Marketing, Startups, and Venture Capital
Drew is a data-driven marketer with a passion for crafting exceptional brand experiences. He currently runs marketing at High Alpha, an Indianapolis-based venture studio, and previously held roles in content marketing and product marketing at ExactTarget and Salesforce. At High Alpha, Drew advises and runs marketing in the early days for the High Alpha Studio portfolio companies, helping them scale to their first $1M in revenue and build world-class marketing teams.
Businesses are always looking for more customers and to generate new leads. Social media is a great place to build a community and engage with audiences for small businesses and startups. Not only can social media help you raise brand awareness, but it can also be used to acquire new leads and ultimately new customers.
Below are nine ways to acquire new leads and customers using social media.
Read MoreToday’s marketing leader must be more agile, data-focused, and customer-obsessed than ever before. For The State of Marketing Leadership, a joint research report from LinkedIn and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we surveyed more than 900 senior-level marketers on LinkedIn to learn what’s top-of-mind in their roles—whether director, VP, or CMO.
We sought out to learn senior-level marketers’ top marketing goals and objectives, their measurements for success, their effectiveness with marketing technologies, and where they see growth in the future.
Read MoreAt the beginning of the year, my team released the 2015 State of Marketing. In the report we surveyed over 5,000 marketers globally and asked about their budgets, priorities, channels, strategies, and metrics for 2015.
We researched the most pressing business challenges, the top areas for increased spending, the hottest trends in social, mobile, and email marketing, and more. We found that 84% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their marketing budget in 2015. Thirty-eight percent of marketers also plan to shift spending from traditional mass advertising to advertising on digital channels in 2015.
Read MoreFrom What if you stopped? by Seth Godin:
What would happen to your audience if you shut the doors tomorrow? (I know what would happen to you, that's not my question... what would happen to them?)
What would happen to your customers and to your prospects if you stopped doing your work?
If you stopped showing up, if you stopped selling them something, would they miss you if you were gone?
Read MoreSuper Bowl XLIX is officially in the books. The New England Patriots have been named World Champions once again, Katy Perry wowed the world riding in on a lion, and many people now understand what it is that GoDaddy.com actually offers. After a night of parties, cheering, and some of the most prolific advertising of the year, our team here at Salesforce Marketing Cloud is providing you with a comprehensive analysis of Super Bowl XLIX advertising and social media trends.
Read MoreI've recently seen a great deal of Liberty Mutual's new commercials around accident forgiveness and new car replacement. They have a number of these commercials where a Liberty Mutual customer tells a story about their accident in front of the Statue of Liberty.
These commercials, though, are a little lackluster and bring no specific affinity toward Liberty Mutual or their brand. I think the lackluster performance of these commercials is a perfect way to demonstrate the power of visualization in advertising.
Read MoreFrom Average is just another word for mediocre by Seth Godin
If you think your organization needs a bigger marketing budget, maybe you just need to be less average instead.
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As the month of Christmas campaigns unfolds, I wanted to put together a list to top holiday campaigns over the last few years — except I thought I would give it a little twist. Technology has certainly changed the way brands and their audiences are interacting and communicating. This has also left an impact on holiday campaigns.
Below I’ve featured some vintage Christmas campaigns and advertisements and highlighted some of their modern-day counterparts. I hope you enjoy!
These campaigns are not creations by or related to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We just admire these campaigns and strategies.
Read MoreOver the past week a team here at Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been analyzing social media trends and data to provide you with the top digital marketing trends for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire Thanksgiving weekend. We have been posting that data and analysis every day over the weekend here.
As we finished our analysis, I aggregated some data and found some interesting Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend insights and stats to share.
Read MoreOver the past year, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has conducted a number of original research studies, benchmark reports, and marketing leadership surveys. All of this new research has given us quite a library of data and mind-blowing statistics on how both brands and consumers use technology to interact with each other.
I've compiled many of these statistics into a single list of 75 digital marketing stats from 2014 research.
Read MoreHalloween is upon us. This Friday over 160 million people will celebrate by dressing up, giving out candy, attending parties, and covering porches in spooky decorations.
We've been listened to Halloween social media buzz using Radian6 social listening data over the past 30 days, and created the infographic below with key Halloween trends this year. We also included some interesting spending statistics from NRF.
Read MoreOn Wednesday morning of Connections 2014, we heard from Kyle Lacy, Director of Global Content Marketing & Research at the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, in one of our breakout sessions.
Kyle shared on key technology trends that are transforming how customers communicate and how brands should be interacting with them. Below are Kyle's 7 Technology Trends and some recommendations for how brands can use these trends to enhance their customer journeys.
1. Moments Matter
Take advantage of every experience the customer has with your brand no matter what the interaction is and what device it’s happening on.
Moments really do matter when technology allows us to reach our customers at any stage along the customer journey. Use the map above to think about your own stage in the customer journey and how to optimize those moments and the experience your customers have with your brand.
2. Connected Consumer
Mobility is the largest trend we’ve seen in all the recent trends we've uncovered—and this is just the beginning. Smartphones still have a massive growth potential with only 30% of the total market using smartphones.
"The connected consumer is constant," Kyle noted. "As the global consumer becomes more connected, we don’t care what device they’re using. I only care that they are connected."
Kyle shared that 42% of US consumers purchased a product on their mobile phone in 2013 and 83% of US consumers research products while in-store on their mobile phone.
3. The Ecommerce/Amazon Effect
Amazon is still revolutionizing ecommerce and retail. From things like Amazon Prime Air (see video below) and enhancing product recommendations and personalization, Amazon continues to be on the cutting edge of technology.
And it's not just Amazon. Ecommerce is continuing to be transformed from giants like Alibaba to startups like Partpic.
4. Brand Personalization
Personalization is everything. The ExactTarget Marketing Cloud's recent Predictive Intelligence Benchmark Report found there is a 12-25% increase in sales if the transactional message includes personalized product recommendations.
5. Collaborative Economy
The collaborative is defined as, "An economic model where creation, ownership, and access are shared between people and corporations." Brands like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, LendingClub, and many others have introduced a whole new economic model that has major implications for how consumers are interacting with each other.
The collaborative economy is a collaboration between products, ideas, and people and is just another step in the social revolution.
6. Social Intelligence
Social media has grown a lot over the past few years. We have gone from a handful of use cases and strategies to a new concept of social intelligence based on numerous key aspects of social media ranging from tactical to strategic value.
The main issue now, though, is that organizations don’t know how to build out groups to manage “digital.” When empowering the new collaborative company, it’s about embedding social media cross the fabric of the organization. You have to ask yourself, "How do we make one department’s outputs another department’s inputs?" This is where the true value and efficiency comes with social media.
7. Humanizing Automation
Kyle finished his seven trends with "humanizing automation." Automating the customer journey is a vital goal for most marketers. The challenge comes when you try to keep the human element to the customer journey while still maximizing efficiencies using automation. To do this, you need to be sure you're making data-based decision.
The key is that data equals relevance and experience equals relevance. With trends, data is where you start and experience is where you end. {Tweet This}
David Walmsley, Head of Multichannel at Marks & Spencer, says, "We must move from numbers keeping score to numbers that drive better actions."
You can view Kyle's full presentation below and you can see all the Connections 2014 breakout session presentations here.