Driving sales, improving lead quality, and boosting conversions have never been more critical – especially in an age of increased privacy concerns. The right marketing technology is your key to getting it done.

Discover dozens of marketing technologies, tools, and solutions – all for FREE and all without leaving your desk: Grab your free MarTech pass now and join us online, this Tuesday and Wednesday (March 28-29)!

At MarTech, you’ll unlock nearly 50 data-rich sessions from world-class brands including Forrester, Sysco, Electrolux, Salesforce, and more:

• Identifying B2B and B2C consumers in a privacy-driven environment, with Cyndi Greenglass, President at Livingston Strategies, Tim Parkin, President at Parkin Consulting, and Kim Davis, Editorial Director at MarTech
• The new role of marketing in the constantly changing go-to-market world, with Sangram Vajre, CEO at GTM Partners (including a free book giveaway!)

… and get your questions answered in real-time during live Q&A (Overtime!) with select speakers, including the godfather of martech, Scott Brinker, Mission MarTech’s Milton Hwang, and more!

You’ll also explore the critical rise of AI and what it means for marketers during exclusive programming and networking opportunities, including…

• How marketers can use AI right now: A panel discussion – followed by Overtime live Q&A!
• The marketing singularity: Large language models and the end of marketing as you knew it – featuring Christopher Penn, Chief Data Scientist, TrustInsights.ai

Hungry for more? Discuss ChatGPT, GA4, and MOPs challenges with like-minded attendees and industry experts during Coffee Talk meetups – only available live!

And don’t miss these recent additions to the MarTech agenda!

• Marketing and sales working together: The why and the how of the renewed mandate — featuring Deloitte Digital’s Dennis Startsev and Paul Vinogradov
• Rethinking the CDP: Chime explores new ways to drive personalization at scale — featuring experts from Chime and Tejas Manohar, Co-Founder and CEO at Hightouch
• How Electrolux created an analytics roadmap to power first-party data activations — featuring Erica Campbell, Global Consumer Data & Analytics Director at Electrolux, and Craig Howard, Chief Solutions Officer at Actable

After just a few hours, you’ll be ready to… 

• Leverage automation and real-time insights to optimize KPIs
• Reduce marketing spend with a first-party data strategy
• Apply personalization strategies that accelerate customer loyalty
• Support additional revenue streams through audience monetization 
• Execute campaigns to help fill your marketing funnel with new consumers
• Reach, engage, and convert more email marketing prospects  
• Execute more effective targeting, increase personalization, and improve ROI 

…and so much more. Can’t attend live? Explore at your own pace with instant on-demand access, included for free. 

Don’t wait… grab your free MarTech pass now and join us online, this Tuesday and Wednesday, March 28-29!

The post Join us online THIS WEEK for MarTech… for free appeared first on MarTech.

“The first thing that I always tell people in optimizing the intake process is that garbage in is garbage out,” Sharaf said, speaking at The MarTech Conference. “The quality of information coming out…is only as good as the quality of information that went in. So if you have a really bad process for getting data into your marketing automation platform, then it’s probably going to be garbage coming out to your sales team, to your marketing partners and anyone else that utilizes that data.”

So here are four things you can do to fix that.  

1. Consolidating web forms

The best practice is to create two or three web form templates you can reuse across all of the forms on your website. You can use these for resource downloads, for contact sales requests, for starter trial requests, registering for a webinar, or any other type of content that someone would access from your website. 

“With two or three templates using the same information across all of those forms, you can have consistent data in the same format across all of your sources, getting into your marketing automation system,” said Sharaf. “The other thing this allows you to do is to ensure that when others outside of your team are creating web forms they know exactly how to set those things up and there’s no manual intervention from your team.”

Dig deeper: Spreadsheets remain critical for marketers

He also suggests using hidden field values. “Create one template and then use hidden fields within that form to tell your marketing team where that person came from, what content they downloaded, what form they filled out, etcetera,” he said. 

2. Normalization of fields

When asking for personal information, you want to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to answer. This can mean limiting the options so you get the data you really need.

“Instead of asking somebody for a free form job title where they could enter in one of a million different job titles, try asking for job level and role,” said Sharaf. 

That way you don’t get different responses from people who all essentially have the same position, like “director of marketing,” “director, marketing,” “DAR, marketing” and “marketing director.” Instead you get, “I am a director and my role is in marketing.” 

Dig deeper: Study: Marketing automation teams mired in execution, neglecting strategic priorities

“This is something that can make your data very clean and also allows you to do better segmentation in lead scoring based on these normalized fields,” he said. 

3. Dropdown selection

This is a classic irritant that everyone has encountered: You’re asked what nation you’re from and are confronted with a dropdown that lists every country on the planet in alphabetical order. It may seem inclusive, but it’s really one more way to discourage a visitor. Unless you’re getting customers from all over the world, don’t do this.

“If you are doing a form for U.S. based prospects or customers, put the United States at the top of the form,” said Sharaf. “If you know that it’s a North America program, put Canada at the top of the form. If you know it’s a European program, put the top ten European countries at the top.” 

This will give you a much higher conversion rate on your form and also get people to select the correct value. 

“I know when I’m filling out a form very quickly, oftentimes if I don’t want people to have my information, I’m just trying to get through it quickly,” he said. “I’ll just select the very first value in the pick list, even if it’s not the correct value. By putting the most popular values at the top, you eliminate people doing that.”

4. Offline list uploads 

“Everyone does them,” said Sharaf. “You use them for your offline events, sometimes use them for your webinars, etcetera. There are a bunch of different use cases. Sometimes third party vendors will send you a list. The thing that will streamline your intake process best as possible is to create an Excel or Google Sheets template for marketers to use.”

In that spreadsheet, set the field names to ones you want them to use. Set validation rules to prevent putting a number into the country field or a letter in the phone field. Another thing you can take advantage of is using X lookups or V lookups to turn things like country names into country codes if that’s what works with your system.

 “So you can ask the marketers to put very minimal information into the list upload template and then you, as a marketing automation expert or data analyst or whoever you are, can then utilize that information for a simple upload into your marketing automation platform,” he said.

These steps will let you take advantage of clean and enriched data, providing cross-functional value for teams beyond just sales. Also, they are system agnostic and can be used with any MAP.

“Personally, I’ve used Marketo, I’ve used IBM, Acoustic and others,” Sharaf said, “but this obviously can apply to anything, whether it’s HubSpot or Eloqua or any of the other marketing automation platforms.”

The post Data driven markeing automation: How to get started today appeared first on MarTech.

As the industry weans itself from cookie-tracking, other data sources are becoming more important. Especially first party data and consensually obtained customer information that can be supplemented in privacy-compliant ways. Equally important: Activating that data to create personalized engagement and construct compelling customer journeys.

Technology allows marketers to do all of the above, but strategy is also crucial. It has to be built on an understanding of the customer’s perspective, pain-points and requirements. At The MarTech Conference we’ll bring technology and strategy together to build a framework for the future.

If you’ve had success in any of these areas and think you have the experience to teach others what you’ve learned, we want to hear from you. Specifically, we’re looking for industry practitioners to lead sessions on the following topics:

• Account based marketing
• Conversion optimization
• Customer data management
• Customer journey orchestration
• Digital asset management
• Digital events
• Digital experience
• Email marketing
• Identity resolution
• Marketing automation
• Marketing performance management/analytics
• Marketing work management

Whether you’ve been speaking for years or have never done it before and feel you have experience other marketers can learn from, please consider submitting a session pitch. We’re always looking for new speakers with diverse points of view.

The deadline for session pitches is February 3rd!

Your pitch is more likely to grab our attention if you:

• Include details about what an attendee will be able to do better or different as a result of attending your session.
• Are from a brand or can include a speaker from a brand company in your session
• Have a case study or specific examples that can be applied in different organizations.
• Provide tangible takeaways and a plan of action for attendees to implement what you teach.

Jump over to this page for more details on how to submit a session idea, or directly to this page to create your profile and submit a session pitch.

The post Interested in speaking at The MarTech Conference in March? Submit your pitch now! appeared first on MarTech.

“Marketing gets its unpredictability from the tangled connectivity and interactions of people, customers, brands, competitors, influencers, governments,” Schaub said in the keynote address for The MarTech Conference’s second day. “And those billions of interactions between these agents cause feedback loops, resulting in what the US Army War College called VUCA [which] stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.”

Dig deeper: How to keep up with accelerating customer expectations: The MarTech Conference keynote

Schaub, a former tech CMO, led IDC’s CMO Advisory practice for nine years. In that time she advised hundreds of technology marketing leaders on management best practices. She says embracing this unpredictability requires changes to three ways of thinking.

The first change is from an accounting perspective to an investing one. Marketing is currently viewed as a cost center where funds are spent on something specific. In an investor’s mindset the funds are risked in pursuit of something.

Investors not accountants

“The cost center mentality assumes that marketing budgets work like capital spending on tangible assets like machines or buildings, and they can be evaluated in a similar way,” she says. “Investment portfolios [are] managed quite differently. A wise investor understands that pay offs are never guaranteed and that investing for the most part is a long game.”

This doesn’t mean ignoring marketing’s role as a short term sales booster. It means keeping in mind marketing’s essential long term role and goals. 

“In a complex system early interventions produce disproportionately large future impacts,” says Schaub. “So it’s important to invest over multiple timelines, to invest early and to invest consistently, to diversify and to experiment, because you’re going to need different tactics as those conditions change to thrive under VUCA conditions.”

She points out that marketing scorecards, which compare KPIs against plan, are built on a questionable assumption. 

They “assume that the marketing environment is stable. But what if we admit that because of the constantly changing nature of marketing, the plans are out of date the moment they are released?”

Navigation, not control

The second change is to understand that pre-set plans don’t work in complex systems. A marketing manager must think like a navigator and maneuver when confronted with change. 

“A navigation mindset assumes a constantly changing context, which means that static financial goals made months in advance aren’t realistic,” she says.

This requires knowing where you want to get to and using that as a guide.

“You must have an enduring mission,” Schaub says. “The purpose of your organization endures, but the how and the when must be flexible. A better approach than static scorecards are dashboards that track data over time and frequently adjust expectations to the current situation. KPI’s then become navigation tools, providing directional indicators about whether you’re getting closer or farther away from your mission.”

Let go of cause and effect

Finally, think like a statistician who views things in terms of probabilities, not cause and effect. This change requires more effort than the first two because it’s at odds with how people naturally think. 

“Marketing outcomes do have reasons, but they’re not the clear reasons that our brains crave,” she says. “So we must train ourselves to accept the uncertainty of the real world. And this preparation is greatly aided by a better understanding of probability.”

Doing this means understanding that no outcome is certain and there are no recipes. This is replaced with the knowledge that markets do have patterns and these are semi-predictable, just as the traffic and weather are semi-predictable. 

“When we shift to thinking like a statistician, we also come to appreciate how outcomes depend on a confluence of interdependent factors,” Schaub says. “Then, with the right analytic approaches, we can tease out, for example, the 20% of known programs that best correlate with business outcomes.”

Looking at marketing from these perspectives can lead to enormous breakthroughs.

“Your adjusted perspective will shine a light on new practices that will break through the stalemate of persistent marketing challenges, including the ability to financially evaluate marketing,” she says.

The post Predictable marketing ROI is doomed: The MarTech Conference day 2 keynote appeared first on MarTech.

“You need data quality and hygiene to be closer to where that marketing strategy is,” he said. “There’s a lot riding on the quality (or lack thereof) of your data.”

Data quality issues, which often stem from first-line, day-to-day operations, can ultimately harm your bottom line if left untreated. That’s why marketers need to ensure their data collection, analysis, and activation processes are optimized from the get-go.

Here are some data quality strategies Pritchard suggests marketing teams adopt to fix these problems.

Create a data quality report

One of the first steps marketing teams need to prioritize when cleaning up their data is to create a data quality report. As an example, Pritchard shared a report template his team created for their clients that highlights many potential reporting issues, including home address changes, duplicate customers, and profiles in need of suppression.

“[Reporting] isn’t some day-to-day operation that might save you $10 or $15 every now and then,” Pritchard said. Rather, detailing these data issues can help ensure your brand’s long-term marketing success by keeping track of problems as they arise.

Conduct a data quality assessment

“My [next] recommendation is to do a data quality assessment,” said Pritchard. “What that means is to assess your data quality against weighted aspects.”

Data quality assessments can help determine how well your information stacks up to the dimensions of high-quality data, which are weighted according to their importance to your organization. These can include:

• Accuracy.
• Completeness.
• Consistency.
• Timeliness.
• Validity.
• Uniqueness.

Pritchard’s team’s assessment scores clients from a range of zero to 100, but brands can use any scale they like — as long as it’s consistent. Once completed, your team (usually middle managers) can highlight areas of strength and weakness, which will inform the overall marketing strategy going forward.

Improve data quality through hygiene and enhancement efforts

After identifying data issues through quality assessment and reports, marketers should focus on cleaning up the errors through hygiene efforts.

“If you liken your marketing campaigns to playing darts, you want those darts to hit the board, which is the marketing campaign being effective,” Pritchard said.

He added, “Data hygiene would be increasing the accuracy of that dart.”

Data hygiene addresses the verification, suppression, and deduplication issues identified in your assessments and reports. Removing inactive, duplicate, and suppressed accounts in this way can help your team save money, spending resources only on accounts that are actionable.

But data hygiene alone isn’t enough to ensure organizational success. So, Pritchett encourages brands to enact data enhancement efforts as well.

This process involves asking customers for additional first-party data — such as phone numbers, emails, and addresses — to give your brand more context and better communicate with them across multiple channels.

“Using our dart analogy, enhancement gives you more darts to throw,” he said. “If you’re throwing three darts at a bullseye, you’ll have a much better chance [of hitting it] if you throw 100 instead.”

Combined, data hygiene and enhancement efforts have the potential to save money and resources by targeting actionable leads, encouraging more organizational success.

The post Why clean data is key to organizational success appeared first on MarTech.

What five things do you think will remain unchanged about marketing technology in the next ten years?

The question made me pause because usually I receive queries about what will change, as martech leaders try to “skate to where the puck is going.” In a fast-paced martech world that affords too-little time for reflection, it’s useful indeed to think about continuity, among other reasons, because it can help focus your energies and keep you from wasting time chasing ephemeral fads.

So herewith are my top five predictions for enduring trends.

1. Primacy of customer data

Effectively managing customer data is table stakes for prospect and customer digital engagement. Most of us haven’t been doing this very well. Getting on top of customer data management will likely become a decade-long (or more) pursuit.

At RSG, we advise many large enterprises on CDP evaluation and selection. The nature and scope of these projects vary widely, but one theme remains constant: Implementing a CDP just exposes long-latent structural problems in the way you’ve been collecting, processing, securing and managing customer data. This work is hard!

Moreover, the coming years will make it even harder. Security risks are growing. Regulatory compliance is stiffening. Consumers and their advocates are (rightly) pushing for better norms and transparency around how their data is collected and used.  

2. Still figuring out personalization

I have been on the front lines of advising and sometimes implementing personalization technology for twenty-five years now. The dirty little secret in our industry is that everyone talks about personalization, but very few enterprises actually do it in a methodical way.

For most of you, it’s been a five-steps-forward, four-steps-backward endeavor. Measuring the effectiveness of personalization remains difficult, and despite breathless vendor case studies, many if not most pilot projects here fail to achieve meaningful ROI. Part of this relates to customer data deficits noted above, but other challenges revolve around customer unpredictability and mistaken assumptions about what the person on the other side of the screen really wants (as opposed to what you think or wish they would want). It shouldn’t surprise you that many consumers find personalization efforts creepy or hackneyed.  

This is not a blanket indictment of trying to tailor more effective user experiences. The best organizations systematize test-and-optimization cycles. Segmenting customers in cohorts can make messages more germane.  Prioritizing business use cases really helps. But given the resource overhead, one-to-one personalization has not yet found its magic bullet.  

So here again, we’ll be spending a decade figuring out personalization. I suspect that, for most of you, slow and steady will win the race. 

3. Content is king

As a journalist in a previous life who now taps out research reports for a living, I’m biased towards the power of good content. However, it seems like the commitment to crafting excellent content among the large enterprises RSG advises tends to wax and wane over time.  

I’m not sure exactly why. Clearly, content is central to any effective user experience – just ask any UX designer. Yet good content can be expensive to create and complex to manage and re-use in an omnichannel world. Some AI adherents boast that new platforms can solve the former challenge of content creation. Pro tip: They cannot.  

With respect to content management, we’ve come a long way, but many challenges endure.  Too many enterprises over-rely on agencies for content creation and lose a lot of intellectual property along the way. Traditional web content management platforms are really bad at omnichannel content management. Component content management is essential in a customer-centric world, but it’s as hard to manage now as it was twenty years ago.  

Fortunately, some new technologies and approaches are emerging, and some enterprises are getting smarter about content supply and demand chains. Still, ten years from now, the successful digital transformers will have gotten content right in the interim.

4. Highly-fragmented markets

New martech markets will evolve over the coming decade. Some existing vendors will fold or consolidate. But I guarantee one structural continuity: In any given market, you will confront a plethora of choices. In general, this is a good thing, though it can cause vertigo for enterprise technology buyers (hint: apply design thinking to your tech choices).  

I’ve written elsewhere in these pages why these markets remain so fragmented. The cost of new-vendor entry keeps falling, and cloud models tend to reduce supplier risks. Despite recent contractions, we live in a world awash in investment capital, and the next decade will see it continuing to gravitate to martech. At RSG, we’ve tried to focus on the most important 160 vendors for our enterprise subscribers, but it’s an ongoing challenge.  

This doesn’t remove risk calculations in your supplier choices as much as juggle them. You might end up with a “zombie” vendor. Your supplier might prove finicky and radically adjust roadmaps (we’re seeing more of this in the CDP space). So you will likely still have many good and bad vendor choices, but likely fewer catastrophic ones.

5. Suites vs. best of breed

Today martech marketplaces are characterized by suite vendors purporting to sell collections of platforms (see the center of the map above) versus more focused, “point solution” suppliers. It’s an old story in the tech world and increasingly germane in the marketing space. 

At RSG, our research and anecdotal experience suggest that savvier enterprises who build their stacks one service layer and component at a time see better results. They’re also less apt to be bullied into making poor decisions.  

But the debate endures and I think will carry over into the 2030s. That said, you might see a new class of suite vendors emerging.  Today Adobe, Salesforce, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft and SAP offer manifold marketing and digital experience solutions. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that over the next decade, they will all accumulate (even more) technical debt and become the IBM and Oracle of the 2030s.  

But the “suite” bundle will remain attractive to martech leaders looking for shortcuts to thorny integration problems, so I’ll also guess that a new crop of vendors will take their place.

The post 5 enduring trends in martech appeared first on MarTech.

Rather than tailoring messages to individual customers, marketers in the B2B space are recognizing the need to adopt account-based strategies to resonate with groups of executive-level buying groups. This process necessitates a strong appeal to brands’ goals — often at the enterprise level — and this can’t be done without proper marketing and sales team alignment.

“The other thing that you need to make ABM successful is tight marketing and sales alignment,” Britt said. “It only works if you’re working together as a unified team and deciding who your ICP [ideal customer profile] is. Which accounts within that ICP are you going to go after?”

Here are three ways an ABM strategy can help improve sales and marketing velocity.

Account targeting from a marketing side

“I’ve worked for organizations where marketing ended when the opportunity was created,” Britt said. “We were all about driving the demand and the awareness and getting those qualified opportunities. But then after that salespeople are sometimes like, ‘Alright, it’s mine now. I don’t want any kind of marketing or promotions hitting them because I don’t want this prospect to get distracted.'”

“I think that’s changing now; it’s refreshing to see that marketing does have a role to play with open opportunities,” she added.

Britt says marketing teams can improve account targeting by looking at these open opportunities, especially those one might think to glance over at first. She recommends including opportunities that aren’t just categorized as top tier — those with the highest propensity to close quickly. They should reach out to accounts that are under a certain dollar amount or those that are at a higher stage of the sales funnel as well.

More B2B marketers are adopting account-based marketing than ever before. Find out why and explore the ABM platforms making it possible in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

Sales engagement and outreach

Britt’s presentation also highlighted the necessity of sharing data between marketing and sales teams. When accounts start to visit your web properties, click on your ads, or attend your event, marketers must get sales teams involved with their marketing campaigns.

She said marketers should share that data with sales so they can see who’s engaging and what type of intent signals they’re showing. This provides additional opportunities for sales outreach — even if no one’s clicking on that ad, they might be showing other intent signals that sales can act on, such as visiting the site or interacting through some third-party intent.

Britt’s own marketing team’s process of collaborating with sales, enhancing their engagement and outreach opportunities. They put together an email template for sales to use (shown below). It showcases an upcoming virtual event in the signature portion, helping sales better connect with accounts via email marketing.

“It’s about continuing to have those touches, that engagement with the account,” she said.

Account analysis and measurement

“When it comes to pipeline acceleration, you’re hopefully improving your win rate with these [ABM] programs that you’re putting the surround sound type of campaigns around,” said Britt. “You’re increasing your average deal size as you’re nurturing them through the opportunities journey and then shortening that sale cycle and increasing the sales velocity.”

She suggested marketers develop methods for measuring account engagement — both from a marketing and a sales side. Teams should look into whether accounts are clicking on your ads, registering for your events or your webinars, signing up for the direct mail, and other straightforward measurements, but also less obvious engagement metrics. These include activity time, churn rate, customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value (CLV), and more.

She recommends marketers put together a high-level overview of their analysis for managers, what she calls an ABM scorecard (shown below). Scoring your marketing and sales teams’ account engagement in this way can make data clearer for higher-ups to act upon.

“This is a simple way to display those key metrics, especially when you’re reporting it to leadership,” she said.

The post How ABM strategies can accelerate marketing and sales velocity appeared first on MarTech.

She added, “As more and more workers become remote, you need to be able to provide online engagement for those individuals.”

With so many people working remotely or in hybrid positions, event marketers often find themselves competing with other virtual experiences. There are simply too many distractions vying for audiences’ time, whether it be social media, entertainment channels, educational videos or other kinds of content.

Fortunately, the demand for virtual events is high, and marketers have more opportunities to integrate event technology into their campaigns than ever before.

Challenges clients are facing in a virtual world

Incorporating event technology into marketing tech stacks can be much easier said than done, according to Lovatt. Capturing audience attention in an increasingly virtual world might seem like a losing battle.

“This is a reality of what you’re facing when you try to bring event tech event platforms into your marketing tech stack: endless online meetings every day that you’ve got to engage and energize and fight for attention from,” she said.

However, these challenges don’t negate the potential impact event tech can have on demand generation.

“Eighty-six percent of virtual events deliver a positive ROI in [the first] six months,” Lovatt said. “But, how do you prove that? It’s all about bringing it into your marketing tech stack where you can start to quantify and measure the results.”

One way marketers can prove the worth of event tech is by employing A/B testing frameworks. This can help generate actionable data for executives and stakeholders.

How event marketing technology can help engage audiences

Lovatt says many of her team’s customers often request meeting and event experiences that are completely customized. These can be built on brands’ websites or externally with on-brand elements that energize and activate audiences.

Once these audiences are interested, marketers can then leverage the data and intelligence gleaned from these event experiences.

One of the biggest benefits of virtual event technologies, in Lovatt’s estimation, is their ability to connect marketers with audiences regularly, as opposed to one-off engagements that have become all too typical.

“People no longer come to your event [just] once a year and then forget all about you,” said Lovatt. “You are now able to invite people into your digital event environment every single day of the year if you want to. So, you have an ongoing touchpoint opportunity.”

Event technology can offer marketers many other benefits as well: better integration with other marketing channels, improved lead scoring and conversion tracking, or even online community generation. If marketers use these technologies to connect with audiences in personalized ways, they’ll have a better chance of enjoying a sustainable channel that’s built for a remote-first world.

“Virtual events offer an amazing opportunity to create an evergreen marketing channel that is well-delivered and that can continue to generate leads into the future,” Lovatt said.

The post Why event technology is critical to marketing success appeared first on MarTech.

Industry experts have been well aware of the digital-first environment for years now. In fact, Gartner said that by 2025 almost 80% of B2B interactions between suppliers and buyers would happen through digital channels — and that was before the 2020 pandemic accelerated digital even further.

But, if marketing and sales teams can’t keep up with the acceleration of digital channels, customers will be more likely to abandon their brands. That’s why Bornstein recommends marketers take advantage of the wealth of resources offered by first-part customer data.

Here are three ways he recommends brands optimize first-party data collection.

Give viewers choices during webinars

“It’s amazing how webinars have changed over the past few years,” Bornstein said. “They’re more like TV programs than the PowerPoints of old. We see more conversational formats, such as interviews and talk shows. The audience is a much bigger part of the experience.”

He added, “We see companies creating experiences where audiences are not just watching a presentation, but they’re involved in it.”

Bornstein highlighted a webinar he liked that allowed users to make their own choices: You could click on webpages and different URLs, or ask for a meeting in real-time and then go to a calendar and schedule an event. Giving users options while viewing webinars can help brands make these digital experiences more engaging.

“When I talk about self-selection, that’s what I mean,” he said. “Some people are going to be top-of-funnel, and some people are going to be mid-funnel. And some people are going to be ready to engage with your company — you need to provide them with those options.”

Craft interactive content hubs

“We’re seeing more personalized content hubs,” said Bornstein. “No matter what page you navigate to, you’re going to get something specific, whether it is on a website or a targeted landing page.”

When marketers share content pieces from these hubs, Bornstein recommends adding multiple interactive elements to foster even more user engagement. Whether it’s an inviting CTA, an enrollment button, or a chatbot, marketers can enrich content experiences through interactive hubs.

The authoritative, informative content remains the most important element of these hubs, but marketers will miss out on conversion opportunities if they don’t help foster engaging reading experiences.

“Anything is possible with content experiences,” Bornstein said.

Develop immersive virtual events

“A great virtual event experience is not just streaming presentations to an audience,” said Bornstein. “That’s not interactivity, and you’re not going to learn anything about those people.”

Bornstein and his team got a wake-up call about the necessity of interactive virtual events once the pandemic hit in 2020. They were in the middle of a big company tour and had to end it abruptly. Instead of hosting the next big event, they quickly shifted it into a virtual format. Then, they began brainstorming ways to collect valuable first-party customer information.

Instead of giving out free products and asking attendees to meet with event speakers (as in a live event), Bornstein’s team decided to offer interactive digital content options to keep audiences engaged in their virtual environment.

There are many interactive technologies available, so marketers would be wise to incorporate them into virtual events. The key differentiator between boring and engaging events may lie in the way they bring viewers into the experience.

“The smart marketers out there are not building virtual events to be presentations,” said Bornstein. “They’re building virtual events as real experiences.”

The post 3 ways to optimize first-party data collection appeared first on MarTech.

“Cookies have been what we’ve really focused on to do everything that we do as marketers,” Zachmann said. “This big change that’s happening, and not to be dramatic, but we’re calling it the cookie apocalypse.”

Here’s some cookie apocalypse numbers: Chrome accounts for more than 50% of all browser usage. So, when third-party cookies are gobbled off Google’s browser, that’s a loss of 50+% of that information. That’s on top of the 30+% lost when Safari and Firefox killed cookies. You can understand the eschatological reference.

Life after cookies

There are still many ways to gather information, of course. However, they all come with their own identity resolution drawbacks. 

• Personally Identifiable Information data providers (PII): These are companies like who take PII information – first name, last name, email – and build profiles of individuals and households. “The challenges that they’re going to face when they build out these identities is scale,” said Zachmann. “As increased iOS limitations come on, as increased consent management from different states are released, they’re going to have to really work very diligently to make sure that they’re maintaining proper consent to manage these different PII standpoints.” There are also issues about interoperability, he added. These providers like to keep their data to themselves and have companies use their stacks for activation and measurement. 

• Probabilistic data providers: They make probable assumptions about what a group of intenders or users or consumers are going to be doing. They use a subset of seed data, one-to-one level data about someone. That could be an email from a place they’ve registered, then the provider will add data from other places where that email address has been used, like ecommerce, news, etc. This lets them build a pretty good demographic picture of this person, without knowing who they are. From there the provider will use this small seed set of data and blow it out using look-alike modeling or analytics. “It can be very effective as far as getting more scale,” said Zachmann, “but the accuracy gets decreased and oftentimes we’re paying for users who may or may not be interested in the offer we have on the table.”
• Authenticated hashed email (HEM) data providers: They take regular email addresses and encoding them using a cryptographic hashing function. This creates an obfuscated string of characters, or hash, to represent the email. This creates an identifier that doesn’t share restricted information and can then be used as a single unified identity used for tracking across channels and devices. relate to either household propensities, intent, behaviors, contextual reading behaviors. “The problem with these hashed emails is that they only have about a 20% to 40% reach,” said Zachmann. “Because they’re hashed and because hashed email really can’t be either denominized or shared … you kind of have to stay in their world or in their sandbox.”
• Data Management Platform (DMP) data providers: These are companies like Oracle or Lotame and others that build backbones of data. They use their own first- and second-party data and assign a proprietary ID to them. “Tricky part about DMP’s is that while they have large scale they don’t often have the ability to have their ID interoperable between other platforms,” said Zachmann. “Like moving the ID to say the trade desk where you want to activate your ads or moving it to a measurement partner that you already use. Oftentimes those ID’s right now don’t talk together and it’s really difficult to do addressability and measurement when the DMP’s ID is more insulated.”
• App data providers: They collect information about where and when their app users engage in content and make purchases. And they’re able to stitch that data to a household IP, which gives them yet more data. They are in the midst of their own “APPocalypse.” Apple now requires them to get users’ consent for collecting data. Although Google is dragging its feet on the issue, they are moving in that direction and already require apps to disclose what is being collected and why. “I think right now the opt in rates across the US is only about 24% of iOS users who are opting in to be targeted on their device,” said Zachmann. 
• CTV: A lot of the people who cut the cord with cable TV are using connected TV devices like Roku and Fire TV Stick. Those devices have IDs and the companies combine that with your IP address and first party data to create the information they sell. “They have a known measurement stack and are becoming a bigger part of the pie,” said Zachmann. They can be part of marketers’ data mix, but not all of it, he added.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

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There may be a solution

The best currently available solution is also one of the hottest new buzzwords: Clean rooms. 

These use privacy-enhancing technology which lets data owners (including brands and publishers) share customer first-party data in a privacy-compliant way. This makes it possible for first-party data for the same person, from different sources, to be combined even while they remain anonymous. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about data clean rooms

“They’re really … shaking up the identity landscape because they’re providing this system where you can go in, put in your data [and] they’re going to take care of it for me,” said Zachmann. “They’re going to cleanse it, make sure all the opt outs are removed, make sure everything is done, and all the consent management profiles are maintained.” They’re a good way to deal with both interoperability and privacy issues, he added.

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