out at midnight on Sunday when the issue had finally shipped. Rather than figure out a killer organizational system, I’d chosen to just simplify the process by doing everything myself. I didn’t sleep much, but I survived, just barely.

I passed the torch when I left to study abroad, but after graduation, I was back at it again as editor-in-chief of an online newspaper that I’d helped start out of a Park Slope, Brooklyn coffee shop. While I’d been in denial throughout childhood that my disorganization was an issue, I was fully aware of it by then. I had the sick feeling of lacking some fundamental skill, which put a hard ceiling on my potential as an editor. Instead of focusing on what I was good at—writing, editing, coming up with content strategies and creative ideas—I spent half my time wondering, “Where the hell is that thing?” while combing through email threads.

I wish I could say I met some guru who taught me to eat, pray, and organize. But really, I overcame my biggest flaw by falling in love with a piece of software.

***

I first found out about Contently while covering Techstars, an NYC incubator. The founders were building a platform to give brands access to publishing tools and thousands of freelancers. My business partner and I got in touch with Shane Snow, one of the co-founders, and came on board as two of Contently’s first freelance managing editors.

Most startups don’t work out, and at first, I thought my affair with Contently would be a fling. But then the platform’s calendar, text editor, and workflow sucked me in. All of my stories and assignments were in one place. I was organized. I felt like Laney Boggs in She’s All That, suddenly transformed.

I could track when deadlines were approaching, who had worked on a particular story, and what changes they made. I had a beautiful analytics dashboard that told me what content performed best. Most importantly, I could focus on the work instead of digging through my email.

In 2013, Contently hired me as editor-in-chief. For the first time, I wasn’t terrified of my own shortcomings. The only person scared was my therapist, who began to suspect that I’d developed romantic feelings for a content marketing software product. But working with a clear head helped us grow from 14,000 readers to over 400,000.

A few years ago, I could barely see the connection between software and content. Now I’m convinced they’re intrinsically linked.

***

I spend a lot of time thinking about the challenges marketers face. As a discipline, content marketing is new. It’s hard to explain and harder to measure. Most programs are woefully understaffed.

The logical solution is content teams need more resources, but there’s a chicken-and-egg dynamic. Brand newsrooms struggle to justify full-time hires until they show results, which leaves a lot of content marketers stuck in a no-win situation.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Content marketing is more of a quality game than a quantity game. The top 5 percent of branded content garners 90 percent of the engagement. That means giant media operations cranking out hundreds of stories a day won’t necessarily succeed. More importantly, you do need talented people freed up to focus on great creative work that breaks through.

As a result, I think we’re going to see a trend of content marketing creatives taking a new approach in 2017: Instead of trying to scale their teams, they’ll push for tools that maximize the output of their existing talent.

The beauty of modern content technology is it can reduce the amount of time editors deal with busywork. We use Contently’s software to receive pitches from our writers, quickly create assignments, and organize our calendar with a drag-and-drop function. From there, the platform does the rest, such as automatically paying writers when they submit a first draft, tracking revisions, and identifying passive voice and broken links. And our proprietary analytics serves up cards that deliver actionable insights on metrics like traffic, engagement, and conversions. Instead of spending hours pulling this data, I digest it in seconds.

With the right software, these operational tasks can go from occupying 50+ percent of your time as an editor to just 10 percent. In other words, you can increase your production five-fold for the price of hiring a junior editor. The folks that figure out how to do this will have a leg up in 2017 and be free to tackle the ambitious creative projects that get noticed.

As a kid, I never understood why my teachers were so obsessed with organization, but now I get it. They wanted me to spend more time being creative. Whether you’re a disorganized mess like me or not, the right combination of content technology can serve as your magic binder. Now’s the time to embrace your inner Lisa Frank.

The post How I Fell in Love With Content Marketing Software appeared first on Contently.

Suddenly you think of everything in terms of positioning, strategy, persuasion, and accountability. You look at ads and say, “What the hell were they thinking?” to your friend who couldn’t care less. You see a post from a brand you’ve never even heard of and think, “Wow, that’s genius.”

I only really started caring about marketing (and the intersection of advertising, technology, and media) a couple years ago when I started at Contently as an intern. It’s been a never-ending crash course ever since. Digital marketing changes rapidly, and it’s only getting more complex. As soon as you think you understand the space, you realize a minute later that you’re not even close.

This year in particular, with its many shocking pieces of news and trends, has upended many assumptions I’ve held about marketing. Here are four of the most important trends that have changed the way I think about my job.

Narrative and reality are two different things

At the start of 2016, there was a ton of hype surrounding virtual reality (VR). Playstation VR, HTC Vive, and Oculus all launched this year, so marketers were gearing up for the expected revolution.

Of course, VR has since arrived, but its impact has been minimal so far with sluggish sales. As I wrote in my article about the year’s biggest marketing storylines, augmented reality (AR) seems to be the much more exciting product.

Messaging apps have gone through a similar hype-cycle as VR. For years, publications (including us) have waited for messaging apps to emerge as a big new marketing channel. Yet despite some exciting features, messaging apps aren’t on the radar of most marketers right now.

That’s not to say that VR and messaging apps are dead—far from it. It’s important to give them time to penetrate the market. Yet as we’re seeing with the crashing smartwatch market, we should be skeptical of new channels and technologies that receive breathless hype from journalists. Real change doesn’t happen because of dramatic headlines; it comes when a product actually provides value to the customer (and in our case, to the marketers hoping to reach them).

Boring but important stories are often ignored

When looking for news relevant to Contently, I see a lot of the big names over and over. Facebook. Google. Twitter. Usually, there’s a valid reason for it. Facebook and Google, in particular, dominate digital advertising, and reporting on their every step to the point of absurdity is actually not that absurd.

However, under-the-radar news often gets ignored, even when it has to do with big names. Publishers optimize for clicks, and Facebook and Google are the Kardashians of marketing. Journalists get caught up in popular narratives because they’re in a bubble or simply don’t know any better (including me). Sometimes less sexy companies aren’t good at telling their story to the press.

Publishers optimize for clicks, and Facebook and Google are the Kardashians of marketing.

Martech is a great example. It’s a massive industry—Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, and even Amazon are all involved in martech, but we didn’t start making an effort to cover the space until this year. Marketing Land, likewise, only launched its martech vertical, MarTech Today, in 2016.

Additionally, there are thousands of smaller players jostling for position that marketers use every day, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any sort of deep analysis or regular coverage about them on any of the major marketing publications like Ad Age or Digiday.

Why is that? For one, it’s a relatively new space. It’s also technical. And it is certainly not sexy. As a result, it barely receives any attention.

Most of the real innovation comes from small companies

For Adweek’s 2016 “Brand Genius” awards, every single “brand genius” is from a big-name company (Airbnb, Intel, Taco Bell, etc.). While piloting the aircraft carrier that is a major Fortune 500 company is challenging, it’s rare that you see the bigger brands introduce truly innovative marketing. Instead, it almost always comes from smaller companies that have the flexibility to be different.

Take Glossier. As everyone at Contently knows, I’ve been obsessively mentioning the company at every opportunity because I think it’s upending traditional notions of marketing. Glossier originated as a fashion and beauty blog, Into the Gloss. It then transitioned into an e-commerce company that has carved out an incredible, loyal audience. As BuzzFeed News reporter Nitasha Tiku writes in her amazing profile of the company:

Glossier’s real innovation was optimizing for the internet at every step: using the tools of the social web to turn readers into followers and followers into brand evangelists, unpaid product advisers, and, maybe, something like a community, albeit one that buys things from you.

A company like Trader Joe’s is another good example—a big name, sure, but not one that’s close to Fortune 500 status. The company’s marketing strategy is completely out of line with most companies in that it doesn’t really have one. Trader Joe’s isn’t on social media and rarely advertises. Yet like Glossier, it has a cult status and great brand recognition. That’s something you’ll rarely hear about from mainstream marketing publications, which often profile the big companies following trends rather than the ones making them.

Most people are just as confused as you are

One recurring theme of almost every conversation I’ve had this year with people who work in marketing is confusion. Thousands of companies want to sell you their vision of the future at all times, which can be disorienting.

Here’s a secret: None of them know for sure if they’re right. In fact, if people try to tell you they know what marketing will look like in five years, they either have a huge ego or are trying to sell you something. The internet disrupted many traditional marketing truths, and there’s been a battle ever since. The result is a lot of marketing veterans feel more lost and stressed than ever before.

That future shock is difficult, but it’s also what makes covering and working in the space so exciting. Winners and losers change positions at seemingly every turn, new disruptions emerge before you’re done processing the last one, and you feel overwhelmed more times than not. I’m sure 2017 will be no different.

The post 4 Hard Truths I Learned Covering Marketing This Year appeared first on Contently.

Data, optimization, and automation have now become central parts of marketing strategies. In many cases, software gets implemented across a variety of functions to help handle the increasing complexity of the digital world.

Put simply: It’s a complicated time to be a marketer. Luckily, there are people like Scott Brinker to help navigate it.

Brinker—the founding editor of Chief Martec, program chair of the MarTech Conference, and co-founder of his own martech company, ion interactive—has been a leading voice in the space since 2008. I spoke with him about martech’s automated future, where content fits into the marketing stack, and what marketers get wrong about martech.

You write a lot about the importance of strategy. A report came out recently that suggested strategy, not integration, is actually the most challenging part of martech. That’s interesting because strategy is the one thing that you can’t really “solve” with technology. So how can marketers up their strategy game?

Strategy is one of these words that means different things to different people. A very high-level business often wants clarity around position in the marketplace, its value proposition, how it compares its positioning to competitors, and so on.

If I’m looking from a content marketing perspective, you have to think strategically about, “Okay, which keywords do I want to dominate in search engine results? What sort of influencers am I looking to connect with in social media circles?” It’s work to really go through that process of identifying “where do we think the best investments are for what we want to achieve?”

Then, once you have that clarity at different levels within the organization, you start looking at technology as a way of solving: “Okay, how do we achieve that? If we know search engine optimization is incredibly important for us, what are some of the tools that we can use to support better SEO efforts?”

What are your thoughts on attribution and tagging? There seems to be a lot of pushback against it lately—Chief Martec even had a post about that. Do you think that pushback is warranted?

The guy who wrote that guest post on Chief Martec was making the case that, scientifically, it’s impossible to ever have perfect attribution. There are too many variables that we don’t have the data on. We can’t quantify what went into everyone’s decision-making process.

His point was that it’s very important to have realistic expectations. If we’re looking for this magic machine that we press a button and it tells us, “Do X, Y, and Z, and you’ll be guaranteed that people are going to buy”… We’re just not going to get there. It’s very damaging for the profession as a whole because we’re going to miss the bar.

“Few things in marketing are about achieving perfection. They’re largely about doing a better job than your competitors.”

This is not a knock against data-driven marketing. One of the places where he indicated there’s tremendous success is using partial attribution as a way to do things like media mix modeling, designing how much budget is best spent in different channels, and going after different segments and different messaging ideas that have been tried.

It’s not perfect, but few things in marketing are about achieving perfection. They’re largely about doing a better job than your competitors.

It seems to me like a lot of people buy software and then expect it to solve all their problems.

[Laughs] It would be nice if it worked that way. Unfortunately, it does not.

Another thing you write about a lot is consolidation and expansion within the martech industry. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it’s still expanding, or is it contracting?

I think it’s a combination of both, which is what makes it such a tricky space. You certainly do see some consolidation. There continues to be a fairly healthy [mergers and acquisitions] market in the martech sector.

We’ve got two challenges in the other direction. One is there continues to be new startups that enter the space who think they can do better. Second, the boundaries of marketing seem to be expanding, particularly as we talk about things like digital business transformation. Marketing isn’t just about running campaigns independent of the rest of the company. Increasingly, marketing gets built into these new kinds of products and services that companies are offering.

Same thing with additional channels. We’re starting to play around with things like Amazon Alexa, or IoT, or augmented reality. All these new things that keep appearing on the horizon, they all become new opportunities for new kinds of software that marketers can leverage. That keeps the field large and vibrant.

Another thing emerging recently is artificial intelligence. In martech, there’s Einstein (Salesforce), Watson (IBM), Sensei (Adobe), and more. Do you think AI will ultimately be supplementary, just giving recommendations, or do you think it will actually take over a lot of the marketing processes?

Some of that will be our choice.

One of the arguments I hear in favor of giving more control to the algorithms is that marketing has become so complex that a human has a very hard time managing all these different levers. At that point, maybe the only way you can manage the complexity is to turn more of it over to a computer.

“The sense of control having been lost is very uncomfortable. I think that’s what we will wrestle with in adopting AI in marketing.”

But as we turn over more of these functions to algorithms, they might end up taking actions that are going to affect our brands. You could use the metaphor of the self-driving car. I think most people believe that self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers. But the moment we have news stories of self-driving cars getting into accidents and killing people, it’s going to really freak people out. The sense of control having been lost is very uncomfortable. I think that’s kind of what we will wrestle with in adopting AI in marketing.

There’s been a lot of recent rulings, like with the FCC and in Europe, around data collection. It seems more people are pushing for consumer protections. Yet at the same time, consumer data is so important for different marketing functions. Do you think there will ever be a point when regulations will undermine martech’s effectiveness or growth?

Yes, to a certain degree. There is a big portion of martech today premised on the idea that increasingly targeted analytics and greater personalization is really the best way for marketing to improve its effectiveness. Those strategies are at great risk if regulation clamps down on the very data those things need to be effective.

I’m actually pretty confident that the marketing technology space, as a whole, is going to continue to thrive, even if there are very tight regulations around data. A big part of martech isn’t just about the analytics or personalization but about creating better experiences for people. It’s taking the insights from user experience, applying it, and building better websites, better mobile apps, and managing the way we interact with people through social media in a way that’s more effective.

What do you think are the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to martech and implementing martech solutions?

The biggest mistake, by far, is underestimating the people and processes side of these adoptions. When people say, “Hey, we’re having difficulty integrating these six different products,” there’s truth to that. People do still have integration challenges, but those challenges pale in comparison to the challenges the companies tend to end up with. Once they’ve got the software installed, and they’ve got it integrated, they throw the switch, and then they’re like, “Okay, now what?”

“The truth is that most of the marketing world doesn’t really know what to do with this stuff yet.”

The truth is that most of the marketing world doesn’t really know what to do with this stuff yet, and they’re still going about the process of marketing the way they always had before. They’re not really doing anything different with the technology, and not surprisingly, they don’t get much return from it.

You see companies that are willing to invest in training their people and promoting more experimentation, and those are the ones that tend to have greater success. It doesn’t feel like we bang that drum loud enough, sometimes.

Do you think that’s partly the fault of martech vendors as well? That they’re not informing their customers how best to use their software?

I think you’re absolutely right. Martech vendors, and I say this being a martech vendor myself, are looking to sell things. They tend to think their job is best fulfilled by reducing the number of things that a prospect has to think about.

What tends to not get brought up in that process is, “Oh, and by the way, you’re really going to want to make sure that you’ve got these training programs for people. And the way you’ve been managing your marketing team probably isn’t going to be as effective as perhaps shifting to more of an agile marketing methodology.”

That’s the really good advice of how people can get the greatest effectiveness out of these tools. Sadly, I think most martech vendors don’t really have an incentive to tackle that education.

Where do you think content marketing technology fits into most companies’ marketing stacks, and where do you think it fits into the landscape overall?

For most marketers, content marketing is a necessary part of what they’re doing. There is a question of degree. Generally speaking, B2C businesses still have need for content, but it tends to be a different quantity of content or a different depth of content, compared to B2B.

Content marketing really seems to be driving a tremendous amount of the buyer’s journey with B2B. Buyers are really hungry to get that depth of insight and information on how they do their early evaluation of solutions and who they want to do business with. I think it’s a pretty important part of the stack.

Do you think content marketing software will be swallowed up by big players, like Adobe, or will continue to grow as maybe its own niche sector within the martech landscape?

Well, one of the questions is how do you define content marketing software? There are literally hundreds of tools within that space, and they are not all competitive with each other. In a lot of cases, many of them are complementary. There might be a couple big pieces of software in there, but I find for a lot of content marketers, their toolbox includes at least a dozen web services or very small, fast things that they use for different tasks within developing content and getting it distributed.

I’m sure there will be some consolidation of tools, particularly the larger tools, into the major marketing clouds, but I think you’re still going to have a robust landscape of more niche providers that complement those for a very long time.

You run Chief Martec, which has been very successful. It’s a huge resource for a lot of people, yet at the same time, there’s a lot of talk about the death of blogging. So what’s the value of Chief Martec? Why do you still blog?

The number one reason I blog is because I find it helpful for myself. They say if you want to learn something really well, figure out how to teach it to someone else. By studying and trying to write, hopefully, some sort of coherent analysis of it, it helps clarify things for me that I find useful in my work. Even if no one was reading it, it would still have a lot of value.

It’s interesting coming from more of a publishing perspective. I feel like there are these legacy models in the industry where we think of publishers that publish largely news stories, or maybe they do (relatively light) features. They’re in the publish or perish business—cranking out as much of that as possible.

“Sadly, I think most martech vendors don’t really have an incentive to tackle that education.”

On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got these analyst firms, the Gartners, the Forresters, folks like that, who publish much less frequently. Very often they have some sort of paywall, and it is a very expensive paywall. Like if you want to read this research report, please fork over $4,000.

I’d say that there’s actually an opportunity there. There’s a space between those two models that bloggers can jump in the middle of. You can have bloggers who are truly specialists in their fields.

Final questions: What do you think is the future of marketing technology? What do you think the marketer’s job is going to look like five to 10 years down the road?

At the rate at which things are changing, I think it’s hard for me to have clarity of what this is all going to look like in 10 years. But the thing that I find most exciting in the foreseeable future is—and I know this is an overused term, but it’s a powerful movement—this idea of digital business transformation.

Look at companies that are the digital natives—like Amazon, Netflix, and Uber—and the way they operate, the way they’ve grown, the way they manage relationships with their customers. As the world just becomes more and more digital, it is clear that almost every business is going to need to develop some sort of capability along those lines for the way they connect and build relationships with their customers.

I think that’s a tremendous opportunity for people who are in marketing and marketing technology to think beyond the campaign and to think much more holistically about what the future digital business relationship with our audience looks like. How do we create an incredible customer experience in that world? That’s going to be really exciting.

The post The Contently Interview: Scott Brinker on the Pitfalls and Promise of Martech appeared first on Contently.

“We want to sound like Vice.”

As a content strategist at Contently, I hear this type of editorial ambition all the time: Brand X wants to be like Vice, Vox, The New York Times. Brands now understand that the voice and tone of their publications will impact audience development. They know that an influx of branded content across the web means their voice and tone are often the most important competitive differentiators.

Yet one of the biggest challenges companies face is deciding what they want to sound like. How do they know if they should model their voice after Vox or The Economist? Are they more research-focused like The New York Times or listicle-based like BuzzFeed? Even if brands decide on a tone, their publications can still struggle to staff the right creative team to bring this decided voice to life.

To address some of these identity issues, we built a tone analyzer at Contently. Here’s how we began.

The tricky business of tone

If you’ve ever been in an argument, you know that tone can determine the meaning of a person’s words and impact your ability to find a resolution. Tone is what we use to interpret if “I’m fine” actually means someone is upset.

In a single piece of writing, tone can be described as the writer’s attitude or approach to the subject matter. It can express a particular mood, feeling, or character. For an entire publication, tone establishes the ethos of a company and the values of its authors.

Sometimes, it’s easiest to recognize characteristics of tone and style when they’re not quite right. Many brands come to Contently because their previous efforts to sound authoritative and professional come off as condescending or detached. Others want to develop a more approachable personality if they have a reputation for being unrelatable.

When deciding how to move forward with tone, our clients often reference a blue-chip publication they want to emulate, but whose editorial focus has little or nothing to do with what they offer. For instance, a company that sells insurance may want to sound like a notoriously colloquial political mag.

When that dissonance shows up, brand marketers need to be able to give guidance to their creative teams. Especially when working with freelancers who write for a variety of publications, it is crucial to prep creatives on the right tone for their audience. Articulating that they want to be more Vox, less Wall Street Journal is an important distinction—and one that writers will understand.

But the result of these high-level instructions too often leads to a road of strategic dead-ends. Lofty comparisons are full of paradoxical concepts that make it hard to publish. When a consumer packaged goods brand wants to sound like an episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver in its video product launch, or an insurance company wishes to capture the je ne sais quoi of Real Simple, what does this mean for the people creating and measuring the impact of this content?

Time and again, there is a disconnect between creatives who have the right tone but the wrong expertise. (John is a former Vox writer, but he knows nothing about the complexities of insurance.) The reverse can also be the case. (Joanna is an insurance expert, but she writes like a dry academic.)

Our goal on the strategy team is to marry tone and expertise so an insurance company, for example, doesn’t have to choose between risk assessment knowledge and punchy prose.

Enter the tone analyzer.

The tone analyzer test

The Five Factor Model, or the “Big Five,” is a personality classification system that bases its framework on major traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional range (sometimes called “neuroticism”). The model emerged in 1961 and came from psychologists Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal at the Air Force’s Research Division.

Building on the work of earlier psychologists who extracted nearly 18,000 words from the dictionary that related to human personality traits, Tupes and Christal reduced this list and lumped the remaining terms into five key groups based on recurring factors. Today, the Big Five remains a useful set of building blocks in understanding not only who we are but also how we communicate.

At Contently, we’ve taken the principles of the Five Factor Model to construct our own tone analyzer that will make pairing writers and brands more data driven. Because we’re analyzing content, rather than actual people, we’ve given each traditional trait a new, more editorially friendly name.

How does it work? The analyzer scrapes a website for as much text as possible, then assigns this aggregated content with a numeric “score” for each of the Big Five personality traits. The process is the same for analyzing a writer’s body of work. Scores range from zero to one.

By assessing the trait scores, we can detect the character of the publication or writer, and match the two accordingly.

The publication score

As a test, I ran Vice’s three most-shared pieces over the past year (this, this, and this, if you’re curious) to get a sense of the publication’s tone. Based on these articles, Vice scores 0.79 for expressiveness, 0.26 for formality, 0.28 for sociability, 0.15 for empathy, and 0.32 for emotion.

Using the Big Five personality key, here’s what we can deduce from these scores:

• Expressiveness 0.79: A high score for expressiveness suggests Vice’s writing is imaginative and that writers are willing—and allowed—to take risks.
• Formality 0.26: The low formality score lets us know the tone lacks authority. It is extremely laid-back and casual.
• Sociability 0.28: A lower score for sociability reveals Vice is restrained and confident in its approach, as opposed to being highly empathetic or open to new ideas.
• Empathy 0.15: Low empathy signals a significant amount of skepticism and comfort in embracing confrontation.
• Emotion 0.32: The low-to-middle emotion score points to a somewhat relaxed attitude. The site doesn’t rely too much on data.

The writer score

Once we go through this same process for creatives, we can pair writers to a brand publication based on that company’s desired tone. It’s worth noting that the point of the tone analyzer isn’t to just find writers with the same voice. If a brand wants to be more emotional, it might target authors with a higher emotional score than its own.

For the second part of the experiment, we scraped the portfolios of three of our TCS editors to find out who would be the best fit for Vice Magazine—or a brand that wants to mimic its tone.

Senior editor Jordan Teicher and associate editor Dillon Baker both ranked high in expressiveness, meaning, like Vice, their writing is imaginative, capable of explaining abstract concepts, and uses anecdotes to strengthen the narratives. But Jordan’s sociability and empathy marks were too high for Vice. [note]Fun fact: He’s written three stories for Vice[/note] Dillon’s formality, sociability, and emotion scores were significantly different from Vice’s as well.

Meanwhile, marketing editor Erin Nelson ranked low for empathy, meaning she is comfortable writing punchy prose that gets the audience to question the status quo, which lines up well with Vice’s approach. Her expressiveness and sociability splits were also close.

When we look at the differences, we see Erin most closely resembles the Vice voice across the five factors. (The closer to zero, the better the score.) If this were a real Contently staffing situation, and Erin had the most relevant industry experience for the brand, the tonal analyzer would suggest she’s the best person for the job.

Toning up

Ultimately, many factors play into the “talent matching” process at Contently. Finding the perfect team of writers for your content operation depends on the depth and relevance of their experience, location, availability, and more. But when a brand considers how it wants to sound, the tone analyzer can help quantify abstract goals and get team leaders to think about the type of writers who can create content that fulfills those goals.

So if an appliance company wants to sound as relatable as Vice Magazine, it’s our job to make sure the content creators can bring the right edge, even if they’re talking about blenders and washing machines.

The post This Tone Analyzer Could Help You Sound Like Your Favorite Publisher appeared first on Contently.

My customer account for Pizza Hut linked to Messenger in seconds and didn’t require any new payment information. One large pepperoni, please. Same as last time? Yes, please. But instead of dealing with a stranger or another checkout screen, I was typing to a chatbot instead. No small talk. No dropped calls. The bot offered me a few promo items, but otherwise, the whole exchange was quick, easy, and largely indistinguishable from a human interaction. Is this still my address? Yep. The receipt came via email.

The company credited with selling the first item on the internet is now making the e-commerce even easier. Pizza Hut recently announced its new chatbot ordering feature as part of a massive social media rollout that debuted a few months ago. Conversational commerce is hotter than a Samsung battery right now, and the largest pizza chain in the world knows it, following competitors and contemporaries alike into a space still very much evolving.

But what if businesses are approaching chatbots all wrong?

What is the secret sauce?

Magnus Jern, president of mobile solutions company DMI, recently told the BBC that when chatbots try too hard to be natural, it diverts from the purpose of conversational commerce. Jern helped launch IKEA’s Anna chatbot in 2005, which was recently retired after 10 years. “In the beginning, we tried to impersonate a person, and we found that there was no reason to do that,” he said.

But the move is a curious one, especially when chatbots are on the rise. Earlier this year, KPCB’s Mary Meeker referred to them as the “secret sauce” of messaging in her keynote on digital trends.

However, academic research has suggested that consumers don’t want robots that can talk like humans. Some would argue, instead, that all we want is a smoother ordering process. A Harvard Business Review report from 2010 found that “loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be.”

In his book, Influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini, a professor who teaches psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, concluded that we’re more motivated (to act, purchase, click, etc.) when choice is limited.

Also, there’s a difference between talking to a human and a bot that technology may never be able to reconcile. According to a study published by JAMA, conversational agents like Siri or Google Now simply don’t understand the difference between “I’m dying” and “I’m dying of hunger” in a crisis.

In other words, ordering a pizza via chat isn’t so unique anymore, but predicting how that conversation might look in the future is a bit more challenging.

The commerce of chatbots

The term “chatterbox” was coined in 1994, the same year Pizza Hut filled its first online order. Today, the company is the largest pizza chain in the world—with roughly half of its orders coming through digital channels and more than 60 percent of those via mobile devices, per internal data.

“We all have to become students of human behavior,” Baron Concors, Pizza Hut’s global chief digital officer, told a MobileBeat audience in June.

Conversable, the Austin-based company behind Pizza Hut’s chatbot technology, is turning the study of human behavior into a thriving business. The software company is partnering rapidly with major brands like TGI Fridays and Whole Foods, using conversational messaging for self-service and on-demand content.

For some companies, customer service is one long conversation. For others, the conversation ends with a pizza delivery.

The chatbot ecosystem is exploding. Facebook now supports over 11,000 chatbots, plus a dedicated store. Apple recently debuted its own iMessage app store with iOS 10. And messaging apps, well suited for brand chatbots, have never been more popular. WhatsApp, for example, now has over 1 billion users. WeChat and Viber have hundreds of millions.

In June, Tommy Hilfiger announced its own chatbot designed with the help of Facebook’s Creative Shop and bot creator Msg.ai. According to TechCrunch, the social giant caught flack for hosting too many clumsy bots from outside developers. The partnership with Tommy Hilfiger lets the company reclaim some control over its new chatbot platform, while heeding the call for online concierges among high-end fashion brands.

As Tommy Hilfiger himself told TechCrunch, “We are obviously distributed in our own stores and in department stores, but going directly to the consumer is really part of the motive and the future of the omni-channel process.” Gigi, named after supermodel Gigi Hadid, will answer customers in a more natural style since, as CMO Avery Baker argued, no one wants to feel like they’re talking to the corporate animal anyway.

Calls for conversation

For some companies, customer service is one long conversation. For others, the conversation ends with a pizza delivery.

“Even the most digitally tuned-in customer will want to know that they are connected with someone who can put themselves in their shoes,” said Simon Hunt, director of customer experience at Firstsource Solutions, a business-process outsourcing firm based out of India.

In August, the travel app Skyscanner estimated a layover of 413,768 hours to a shocked consumer looking for a cheap flight. When the man posted about the error on Facebook, a Skyscanner rep responded with a clever and lighthearted comment that eventually went viral and generated press coverage. To clarify, the technology screwed up, and then a human came in to clear things up.

“Bots are easy. Conversations are hard.”

Conversocial’s CMO Paul Johns told Digiday that such unscripted rapport is a growing trend. Proving a resolution is great, but opening up a meaningful dialogue may be even better. Per CeBit, 71 percent of people who receive a quick response from a brand on social media are likely to recommend that brand to others. It’s no surprise that chatbots are being considered to automate the job.

But despite these developments, there’s still a weird tension surrounding the conversational commerce movement. People want quick, straightforward service, but they also seem to value human empathy. Is it possible for a chatbot to provide both, even if consumers know they’re talking to an algorithm?

Conversations are hard

Ben Lamm, the CEO and co-founder of Conversable, probably said it best: “Bots are easy. Conversations are hard.”

In the race for creating tech with personality, businesses seem stuck on naming their bots after anything other than a tool. Anna. Gigi. Facebook even has a bartender bot named Shaky.

But chatbots don’t care what we call them, and, let’s face it, expressing our trust in AI impacts my comfort, not their effectiveness. That’s why we’re still anthropomorphizing machines.

“Giving something a human name is a way of exerting control over it,” writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic, “a reminder that it works for you, that it exists within a human construct, even when the machine itself is wholly indifferent.”

It’s hard to pinpoint how much conversation and functionality is necessary, but it’s safe to say that functionality is ultimately what will drive revenue.

Chris Messina, the developer who coined the term “conversational commerce” about two years ago (and also came up with the word “hashtag”), gave a talk at the MobileBeat conference where Pizza Hut made its bot announcement this summer. Messina showed the audience his own bot, an integrated messaging platform, and went over the evolution of the bot movement.

Toward the end of his presentation, Messina went over a few rules for both ethics. “A bot should be able to describe itself,” he said. “What it does, how it handles information, if there’s a human on the other end monitoring stuff. Bots should have a similar type of disclosure statement.”

That’s all well and good, but for the most part, the only rule I care about is if the bot can get my order right the next time I want a pizza.

The post Why We May Be Thinking About Chatbots All Wrong appeared first on Contently.

The scene has changed dramatically since then. In the last year alone, the number of marketing technology companies has grown 94 percent, to 3,874 vendors and counting. That’s a 2,482 percent increase since 2011.

Understanding marketing technologies—and how they work together in a stack—has become a critical part of any marketer’s job. There are even competitions, like The Stackies, that judge the best ones. But as the exponential increase in technologies suggests, building a marketing stack is more complicated than ever.

At Contently, people regularly ask us questions like: How do you build your stack? How does your content translate into actual business? So, in an effort to share our knowledge with the rest of the industry, we’re going to reveal how our martech stack works. But before we begin, let’s go over why marketing stacks are so damn important.

What is a marketing stack and why should I care?

A marketing stack can be intimidating, but it’s really a simple concept at its core. Basically, it includes the different technologies you use during your marketing process, from the first time a prospect encounters your brand to that final sale.

Creating, managing, and improving a stack is critical to marketing success. Without a stack, you might as well use a tally system and just guess how effective your content is. Without an efficient, integrated, and optimized one, you’re just wasting your money.

So how do you build a stack?

1. You first have to understand your goals. Buying tools won’t help if you don’t have a strategy in place.

2. You need to consider the framework of your entire marketing ecosystem, as well as the individual tools that will power it. Then you need to figure out how these tools will work together.

3. You need to ensure that each marketing solution tracks results. If there is no way to prove the ROI of your efforts, there is no way to justify them. (Your boss won’t be happy if you can’t back up the purpose of that software that costs $4,000 per month.)

Marketing stacks can look very different depending on a company’s priorities. Scott Brinker, editor of ChiefMartec, simplifies marketing stacks into four categories: suite, platform, multi-platform, and bus.

According to Brinker, most martech companies began as a suite: a single solution provided by one vendor. This suite model eventually gave way to the platform, as leading vendors developed software that also allow for additional plug-ins. Think of it like a web browser that you can trick out with various technologies—with companies like Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, Act-On, and HubSpot stabilizing your add-ons.

However, these platforms typically weren’t enough on their own, particularly for larger enterprise companies. As a result, two additional models emerged.

One is the multi-platform model, in which several big martech platforms interact. For example, a company might rely on Salesforce for managing the sales process, HubSpot for inbounding, Adobe for content, and so on. These large platforms vary wildly in their ability to communicate with each other.

The other model is the bus, which emerged partly as a response to the multi-platform model. The bus unites many tools—but in this case, one technology connects the data between all platforms. Brinker refers to this guiding technology as a “marketing middleware” that “specialize[s] the flow of data across platforms.” It’s a lot like an operating system for your various marketing programs.

Brinker’s topologies are a helpful way to conceptualize how brands can bucket their marketing technologies. Whether or not you fit into one of these four frameworks, the important takeaway is that a brand’s stack will ultimately depend on specific company goals.

The buyer’s journey

Every person has a unique experience with a brand. The process (to use an established metaphor) resembles dating: Even if you date the same person that your best friend swiped right on last month, your experience will be different.

Some leads have that instantaneous connection with a brand. Others take more time to nurture. Some play hard to get, only to find what they wanted was in front of them all along. In each case, the technology in a stack tracks the user’s behavior and manages the brand’s response to this behavior.

Let’s examine the journey of one hypothetical lead through Contently’s stack.

Drake becomes a Contently lead

Drake, the CMO of a Fortune 500 enterprise company, wants to launch a content marketing initiative. He starts this process on Google, searching “how to build a content team.” He clicks on one of the top three articles: “How to Build a Culture of Content and Transform Your Marketing.”

A few days go by, and Drake is served a retargeted sponsored ad on Facebook. He clicks on the new article, “Why Cisco Is Hiring 200 Content Marketers.” Drake is so delighted with the article that he shares it on Twitter and decides to follow Contently.

While on Twitter, another article takes Drake back to The Content Strategist. He decides it’s time to sign up for Contently’s weekly newsletter. Later that week, Drake receives an email from Jess at Contently with the subject line “How to Staff an Amazing Content Team.” He clicks through and fills out a form to download the e-book.

Ten days later, the newest edition of Contently’s print magazine, Contently Quarterly: The Summer 2016 Issue, arrives at his office door. He reads an interview with Glenn Greenwald and continues on to a story about how Marriott is growing its multimedia studio. A week later, the Quarterly is still on Drake’s desk when he gets an email from Luke, who works on the sales team.

Over the course of the sales cycle, Drake will receive Contently content to stay top of mind and accelerate the sale. Drake’s trajectory at this point depends on his budget, authority, and the needs of his organization. He may, for example, access one of our recent webinars through On24 (a software platform) that’s relevant to his pain points.

If Drake’s budget gets cut or his board decides to revert to traditional marketing tactics, Drake will be added to a “win-back” campaign through Marketo, where he is served valuable content to keep Contently fresh in his mind. For the purposes of this story, let’s say Luke successfully closed the deal and earned a hefty commission.

What martech systems were at play?

From that first search to that final phone call, there were many marketing technologies at play. Here is breakdown of how our software tools impacted Drake’s journey and prompted action.

Contently: The blog post Drake first found was produced on Contently’s content marketing platform. After responding to a pitch from a freelancer on our talent network, our editorial team assigned, created, and edited the story using the Contently workflow system. Prior to the publication of this article, we used Contently Analytics to determine the right topic, format, and tone for prospects looking to build their content team. We also have custom fields for keywords, images, tags, and meta descriptions that help boost SEO once an article goes to the next step.

WordPress: Once the story was complete, our senior editor pushed the story directly to Contently Live, our custom CMS. Contently Live is a WordPress template that’s integrated with Contently’s platform and helps increase lead generation.We ideate, produce, and optimize editorial content on the Contently platform, but everything we publish is hosted on Contently Live.

Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, Screaming Frog: Since Drake came from an organic search, Google AdWords wasn’t involved in this case. Instead, prior to Drake’s search, we used several SEO tools to help us rank organically.

AdRoll: We were able to reach Drake on Facebook with retargeted ads served from AdRoll.

Buffer: On Twitter, we tapped into Buffer analytics to ensure Drake saw organic Twitter posts at the most likely point of engagement.

SumoMe: Back on The Content Strategist, Drake was prompted to sign up for the weekly newsletter with a pop-up inspiring him to subscribe.

Campaign Monitor: The newsletter was compiled and sent through our email service provider (ESP), Campaign Monitor, which integrates with Marketo and Salesforce, and allows us to segment audiences by location, industry, department, and title.

Marketo: Drake officially entered the Marketo lead database after he filled out the lead form to download the e-book. Here, our marketing team tracked all of his interactions with Contently content.

Document Analytics: Once Drake began reading the document, we tracked his engagement on every page, using the Document Analytics feature on our platform. Once we saw where Drake spent most of his time scrolling and clicking, we could share more relevant content and prepare the sales team with insights on his behavior for a future call.

SalesPredict, Clearbit: After Drake was in Marketo, he went through a series of tools that helped us determine how qualified he was as a lead. SalesPredict looked at Drake’s demographics and prior behavior with Contently, and assigned him a lead score. Clearbit, which appends additional data points like company name, location, job title, and other public information, gave further context to Drake’s value.

Print for Less (PFL): We used this direct-mail service to send Drake The Contently Quarterly.

Salesforce: We pushed Drake into Salesforce, where he was assigned to Luke. In Salesforce, Luke could track each interaction with Drake.

On24: During Luke’s nurturing process, we used On24 to serve Drake relevant webinars.

Here is a helpful diagram that illustrates how different tools helped move Drake down the funnel:

How did they work together?

If we follow Brinker’s topography, Drake made his way through our multi-platform stack. At Contently, four marketing technologies guide our stack: Contently, WordPress, Marketo, and Salesforce. From there, a variety of SaaS services work with one or more of these central technologies.

As the source of our content production and analytics, Contently is the focal point between these main players—pushing content (WordPress), servicing marketing initiatives (Marketo), and empowering sales communication (Salesforce). The key is the different elements of our tech stacks are never isolated during a lead’s journey.

Tracking everything this way ensures we connect content to ROI. Without an integrated system to record the interaction between Contently and Drake, it would have been impossible to attribute a particular piece of content to the eventual sale.

As content marketers for a content marketing platform, it is critical we understand the value of each piece of content as it relates to a sale. Our stack makes that possible. In fact, it generates 10x ROI, based on findings from our marketing, editorial, and sales teams. (There is no better feeling than when a sales director tells you that your creative project was worth over $100,000 in ROI).

It’s important to note that while these are the hypothetical tools used in Drake’s journey, this is not an exhaustive list of our marketing technology. It is also not a fixed stack. As our needs develop, so will our stack.

(Editor’s note: Our senior marketing operations manager would like me to make clear that this post is not an open invitation for vendor solicitation.)

Started from the bottom

Whether you follow the suite, platform, multi-platform, or bus stack model, a seamless relationship between technology and content is often the difference between complete confusion and meaningful ROI.

While the explosion of marketing technology might make it harder to determine which solutions to invest in—there are thousands, after all—it also means technology exists to solve almost any problem you can think of.

In the words of Drake: What a time to be alive.

The post How We Built Our Content Marketing Stack to Drive 10x ROI appeared first on Contently.

It’s hard to fault these reasons because there are an insane number of tools out there:

Insane graphic via MarketingLand

But the options are overwhelming for a reason. Each marketing technology platform—or martech, because why not—has a different strength for a different type of business. And it’s to every marker’s benefit to know how to use… well, maybe not all of them, but at least the ones in their vertical.

Here are some of the best martech platforms available in key categories, broken down for small, mid-market, and enterprise businesses.

Small Business

Content Management System (CMS)

WordPress

Yes, it’s what your niece uses for her blog. But WordPress isn’t just about blogging anymore. With a range of options from hosted to self-hosting to tons of unique plug-ins, you can tailor WordPress to your needs—including your budget—with ease.

And when we say “with ease,” we mean without the help of anyone who has a Ph.D. in HTML. And if you get tripped up, you can always call your niece.

Analytics

Google Analytics

Google rules the world for a reason. It knows everything that happens on the Internet. (Or close to it, anyway.) That’s why Google Analytics is such a powerful analytics tool, even though you don’t have to pay for it.

While other paid options offer more in-depth profiling, Google’s analytics product is so robust for small businesses that it inspires quotations like this from Christopher Penn of email marketing company Blue Sky Factory: “If someone tells you that Google Analytics isn’t enough for a small business, then frankly they have no idea how to use it properly.”

Email Service Provider (ESP)

MailChimp

In a side-by-side comparison of ESP features, MailChimp’s biggest advantage jumps right off the page: $0. For small businesses with fewer than 2,000 subscribers, that’s hard to beat.

However, should your company need to send more than 12,000 emails per month, increase its subscribers, or add more features like advanced merge fields and segmentation, the price climbs a bit.

Constant Contact

Right up there with MailChimp in terms of usability, Constant Contact may not be free, but it has affordable plans based on low subscriber numbers. Plus, all plans include an unlimited number of emails.

Though PC Magazine experienced some glitches when testing the product, small businesses can get a lot of great features on a budget out of Constant Contact.

Mid-Market

CMS

Sitefinity

According to CMS Critic, Sitefinity was “the first and only CMS” offering the three mobile development strategies of responsive web design, mobile websites, and mobile apps.

It’s also less technical than other CMS platforms aimed at larger companies, so you don’t have to be a developer or have one on hand to use it. CMS Critic also gives the technology props for its capabilities in e-commerce, multi-site management, and content personalization.

Drupal

If your cybersecurity concerns outweigh your need for simplicity (and, honestly, they probably should these days) Drupal offers plenty of flexibility with more peace of mind.

The platform has flexible hosting options and plug-ins, and while it requires more developer savvy to use, “Drupal leads the way when it comes to CMS security,” according to Entrepreneurship Life.

ESP

Campaigner

For more robust ESP needs than the low-cost options, Campaigner offers some more advanced features like multiple user capabilities and automatic segmenting that give you sophistication. It also offers the unique benefit of 24/7 phone support and was named PC Magazine‘s Editors’ Choice for advanced email marketing tools (although it’s worth noting that J2 Global, the company that owns Campaigner, also owns PC Magazine.)

Marketing Automation

Marketo

For mid-sized businesses with martech needs beyond a traditional ESP, a marketing automation platform can provide an all-in-one solution. Marketo, for example, offers ESP, social campaign products, analytics, native CRM integration, and business intelligence capabilities.

It’s one of the most comprehensive platforms of its kind, including just about every feature mid-market businesses will need.

HubSpot

In a side-by-side comparison, HubSpot and Marketo have a lot in common. The slight differences are that with HubSpot has more affordable entry-level plans, while Marketo ranks slightly higher on a number of quality criteria like campaign design and editing.

Marketo may have a few more bells and whistles, and be a more powerful platform, but HubSpot is still well received. Overall, it may be a friendlier option for growing, budget-conscious, mid-sized businesses.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Salesforce

Both HubSpot and Marketo integrate with Salesforce for customer relationship management. Universally acknowledged as the largest and most well-known CRM software, Salesforce offers ease of use, flexibility in the form of a widely customizable dashboard, and lots of functions, like lead gen tracking and sales forecasts, that track and analyze customer interactions. It also has a strong reputation for keeping all that customer data safe from security breaches.

Enterprise

CMS

Adobe AEM (aka Adobe CQ)

There’s no getting around the fact that Adobe’s CMS option is expensive—nearly every reviewer mentions the price, which frequently winds up in the millions. But for enterprises with deep pockets, the functionality can make Adobe CQ an essential tool for marketers.

In a Forrester analysis, Adobe’s software rated high for cloud deployment, native mobile app support, portfolio integration with marketing and commerce, testing, runtime architecture, and ecosystem support. As the report stated: “Adobe has built the best portfolio for companies with the greatest marketing need.”

Analytics

Google Analytics Premium

The standard Google Analytics could be enough for small to mid-sized businesses, but enterprise level organizations have entirely different analytics needs.

Google Analytics Premium offers more detailed data on customer segmentation and shopping behavior; it’s also integrated with both Google products and data from non-Google sources. Additionally, it promises hand-on support in the form of a dedicated account manager and ongoing training.

IBM Digital Analytics

Not all web analytics have to come from Google. IBM Digital Analytics (formerly IBM Coremetrics) offers comparative insights and benchmarks against industry leaders as well as a custom dashboard and actionable data.

The optional add-on IBM Digital Analytics Multisite fits into IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management software.

Oracle Business Intelligence

Oracle offers a broad range of analytics features, including ad-hoc analysis, automatic scheduled reporting, profit analysis, and predictive analysis. Software analysis firm ITQlick calls it “the BI and analytics to beat.”

Predictive Analytics

Lattice Engines

Predictive analytics take data a step further—and into the future. Lattice Engines uses algorithms to recommend enterprise companies feature selection, data normalization, and predictive modeling. These powerful tools allow marketers to anticipate how consumers will behave, including what they’re likely to buy and when.

Marketing Automation

Oracle Eloqua

One of the top marketing automation platforms for enterprise businesses, Oracle offers detailed lead management capabilities, including two-dimensional lead scoring model, and has a relatively easy learning curve compared to platforms in its class.

Adobe Campaign

While’s Adobe Campaign’s learning curve doesn’t rate as highly as Eloqua’s, it does come with a wide range of features including the ability to integrate with most major CRM platforms. It also has the advantages of integrating with Adobe’s many other marketing solutions for enterprises already leveraging the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

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