Marketing Communications Today is a collection of resources for marketing communications
professionals filled with industry research, marketing trends, and career
information about integrated marketing and data-driven communications.
Learn industry insights through the Marketing Communications Today blog,
podcast, as well as Integrate Online.
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.
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:
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!
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.