Marketing Communications Today Blog

Seth Marrs, the Forrester analyst who follows sales technology, painted an exhilarating picture of the future of SalesTech, saying it will combine with MarTech into an entirely new way of going to market — along with a new organizational function called Revenue Teams. Primarily focused on the B2B ecosystem, but with consumer applications — especially for call centers — this developing technology is enabling an end-to-end customer experience driven by conversational intelligence, NLP (natural language processing), AI, and real-time data capture and analysis. In fact, Seth believes the future will be about opportunities and not leads, and this tech gives us a brand new container for our engagement experience, resulting in more powerful roles for marketing, higher revenues, and customer satisfaction overall. Sounds great. Give a listen!

Cyndi Greenglass: What is sales tech?

Seth Marrs: Sales tech is everywhere now, and I think that's largely due to the deficiencies that have come up in CRM and companies coming up with unique ways to add value to a seller. Sales tech is really about helping the seller improve efficiency, helping the seller with insights that are valuable and helping them close deals and prospects. If you think about a seller’s job, the things that add value or add insights have traditionally been very hard to understand because the value of a seller is in their interaction between the buyer and them. That's traditionally been off limits for the most part. Those conversations happen, and it was whatever the seller said happened is what happened. But with tools like Gong and Chorus and some of these other conversation intelligence tools, and with the pandemic and everyone working from home, that sped up a new form of technology and sales tech, which is capturing those interactions and using natural language processing to understand what those interactions mean. And then taking that and translating that back to the seller and actually giving them insights that maybe they didn't know.

Join Bill Nevin, M.S. IMC, as he discusses the IMC 610 Introduction to IMC class, his time in the program, as well as his tips for time management. Bill is the Associate Vice President of Communications for the West Virginia University Foundation, an adjunct instructor in the M.S. IMC program, and an instructor for the Higher Education Marketing Industry Focused Cohort.

Interested in growing your career with a master's degree in Data, Digital or Integrated Marketing Communications? Request more information today!

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Recorded live from the Innovation Center at WVU Reed College of Media, Ruth Stevens and Cyndi Greenglass look at the fascinating marketing trends shared on their podcast over the first half of 2022. Included in the discussion are insights on the complex evolution of the customer experience (CX), the emerging power of Gen X as an audience, the importance of your digital first impression, the future of events, humanizing measurement, and connected TV (CTV). Don’t miss this opportunity to catch the highlights of the first half of 2022 and the marketing waves Cyndi and Ruth are riding over the horizon.

The landscape of higher education has experienced major changes, but it is set to undergo a sweeping transformation in the years ahead. We need to prepare for that with three main focuses:

Ideas for virtual events:

As marketers, we spend a lot of time talking about Millennials. We target them as consumers, employees, and donors, to the point of obsession, as the next cohort after the Boomers. But wait! We are overlooking Generation X, not surprisingly called the “Forgotten Generation.” This is the 65 million people in their 40s and 50s sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials. They represent a $2.4 trillion market. Ignoring them could prove a costly mistake for both businesses and nonprofits.

In this episode, we speak with Alicia Lifrak, who is a Gen X member herself, and has spent the past 25 years leading strategy in the nonprofit and higher education worlds. She explains why marketers ignore Gen X at our own peril, and what we should be doing about it.

Pop Quiz: Can you name at least 3 Gen X leaders of major transformational companies today? Listen to this episode for the answer.

Congratulations to the Class of 2022, you did it! All the sacrifices and tough times lead to this moment. The moment you celebrate all you have accomplished and the family and friends who supported you through this journey. We unite to celebrate you.

Meet our Class of 2022:

May you never forget the feeling of singing Country Roads with their fellow grads – all of them forever Mountaineers. Congratulations to the WVU Data, Digital and IMC Class of 2022! We are so proud of you.

Marketing is no longer about simply bringing in new customers. Marketers are also responsible for managing customers to profitability. Our guest Steve Gershik explains why customer management is the new horizon, and how we all need to develop the tools and skills to understand our customers deeply. We must become digital anthropologists, examining customer behaviors and signals to infer the steps needed to serve customers and expand their value. Join us for a lively conversation, beginning with Steve’s notion of the “funnel beyond the funnel” and the surprising origins of the AIDA concept.

Cyndi Greenglass: What do you mean by “the funnel beyond the funnel,” and why should we care as marketers.

Steve Gershik: In my opinion, the funnel is the most effective advertising slogan ever for marketers. It was created 125 years ago by an advertiser named Elias St Elmo Lewis. He was a marketer who had founded an agency, and like any good guru, he didn't wait to develop his ideas—he just stuck it out there. He started out with this idea of defining the stages of marketing as to catch the eye of a reader, to inform him, to make a customer of him. It took him 10 years to develop that A-I-D-A slogan. He said the advertising is creating desire in the minds of careful folks and, and the salesforce is going to be organized and educated to cash in on that desire. Once you've put somebody through A-I-D-A –attention, interest, desire and action—it actually took them another 10 years to add the action part at the end. That idea held true for a long time—for as long as the salesforce had the power. They controlled information about the product. They controlled knowledge about pricing, and the customers had to go through a salesperson. They have a lot more control over what we all now call this customer journey. But a funny thing happened, and the commercial web came along, and then what was called web 2.0. It was not only about companies communicating out to customers anymore, the customers could talk to each other. People can exchange information about products and services without the need for a salesperson intermediary. That corresponded with this rise in this new business model in B2B were products that had been sold with a one-time charge and a small maintenance and support charge as an annuity. Now there was this recurring revenue model where we had to earn the right to continue to call the customer a customer. This recurring model now places a tremendous emphasis on customer happiness and customer satisfaction. That really gave birth to this idea of the funnel beyond the funnel. Companies are paying attention to post acquisition customer marketing, but still it's not being budgeted for strategically.

At the conclusion of each semester, the WVU Marketing Communications Online Programs are excited to celebrate our graduates. Meet some of the members of the class of Spring 2022 who have successfully completed their studies!

M.S. Integrated Marketing Communications
Digital Marketing Manager at Vision Technologies
Annapolis, MD

What advice do you have to those considering the programs?

Marketers are under mounting pressure to demonstrate results. In this episode, the renowned measurement master Katie Delahaye Paine shares her latest tips on how to successfully overcome the challenge while preparing for the new developments ahead. Join us to learn two key reasons this issue persists, why you need to set the right objectives, and how silos and fiefdoms can doom your efforts. Innovative AI-driven tools are on the way, but we must apply them with care.

Cyndi Greenglass: Are all marketing measurements up for the challenge?

The landscape of higher education has experienced major changes, but it is set to undergo a sweeping transformation in the years ahead. A smaller Gen. Z cohort, combined with increased talent demands in the industry bring both threats and opportunities for academic instruction. Who will survive, and how will they thrive? In this week’s episode, we tackle two compelling opportunities: how marketing professionals should evaluate the role of higher education in their career ladder, and how schools should borrow from the B2B playbook to competitively market themselves for the future. Take a listen with our esteemed guest, Chad Mezera, Assistant Dean of Online Programs for the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. Chad literally “wrote the playbook” on online education, and has turned WVU’s higher education programs into award-winning, innovative online degrees.

Ruth Stevens: What do you think marketing education is going to look like tomorrow?

Chad Mezera: I think the opportunity here is really understanding your audience and what they need. One of the things that has differentiated our approach is that we've been able to maintain high practitioner focus. With all of our programs, both at the graduate undergraduate level, but particularly at the graduate level, there's a dedication to keeping pace with what's happening in the industry. In the last 15 years, the industry has changed dramatically and education, at its core, needs to keep up with where the market is and with where employers are. Early on in in my higher education career, I had a disagreement with a mentor of mine about how education should be approached and what the value proposition is for the students. He was vehement that we don't do training in higher education and that we focus on global thinking and the critical thinking and let the employers do the training. And, maybe 20 years ago, that was a much more relevant approach, but I think now there's a shift and education has to serve a need that isn't just about how people think and their ability to do critical thinking, but also how they're able to do that work within a particular career. From the perspective of where marketing education is going, I see a lot of successful programs that are trying to find the right balance between the higher education philosophy and the needs of today's employers.

In this episode, Brian Hunt explains, in the clearest possible terms, the total scoop on CTV for marketers. We learned its benefits and drawbacks, the differences between CTV, OTT and linear television, and why CTV is an essential medium for us to be experimenting with today. Career hint: Data science majors can write their own tickets in this field! Join us for the details of how television is becoming more digital, targetable and measurable as a marketing communications channel.

Cyndi Greenglass: How does connected TV (ctv) work?

Brian Hunt: Connected TV is a television connected to the internet. It works with a streaming enabled device like a game console, Roku, Apple TV or even a smart TV itself. Then, there is the content. There are three very distinct pieces of content. The first are subscription services, these are services such as Sling where it mimics your traditional cable service. The second category are apps, for example most networks or brands have an app, like CNN, and they either put free content on there or you can subscribe. The last group that's very specific and new are free ad supported apps that are owned by big media companies such as Pluto, that's owned by Viacom CBS there Izumo that's owned by Comcast. It has digital like qualities to it. In a Connected TV environment, we are able to target specific segments. Our particular platform has 30,000 different segments. The reason why CTV is growing is 65% of Gen Z or Millennials have at least one OTT subscription.