MarketStar Blog

Customer experience (CX) is the emerging competitive differentiator for brands. According to Dimension Data’s ‘2017 Global Customer Experience (CX) Benchmarking Report’,¹ 70.9% of boardrooms recognize CX as their most important strategic performance measure. CX can broadly be defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your brand.

Look-alike modeling has become a game-changer in the marketing world. By identifying groups of people who resemble your most profitable customers, this strategy can significantly enhance your advertising efforts. In this article, we'll dive into three key pointers to help you leverage look-alike modeling effectively. 

In our previouspost , we had discussed the importance of focusing on a mobile email marketing strategy. In this post, we will look at how you can adopt a mobile email marketing strategy by looking at some of the best practices for optimizing email campaigns for the mobile user.

With mobile technology advancing at a disruptive pace, there’s no saying where mobile user expectations will go next. So how do large marketing enterprises protect and leverage their huge investments? 

MarketingProfs’ August 2017 summary1 of The State of Engagement, a recent Marketo research report2, is telling. The Marketo study was compiled from the responses of close to 1,200 marketers and 1,000-plus consumers surveyed in the US, the UK, France, and Germany. The report covered almost equal numbers of B2C and B2B consumers – 511 and 489, respectively. 

Among other findings were two that are pertinent to this post:  

Video marketing has become one of the most sought-after content marketing trends for brands today and it continues to grow at a rapid scale. Cisco’s research1 estimates that “Globally, 70% of all Internet traffic will cross CDNs by 2021”. Moreover, the exponential increase in mobile and tablet users, paired with sufficient availability of distribution platforms, have made it convenient for marketers to drive audience engagement through videos. However, it is imperative to get the technique right to obtain maximum engagement from it. 

Here are 3 things you must do to drive maximum audience engagement through video marketing: 

Programmatic advertising has become one of the most commonly-used forms of media buying simply because it is the most efficient method available. Instead of relying on human salespeople to bid and negotiate for inventory, agencies and brands can now utilize programmatic software instead. 

The benefits of Account-based Marketing (ABM) included an increase both in the number of deals closed and the average size of a deal in ABM accounts but also an increase in the engagement level in ABM accounts. However, only a little over half had an ABM strategy in place. As high as 42% of those who did not have an ABM strategy in place said the reason for that was that they found it difficult to get their marketing and sales teams aligned. This is unfortunate, considering that both teams are internal to an organization. 

When revenue-generating departments don’t speak the same language, it often results in steep financial losses that are easily preventable. The Fortune 250 B2B company that spent a quarter of a million dollars trying to solve the wrong problem would agree.1 After the failure of a new product, the company threw money at product research and sales methodology, when, in fact, the problem was caused by misaligned goals between sales and marketing. 

The symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing finds them both deeply interconnected and yet at odds. According to Forrester research, 78% of executive buyers claim that salespeople do not have relevant examples or case studies to share with them.2 The same is true when marketing has an inflated view of the company’s brand equity on target customers. Yet sales and marketing rarely sit together to plot targets, strategies, and objectives for the year. That is set to change, especially as more businesses go the Account- Based Marketing (ABM) route. 

Snap Inc. lost over $1.3 billion in market value recently when their shares sank by 7.2% following a tweet by Kylie Jenner in which she said that she doesn’t open the app anymore, drawing agreement from her 24.5 million followers1. Now whether Jenner was solely responsible for the decline in share value or whether she only contributed to it, it must be noted that influencers wield a power like never before. 

Last year was the year of influencer marketing with 84% of marketers launching at least one influencer campaign2. That number is only likely to go up this year. Some experts deem that influencer marketing is the fastest growing channel for online customer acquisition. 

Influencers are people, typically on social media, who talk to their captive audience - their tribe - about things that matter to them. Their influence comes from their knowledge and expertise in a particular area. When they talk, people listen. Influencers have the ability to make or break your brand. 

In theory, your channel partners should be eagerly awaiting the chance to utilize the Marketing Development Funds (MDF) made available to them. After all, as far as they’re concerned, it’s essentially free marketing money! However, the reality of the matter is that 60% of marketing development funds are left unused on a quarterly basis. There are a number of reasons why channel partners leave such a large portion of the MDF pie untouched, ranging from excessive paperwork and lack of resources to poor communication with the business and low confidence in them.1, 2 

What do Airbnb and the Art Institute of Chicago have in common? Not a whole lot. Yet both combined their resources to launch a brilliant co-marketing campaign to highlight an exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings, specifically his ‘Bedroom Series.’ They recreated Van Gogh’s bedroom, complete with objects painted in Gogh’s classic style, and opened it up for people to book a night’s stay, to feel what it was like to “almost step into a painting.” The ‘Van Gogh BNB’ co-marketing campaign was a phenomenal success, with bookings for the first month closing within hours of the campaign going live. The campaign created an incremental attendance of 133,000 visitors at the institute and generated $2 million of incremental revenue, all with just $500,000 investment.1