However, you don’t need to head to the box office to see exciting updates like these. They are happening every day in modern marketing departments.

Marketing technology seems to be moving at lightspeed, creating new roles, new responsibilities, and new capabilities for the marketing departments bold enough to implement them. Just like the characters in Star Trek, today’s marketers [...]]]> This past weekend, the newest installment of the Star Trek franchise warped its way to over $70 million at the box office, once again showing the appeal of new characters, new technology, and new stories applied to an old paradigm.

However, you don’t need to head to the box office to see exciting updates like these. They are happening every day in modern marketing departments.

Marketing technology seems to be moving at lightspeed, creating new roles, new responsibilities, and new capabilities for the marketing departments bold enough to implement them. Just like the characters in Star Trek, today’s marketers have an almost science fiction-like amount of technology at their fingertips. From the real-time customer communication of social media to the round-the-clock efficiency of marketing automation, marketing has entered an exciting new generation.

Let’s take a closer look at these changes in the paragraphs below and in our newest slideshare presentation, “Modern Marketing: A Bold New Frontier.”

New Worlds to Explore

Unlike most departments, marketers have the unique opportunity to discover entirely new areas of their discipline as technology evolves. In the past few years alone, marketing has expanded to include social media, big data, mobile marketing, and content marketing, all of which were new and relatively unexplored. Marketers have had the opportunity to explore these new territories together, learning the language of each, and discovering their advantages and disadvantages.

New Team Members

As these new worlds are discovered, they create a need for new team members (or new responsibilities for the existing ones) to manage them. Marketing departments have seen an influx of exciting new talents. From the creative types driving compelling and engaging content, to the number-crunching data experts sifting through endless databases of customer information, marketing is growing into a well-rounded and diverse discipline.

New Tools

As new resources and talents are discovered, marketers are wasting no time in crafting them into a new set of marketing tools.The rise of big data has led to the rise of robust analytics solutions like marketing automation. These solutions provide a complete view of how your campaigns are performing across multiple channels, how efficient your sales funnel is at moving leads to close, and even how your prospects are interacting with your marketing campaigns. In addition, automation does much of the major marketing legwork, automating repetitive tasks like lead qualification and lead nurturing.

Check out the presentation below for even more information on how marketing is moving into a new and exciting generation.

Email deliverability may not be as fun to talk about as creative marketing strategies like social media and video marketing, but email is the heart of your online marketing efforts and the “Report as Spam” button is an ever-present threat. Even without intentionally spamming recipients, you could be making small [...]]]> The modern-day marketer has more tasks to juggle than ever before — not to mention the fifty billion best practices to keep in mind while performing each of these tasks. But if there’s one thing that today’s marketers cannot afford to lose sight of amidst the mayhem, it’s email deliverability rates.

Email deliverability may not be as fun to talk about as creative marketing strategies like social media and video marketing, but email is the heart of your online marketing efforts and the “Report as Spam” button is an ever-present threat. Even without intentionally spamming recipients, you could be making small mistakes that can hurt your deliverability rates and your email marketing reputation. So, before you send your next email, check out the “7 Deadly Sins of Email Deliverability” checklist below, and make sure you’re not doing anything that could potentially harm your reputation.

Also download our free Email Deliverability Handbook for more help with everything from warming up your IP address to keeping spam complaints under .01% — and more!

But with limited time and resources at your disposal, planning your first webinar series can seem quite daunting. With speakers to line up, topics to brainstorm, registrations to plan, and webinar promotions to handle, where do you even begin?

Luckily, when it comes to brainstorming topics, we’ve got your back. If [...]]]> Webinars are one of our favorite content marketing tactics at Pardot, and for good reason. For businesses looking to expand thought leadership within their industry, webinars are a cost-effective method to reach both prospects and clients. Plus, you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your chair!

But with limited time and resources at your disposal, planning your first webinar series can seem quite daunting. With speakers to line up, topics to brainstorm, registrations to plan, and webinar promotions to handle, where do you even begin?

Luckily, when it comes to brainstorming topics, we’ve got your back. If you’re trying to think of some ideas for your first webinar series (or maybe you’ve done webinars before, but are looking for a fresh new topic to cover), check out the list of ideas below. Don’t forget to consult our Webinar Handbook for some additional insight into the full planning and promotion process!

1. Host a case study webinar series. Talk to some of your clients to see if they would be interested in sharing their stories in a brief webinar series. Your webinar attendees will be interested in hearing how other clients are using your product or service, as well as any tips or advice that they have to offer.

2. Conduct a short-but-sweet “how-to” series. People are always interested in hearing tips on how they can do things better. Focus on covering a different topic with each webinar, such as “How to Build a Landing Page That Converts” followed by “How to Qualify a Lead in 60 Seconds” a few weeks later.

3. Invite partners, clients, or other influential members of your industry to host a webinar with you. Let them speak to issues that your audience will find interesting and relevant. Bringing in a third party to help with your webinar efforts can also bring in new listeners who might never have heard of your product or service…until now.

4. Host a weekly or monthly Q&A session with your users. Have them send in questions beforehand that you can answer on air, and leave a little bit of time at the end for additional questions. Spending this extra time with your user base will show them that you’re willing to invest in their success.

5. Host online trainings. Your users will also find a lot of value in a webinar series that focuses specifically on training. Schedule recurring monthly trainings that focus on different topics relevant to your product, and be sure to leave extra time for questions at the end.

6. Conduct webinars leading up to an event. If you’ll be attending or sponsoring an important industry event or trade show, host a webinar series focused on related topics to generate hype leading up to the event. Consider giving away prizes to users who attend 75% of the webinars in the series and bring proof of their attendance to the event, or try ending each webinar with a trivia question that will only be answered during your company’s speaking session.

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about your next webinar series. Want more webinar tips? Check out our full handbook on the subject here.

As always, let us know if you have any additional ideas in the comments!

Description: Marketers turn to many different marketing channels in today’s marketing world to increase visibility for their company and company’s products. So, which avenues are performing and which are not? Through marketing metrics, a marketer can identify where their time and money are best spent – quickly.

In this webinar, join Zach Bailey, Sr. Director of Engineering at Pardot, An ExactTarget® Company, as he gives us an overview of how marketing metrics can give us the tools that we need to work in a smarter and more efficient manner. Zach will help us understand [...]]]> Date: May 23, 2013
Time: 2:00pm EDT

Description: Marketers turn to many different marketing channels in today’s marketing world to increase visibility for their company and company’s products. So, which avenues are performing and which are not? Through marketing metrics, a marketer can identify where their time and money are best spent – quickly.

In this webinar, join Zach Bailey, Sr. Director of Engineering at Pardot, An ExactTarget® Company, as he gives us an overview of how marketing metrics can give us the tools that we need to work in a smarter and more efficient manner. Zach will help us understand and learn:

• The value of marketing metrics
• Useful areas to measure, increasing insight into our campaigns and efforts
• How to measure the areas that matter most

Encore presentation from January, 2013.

Your Speaker:
Zach Bailey, Sr. Director of Engineering at Pardot – Pardot, An ExactTarget® Company

Register Now

Alright, so it’s not as exciting as climbing aboard the starship Enterprise, but the modern marketing team has new roles, new capabilities, and new worlds to explore that marketers could have only dreamed of just [...]]]> The newest installment of J.J. Abrams gritty reboot of the Star Trek franchise hits theaters today and according to advanced reviews, Into Darkness dazzles audiences with its futuristic technology and exciting glimpses into stunning new worlds. However, you don’t need to head to the theater to see technology boldly taking crews where none have gone before– it’s happening every day in modern marketing departments.

Alright, so it’s not as exciting as climbing aboard the starship Enterprise, but the modern marketing team has new roles, new capabilities, and new worlds to explore that marketers could have only dreamed of just a few years ago. We’ve put together the infographic below to highlight the ways in which the marketing discipline is changing and the futuristic new technologies marketers have at their fingertips. Let’s take a look!

Want to learn more about taking your marketing to futuristic levels of awesomeness? Grab your free copy of our new ebook “The Art of Marketing Automation.”

The first step to building a truly effective digital marketing automation program is to integrate your email, search, social, CRM, and web analytics systems. From there, marketing automation can help you streamline traditionally manual processes like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management.

Want to become a marketing automation pro? Get started by following [...]]]> If you’re just getting started with marketing automation, then you’re probably ready to begin learning how you can use it to strengthen customer relationships, improve lead generation, and boost ROI. After all, that’s why you invested in marketing automation in the first place, isn’t it?

The first step to building a truly effective digital marketing automation program is to integrate your email, search, social, CRM, and web analytics systems. From there, marketing automation can help you streamline traditionally manual processes like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management.

Want to become a marketing automation pro? Get started by following the ten steps below, inspired by our new (free!) Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation white paper.

1. Choose a marketing automation tool—and learn how to use it. Most marketing automation providers have an extensive library of resources for beginning users. Attend online training classes or, if you prefer to learn at your own pace, seek out web-based tutorial training options or free webinars so you can learn how to get the most out of your new tool.

2. Integrate your existing CRM with your marketing automation tool in order to sync lead, prospect, and customer data across platforms. With this integration, you’ll be able to view all of your prospect activity from within your CRM, automatically assign leads to sales reps, and more.

3. Experiment with autoresponders by automating simple, recurring emails. Since welcome and thank-you emails will be sent over and over again as you gain new subscribers and followers, they are perfect for testing the marketing automation waters. Experiment with autoresponders (email communications that are sent automatically when a prospect takes a certain action, like downloading a white paper) to see what kinds of messages you can automate.

4. Try some simple email personalization techniques like using substitution strings for preset subscriber attributes. If you’ve integrated your CRM with your marketing automation platform, you have plenty of information you can use to start personalizing your communications, rather than sending a generic email blast to everyone in your database.

5. Schedule your first social post. Use marketing automation to start making both immediate and scheduled social posts to all of your different social channels, all within the same interface. Just remember not to get so carried away with scheduled posts that you never log on to your networks—your audience still expects a human on the other end of your social messages.

 6. Identify the information that you need to collect for your marketing campaigns. Start with first name, last name, and email address, and then go from there. For example, if you’ve always wanted to start a birthday club, make sure you’re gathering the data you need (i.e., birth date) to make it happen. But remember that people don’t like to feel interrogated, so limit your forms to the information you need to collect, rather than the information you’d like to collect.

7. Integrate Google Analytics and Google Adwords with your marketing automation tool to consolidate all of your important metrics into a single system. Using this data, you’ll be able to see where your prospects are coming from and their conversion points at the individual level. At this point, you’ll also want to establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll use to track and measure success.

8. Begin building basic landing pages, email templates, and forms using industry-accepted best practices. Many automation providers offer implementation services that will walk you through creating these assets, from template design to the content included in each. Landing pages and forms are essential to lead generation, so it’s critical to start building them right away.

9. Start monitoring visitor and prospect activity by inserting basic tracking codes onto your site. The granular information (collected by your marketing automation system) is the fuel that powers the marketing automation engine, so this is an important step to address as soon as possible.

10. Build your first drip campaign. Drip marketing, or lead nurturing, is a powerful lead generation tool that works by sending a series of “drip” email messages to your prospects over time. Even the simplest drip campaign can help keep your company top of mind, so your prospects are already familiar with your product or service when it’s time for them to enter the buying cycle.

Want to learn how you can get even more advanced with marketing automation? Check out the full Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation white paper, which walks you through a 3-stage process for automating your marketing campaigns.

From the super speed with which they are able to respond to prospects to the telepathy they employ to know exactly what a consumer is thinking, modern marketers are more like superheroes than mere office dwellers.

So what’s happened to transform marketers from measly hunch-based, message-pushing mortals? What’s given marketers such impressive superpowers? Marketing automation is the answer. By putting more technology and abilities at the fingertips of marketers, automation has transformed the average marketer into something greater.

Unlike the abilities of the average superhero, these superpowers are available to everyone. We’ve put together the infographic [...]]]> The modern marketer has some impressive powers.

From the super speed with which they are able to respond to prospects to the telepathy they employ to know exactly what a consumer is thinking, modern marketers are more like superheroes than mere office dwellers.

So what’s happened to transform marketers from measly hunch-based, message-pushing mortals? What’s given marketers such impressive superpowers? Marketing automation is the answer. By putting more technology and abilities at the fingertips of marketers, automation has transformed the average marketer into something greater.

Unlike the abilities of the average superhero, these superpowers are available to everyone. We’ve put together the infographic below to help showcase some of the amazing abilities automation offers the modern marketer and how it can transform your marketing for the better. Let’s take a look!

Want to learn even more about what marketing automation can do? Get your free copy of our “Marketing Automation Success Kit!”

Kathryn Honderd, Pardot’s Client Services Manager (and a strong advocate of to-do lists and tactical approaches), gave a webinar on this topic recently [...]]]> As marketers (and particularly as those who skew towards the creative end of the spectrum), we’re perpetually fascinated by the psychology behind what we do: what motivates our audience, what grabs their interest, and how we can better reach them. But there are times in our jobs when we need to stop philosophizing and theorizing and take a more tactical, hands-on approach — and integrating your CRM with your marketing automation platform is one of those times.

Kathryn Honderd, Pardot’s Client Services Manager (and a strong advocate of to-do lists and tactical approaches), gave a webinar on this topic recently and shared her expertise from helping hundreds of clients with CRM integrations. Her advice? Define your goals, map out a plan, and know what to expect from your integration before you even get started. Let’s take a closer look.

Communicate with your sales team.

Integrating your marketing automation system and and your CRM is all about sales and marketing alignment, so make sure your sales team has input from the very start. Your sales reps may be very comfortable with your CRM and may not see a need for introducing a new system, so make sure they understand the benefits of marketing automation and the goals you hope to achieve by implementing it. And, as Kathryn points out, it often helps to pull one sales rep in on the implementation process, thoroughly train them and allow them to see results, then let that sales rep sell the rest of the team on marketing automation.

Communicate with your vendor.

Chances are, your vendor deals with integrations like yours every day, and they have a wealth of knowledge to share with you on how to best configure the integration to meet your goals. Talk to your vendor about your goals for the integration, and make sure you can answer all of the questions on the checklist below before you get started (even if you don’t fill in the answers!).

Want to learn more about the next steps for getting for optimizing your CRM integration? Join us for Kathryn’s free follow-up webinar this Thursday, “Marketing Automation and CRM: Terrible Twosome or Dynamic Duo?” And, as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts in our comments section!

Most marketers understand the need to engage with their consumers on multiple channels, but they have a harder [...]]]> We’ve written several times about the changing preferences of the modern-day consumer, and how these preferences are rendering the traditional sales funnel obsolete. In our multi-channel marketing world, consumers no longer follow a linear path from interest to conversion to close. Instead, consumers are researching online and on their mobile devices, attending events, participating in social conversations, and consuming more and more visual content like videos and infographics — and this has made marketing to the modern-day consumer anything but straightforward.

Most marketers understand the need to engage with their consumers on multiple channels, but they have a harder time figuring out how to do it, and how to do it on their consumers’ terms. While it used to be a matter of pushing marketing messages through various channels, today’s consumers are becoming less tolerant of messages that are forced onto them, and instead prefer to seek out content on their own time. According to Forrester Research, modern-day consumers will find three pieces of content about a vendor for every one piece of content that is published by marketing or sales.

This is a pretty powerful statistic, and raises the question: how can marketers keep up when consumers are seeking out so much information on their own, especially when most marketers have such limited resources at their disposal?

The answer is a mix between personalized communications, lead nurturing, event attendance, and readily-available customer testimonials. Check out the list below for a few ways that you can cater to the modern consumer without maxing out your existing resources:

1. Automate (and personalize) communications using lead nurturing. Marketing automation is a bit of a paradox in that it personalizes your communications by automating them. And how exactly does that work, you may ask? By collecting buyer demographics and recording activities and behavior, marketing automation can tell you a lot about your consumers’ interests. This information can be used to segment, target, and personalize your communications in ways that you never could before. Instead of bombarding your consumers with information right from their first touch point, you can drip targeted and relevant content to them over time using lead nurturing, helping to increase engagement levels.

“It’s a lovely irony that to become more personal, B2B marketers need to become more automated.”

- Lori Wizdo, Forrester Research

2. Showcase customer testimonials and case studies. Since consumers spend so much time conducting research on their own before contacting the vendors that have caught their eye, it’s important to make the information they need readily available. For consumers in the middle of the research cycle, that information is customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies. No other content gives them such a candid look at your company and product, making customer testimonials some of the most persuasive pieces of content in your arsenal.

3. Create and promote objective content like buyers guides. When consumers are researching a product or service, they’ll often consult buyers guides for an unbiased look at all of their options (but keep in mind that while unbiased, each buyers guide will cater to the strengths of the company that created it). Having a buyers guide of your own readily available on your website means that consumers can consult it whenever they want during their research process. And better that they use your buyers guide than one of your competitor’s, right?

4. Attend industry events and trade shows. Since today’s consumers are taking a more active role in industry events, it’s important to have a presence at the trade shows or conferences that you know they will be attending. This gives your prospects the chance to come to you in person if they’d like to know more about your product or service. Talking to consumers at events can also give you greater insight into their interests, pain points, and motivations, which can help you personalize your future communications. (Want to know more about marketing automation and trade shows? Check out our free white paper or Slideshare presentation on the topic!)

Following these steps can ensure that you’re doing all you can to cater to the preferences and habits of the modern-day consumer. You can also check out our Best Practices Guide for Inbound Marketing for a complete look at the modern inbound marketing process. If you have any other ideas, let us know in the comments!

If it’s an Old Spice commercial, the Dollar Shave Club, or another viral video with millions of hits, you’re not alone. But what if we told you that video marketing doesn’t have to be hilarious and it doesn’t have to go viral? In fact, video can be an integral and inexpensive part of your content marketing strategy — and our friends Chris Savage and Ezra Fishman of Wistia showed us how in yesterday’s webinar. Let’s take another look at where video and content marketing meet.

First, consider [...]]]> What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the term “video marketing”?

If it’s an Old Spice commercial, the Dollar Shave Club, or another viral video with millions of hits, you’re not alone. But what if we told you that video marketing doesn’t have to be hilarious and it doesn’t have to go viral? In fact, video can be an integral and inexpensive part of your content marketing strategy — and our friends Chris Savage and Ezra Fishman of Wistia showed us how in yesterday’s webinar. Let’s take another look at where video and content marketing meet.

First, consider these basic goals of content marketing:

• Attract: Pull visitors to your website (via search results or social shares) with valuable information.

• Engage: Engage visitors with valuable and digestible content, earn their trust, and establish thought leadership.

• Convert: Gate valuable content with forms to increase conversions.

• Build relationships: Keep visitors coming back by consistently publishing valuable content.

• Measure and improve: Evaluate the success of your efforts, continually improve your content, and start the cycle all over again.

Now let’s take a look at how video content can help you optimize your efforts in each of these aspects of content marketing — and give you a unique approach that will set you apart from competitors.

Attract

Video has a substantial advantage when it comes to attracting visitors to your site for a couple of reasons. For one, video content is still relatively rare — meaning that if a video is properly embedded and optimized for search, you have a great opportunity to set yourself apart with this particular form of content.

And for another, video is a highly digestible (and shareable) form of content. Think about it: if you’re searching for a quick way to learn more about something, would you rather read an essay or watch a short, educational, and potentially entertaining video? Consider the following clip from Wistia with five tips for making a professional looking video using only an iPhone 4.

Engage and Convert

Video adds an element to relationship building that written content simply can’t achieve. After watching a video of someone, you feel a little like you know them — you have a sense of their personality, and a certain level of trust is established. Use this level of engagement to drive conversions, as Wistia does by asking for an email address at the end of the instructional video above. The viewer is now signing up for further information from the person they’ve just seen, rather than turning over their personal contact details to a faceless company.

Relationship Building

Video marketing isn’t just about getting your name out there and getting viewers to convert, it can also be an excellent way to maintain a relationship once a prospect has converted to a customer. Turn clients into brand advocates by letting them get to know the people behind your brand. Wistia introduces users to their team right off the bat with this quick video, which users receive after signing up for a free account:

Measure and Improve

If you’re all about the analytics, this may be the best news of all: video is a highly trackable form of content marketing. Not only can you gauge a prospect’s interests by what videos he or she watches, today’s tracking tools allow you to see how much of a video a prospect watched. Understanding where you lost a prospect’s attention can help you reshape your brand messaging and develop a better approach to communicating with your audience. Check out the following video from Wistia on understanding analytics — and learn how you can view these analytics from within your marketing automation platform.

So, stop thinking of video as an expensive and unattainable marketing endeavor. Start small and start basic: just putting an employee on camera to share some knowledge can give your company a face and help to build a relationship with the viewer. And don’t stop at one! As Ezra points out, “ the real success comes with adopting [video] as a core part of your marketing, as something you do on a regular basis…and as a part of your larger content marketing strategy.”