AMA Marketing Week in Review

Highlights from 2019 AMA Marketing Week

This was a week to celebrate you, the marketer. We at the American Marketing Association recognize the power of marketing to drive top-line growth and overall health of a business. So why not give you some credit for all that you do?

Through exclusive Marketing News magazine content to winning virtual presentations this week, we sought to help you improve your skills and advance your careers. Here are some of the highlights from 2019 AMA Marketing Week, Sept. 30–Oct. 4.

(Note: All virtual conference sessions will be available on demand to logged-in users at the AMA Digital Marketing Virtual Conference microsite for six months.)

ESOMAR Country Market Research 2019 Report

AMA members get exclusive, free access to this report from ESOMAR, the global association for the data and insights industry. In part, the report analyzes the resilience and dynamism of the U.S. market, which shows healthy, positive growth, especially when compared to a Canadian market that struggles to adapt to a changing industry.

6 Steps to Making Marketing Personalization a Reality

According to Acquia’s Katie Staveley and Dave Bor, 92% of digital businesses are interested in personalization because it creates a more engaging experience and more effective marketing efforts. However, doing it right requires time, resources, content and technology. Organizations must start slowly with what they can immediately implement from a content and data standpoint, move to a more concentrated effort in data collection and personalization efforts, and finally dedicate more time and offer even more personalized defined segments allowing for maximum impact with customers.

Personalization relies on critical information about customers. In order to collect such information, companies need to develop a strategy for data collection that demonstrates ROI to leadership teams. An organization’s data collection plan should include as much information as possible that can be used to segment an audience as well as information that is unique to an organization’s goal and audience in order to successfully personalize content. To have the most effective personalization strategy organizations must have the four R’s: the right strategy, design, delivery and return.

4 Under 40: The Dynamic Future of Marketing

This year’s batch of 4 Under 40 Emerging Leaders suggests a boundaries-defying future for marketing. The most striking characteristic of the group is perhaps how each individual represents four very different aspects of marketing. As the industry becomes more dynamic, so do its practitioners.

The 2019 AMA Foundation 4 Under 40 group consists of a teacher, an optimist, a revisionist and a connector. They’re each highly accomplished in their own right and are redefining what success in marketing means.

Talk Triggers: The Only Marketing That Matters is Customer Conversations

In this AMA Digital Marketing Virtual Conference presentation by Jay Baer, the consultant and best-selling author discussed the ways in which your customers are your best sales and marketing team. The “talk trigger” at hand is an unconventional operational choice that creates word-of-mouth marketing wins, in which people don’t talk about “good,” they talk about “different.” In presenting your customers a story to tell, they will take the opportunity to do so both online and offline. The best talk triggers are experiences, establishing unique perspectives and being ahead of the game in terms of customer assistance.

Changing Jobs in Marketing Space

The skills marketers have acquired don’t simply translate into jobs with the word “marketing” in the title. The worlds of public relations, advertising, social media and more can immediately benefit from a marketer’s insight. And in some cases, it pays to explore alternative ways to utilize marketing training in your career.

This report from Burning Glass Technologies gives marketers a satellite’s-eye view of the alternative jobs to which they can best transition their skills.

The Digital Consumer: How Today’s Buyer Has Changed and What Your Business Must Do About It

In this presentation by Mark Sheridan, he describes how today’s buyer cares about cost, potential problems, comparisons and reviews. Organizations must create a culture of listeners and teachers who focus on addressing what customers want. There are five keys to successfully create a culture of trust through intrinsic teaching:

• Obtain buy-in from top to bottom
• Execute an initial workshop, then produce long-term training and awareness
• Have a content manager and videographer onsite
• Have marketing and sales present
• Use the correct tools and applicable metrics

The Attention Economy – Getting Engagement Online and Why It Matters

We are amid a communication revolution, says Grant Leboff, CEO of Sticky Marketing Club. For the first time in history, everyone has a channel where they can create and push out content. Because of the commercialization of the internet, the expanse of the World Wide Web, social networks and smartphones, consumers and conglomerates are pushing out more content than ever. The sheer volume of content production is requiring digital to be embraced as a separate media organization run through an organization’s digital channels. Attention is the most valuable commodity in today’s world, thus an organization needs to ensure that the content being pushed out provides the highest value, tells a customer-centric story and builds community among customers.

Unlock Your Personalization Potential with Content

Today’s consumers hold immense power and maintain unprecedented access to brands. They want to be assured that the companies with which they engage treat them properly and appreciate their business. In this presentation by Matt Krebsbach and Tim Pashuysen of Sitecore, the speakers outlined a surefire framework of personalization to better reach any customer:

1. Your channels are where content is consumed, not where it’s built. You must manage content in front of your channels.
2. Define the process of content creation: Plan>collaborate>manage>publish. Set simple milestones with clarity.
3. Integrate into the enterprise landscape: Aggregate>plan>collaborate>manage>publish.
4. Modularize the content: Build variations upon it so that it’s applicable to many different personas.
5. Define content ownership and governance: Who should be the owner of the content? Define collaborators and stakeholders should have sway, but who needs to steer the ship?

Research Insights: Special ‘Value of Marketing’ Edition

Highlights from the AMA journals analyzing the indelible value of marketing to organizations—and what the findings mean for practitioners.

The Modern Marketing Mandate: The Expanding Role of the Chief Marketing Officer

Carolyn Baird, global research leader at IBM Institute for Business Value, led attendees through the archetypes of a CMO: reinventors, practitioners and aspirationals. The CMO is an essential member of the C-suite, and one that must be able to prove ROI for all marketing activities. They are core to any existing digital reinvention solution—organizations should develop proactive strategies for CMOs that outline how you will attack data threats and make a difference around customer experience. Doing so will unlock the potential for employees to make sound choices based on customer-centricity and will empower them to further digital transformation.

Why Savvy Businesses Should Lead with a Digital Experience Platform

The number of channels customers can use to interact with your organization has exploded. To compensate, businesses must take a new approach to creating and managing digital experiences. The Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an integrated array of technologies that allows you to do just that. Its agility and flexibility enables users to adopt new, emerging technologies and deliver on tomorrow’s customer expectations. According to presenter Gregg Shupe of Progress Software, the DXP should be the foundation of your digital transformation strategy.

How to Tune-Up Your B2B Digital Marketing Engine

Attendees joined speaker Paulo Martins of Adobe to learn how to get the most out of their digital budgets and maximize ROI. Delivering better results with less digital budget is a challenge faced by most B2B marketers. In running campaigns on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other digital channels, marketers stand to miss valuable opportunities to use digital across the entire funnel. Using intent data to find the right accounts at the right moment is crucial—increasing video engagement, supporting ABM efforts using digital marketing and bridging the gap between online and offline can prove the impact of campaigns.