Sendoso, a sending platform, and Alyce, a corporate gifting platform, entered an asset purchase agreement that will combine the personalization power, automation capabilities, smarts and global scale behind the two strategic gifting companies.

Kris Rudeegraap, CEO of Sendoso, explained in a blog post that the company will infuse its AI functionality into Alyce’s recipient-first personalization capabilities to:

• Automatically trigger personalized smart sends based on sending data and social signals;
• Customize the recipient experience; and
• Incorporate strategic gifting into campaigns on a global scale.

“We built this category and now, after learning from hundreds of thousands of users and tens of millions of gifts sent, we’re building the future of AI-enhanced, hyper-personalized gifting,” wrote Rudeegraap in the post. “From one-person startups to Fortune 100 enterprises, we have a solution for every team and company size. We’ve joined forces to create the largest and only gifting solution you will ever need, with the most robust gifting dataset and the security, privacy, governance, scale and service levels you require.”

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Specifically, the innovations include:

• Campaign Outcomes, which allows customers to pick their ideal campaign outcomes and then utilizes Demandbase’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) to optimize each impression and campaign strategy;
• Campaign Influence Metrics that reportedly make it easier to review B2B-specific influences, such as increases in website engagement, pipeline and revenue;
• Creative Library Enhancements that provide digital marketers with more control over their creative assets to create and launch native, video and connected TV campaigns within the campaign builder; and
• Job Level and Job Function Exclusions designed to prevent impressions from being served to people outside of the buying group, regardless of their intent level.

“While our expert teams will always be here to partner with customers on successful campaign strategy, we have also always had a significant AI component behind our DSP and are excited to offer more self-serve capabilities,” said Gareth Noonan, General Manager, Advertising at Demandbase, in a statement.

The post Demandbase Reveals AI-Powered Advertising Innovations appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Forrester’s recently published research report, “Navigating The 2023 Downturn: B2B Marketing Executives,” further explores how to maximize interactions with your marketing team/talent, customers, board, partners and other company functions to drive growth. This further solidified the recommendations from our prior analysis, highlighting focus areas for the following stakeholders as critical to driving growth:

1. Team & Talent

Contrary to the prevailing sentiment that organizations are cutting staff, 39% of B2B marketing decision-makers at high-growth companies actually planned to increase their personnel budget between 1% to 9%. Further, the share of high-growth companies that planned to increase their personnel budget by the same percentage range jumped to 66%, up from 59% in 2022. (For comparison, 32% of flat-to-declining companies planned to increase personnel budget by 1% to 9% in 2022, which increased to 52% in our most recent survey.)

Additional qualitative feedback revealed that three specialist roles were top of mind: Marketing/RevOps, account-based marketing (ABM) and brand strategy/management. Further, high-growth companies were more likely to increase personnel budget for these specific roles, while flat-to-declining companies were more likely to decrease budget.

2. Customers

Companies can accelerate growth by embracing an experience-led approach that places customers at the forefront and focuses on connecting multiple “experiences” — customer, employee, brand and digital — to provide a more engaging and seamless experience. Interestingly, a new priority emerged in the top five to support customer experiences: Continued adoption of digital approaches.

This held true for both high-growth and flat-to-declining companies. There are opportunities to converge audience experiences for efficiencies in the technology, processes, skills and more. The result will be increased engagement that drives exceptional customer experiences.

3. The Board

Marketing executives should change the narrative with the board on how marketing “success” is defined. Since marketing qualified leads (MQLs) fall short as an indicator of marketing’s impact to the business, ending MQL reporting is a great starting point for evolving the performance-metric status quo.

It’s more important to connect marketing activities to business outcomes, as buying group engagement is a better indicator of buying propensity. To connect those actions, organizations must educate the board on the importance of buying groups and marketing’s role in creating and advancing opportunities within them. For high-growth companies, the top three most important objectives marketing is measured against are ROI, revenue lift and market/competitive/customer intelligence.

4. Your Partners

“Achieving B2B revenue and growth via the partner ecosystem/channel” emerged as the new No. 1 marketing priority for high-growth companies. In fact, 56% of high-growth companies planned to maintain or increase their personnel budget for channel marketing. It’s also understood that people alone can’t run a partner ecosystem, as 25% of high-growth companies plan to expand usage of through-channel marketing automation solutions (as opposed to 9% for flat-to-declining companies). Leveraging your partner ecosystem through established relationships, brand recognition, subject matter expertise and/or increased “feet on the street” can be a force multiplier to accelerate revenue growth.

5. Teams Outside Of Marketing

Sales, product, marketing and customer success alignment has been the call to action for driving revenue growth and profitability for years. Companies will grow revenue faster and be more profitable when the revenue engine functions are aligned. In the current economic environment, it’s particularly important to connect siloed functions — experience is critical to digital-savvy buyers who prefer to self-serve, and lack of alignment is readily apparent.

High-growth companies recognize this need, with nearly one-third (32%) planning to improve marketing alignment and collaboration with other departments, including sales and product. Only one-quarter of flat-to-declining companies ranked improving alignment and collaboration as a priority.

B2B CMOs and marketing teams must continue to relentlessly resist reactive business decisions that disrupt the balance between short-term and long-term growth. Comparing year-over-year data, our recommendation is to follow the insights from high-growth companies regarding targeted talent investment:

• Increasing the focus on the customer and buyer experience;
• Evolving the definition of marketing success to business outcomes;
• Engaging your partner ecosystem; and
• Improving cross-organizational alignment.

Barbie Mattie is a VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester.

The post How High-Growth Companies Are Navigating The 2023 Downturn appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The new capabilities include:

• Language personalization: New logic capabilities support multilingual survey deployment and analysis.
• Best/worst question types: The addition of more question types is designed to help survey makers gauge relative preference and importance of choices. This provides a more nuanced understanding of respondent sentiment.
• Multilingual email and SMS collector: Users can send email or text invitations to survey takers in their local language using a simple drop-down menu.

“Marketers, HR leaders, customer experience professionals, small business leaders and more already benefit from SurveyMonkey’s powerful yet easy-to-use platform, which helps them gain important audience sentiment to make strategic business decisions,” said Aleks Bass, VP of Product Management for Momentive, in a statement. “With these new updates, we’re offering our users even more ways to easily personalize their surveys and gain the actionable insights they need.”

The post Momentive Upgrades Survey Creation Capabilities For SurveyMonkey appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Challenge

Lionsgate leaves no stone unturned in its efforts to connect with movie-goers ahead of movie releases. The highly successful North American film company uses various channels, including physical promotional materials such as posters and print graphics.

However, evolving marketing competition highlighted a need for broader ad interactivity capabilities. Many companies in the entertainment industry rely on QR codes to direct scanners to online resources, such as a website that lists showtimes or movie trailers. Given how QR codes proved themselves as successful content gateways, Lionsgate wanted to incorporate them into their marketing, but they needed essential functionalities, such as dynamic editing capabilities, better tracking and stronger data analytics collection.

The Solution

Lionsgate committed to finding a QR code platform that would provide the necessary functionalities its team couldn’t get from their current solution, including:

• On-demand destination edits; and
• Robust location tracking capabilities.

After experimenting with various QR code vendors, Lionsgate quickly identified Beaconstac, a QR code management platform, as the ideal solution to meet its needs.

“I created accounts for the top-three QR code solutions that came up in my research, one of which was Beaconstac,” said Mike Cabellas, a Digital Marketing Consultant at Lionsgate. “I found that the other two solutions weren’t as easy to use. I couldn’t test many dynamic QR code functionalities on the other platforms.”

Entertainment marketing campaigns are prone to multiple pivots, and Lionsgate needed a versatile platform that allowed modifications on demand. Beaconstac’s dynamic QR code offerings, which provide flexibility in link destinations and other customizations post-deployment, enabled Lionsgate to change the links in their preexisting QR codes without having to reprint entirely new material.

Given its breadth of creative offerings, Lionsgate caters to a wide variety of demographics. The company needed a reliable ad-tracking system that gave accurate insights into whether it was reaching the right audience or not. Beaconstac provided the necessary tools to set up an extensive tracking system and helped Lionsgate home in on exact geographical areas to monitor engagement.

The Results

By providing the Lionsgate team with the tools required to improve QR-code-enhanced movie marketing activities, Beaconstac helped significantly bolster engagements worldwide. Using these features, Lionsgate measured more than 12,000 engagements across 65 major cities nationwide.

Through unlimited dynamic modifications and the ability to pinpoint engagements by location, Lionsgate accurately determined whether its marketing messages were hitting the right demographic and adjusted accordingly.

“The platform has performed great,” said Cabellas. “Based on our ROI, it’s been terrific. It’s definitely one of the better purchases we’ve made since I’ve been here. As I’ve said, it just works!”

The post How Lionsgate Boosted Engagement By 12K Impressions With QR Codes appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Studio helps brands create a diverse array of content that is quickly and easily adaptable to deliver better experiences while reducing costs and time spent on developing campaigns. The enhanced DAM capabilities include:

• Video and GIF capabilities;
• Flexible sourcing that enables users to upload existing content or create content on the platform;
• Template creation, which features lock components such as logo placement, fonts and more; and
• Batch creation abilities that allow marketers to create multiple assets at once.

Studio’s release builds on Bynder’s Q1 acquisition of GatherContent, a content operations platform, which sought to add collaborative workflow and editorial processes to enhance Bynder’s content creation capabilities.

“As content continues to be crucial to competing in the digital-first economy, the demands placed on creative teams will only heighten,” said Paul Heiden, Chief Product Officer at Bynder, in a statement. “In the coming years, brands will have to operate amidst economic uncertainty and limited resources, further intensifying the imbalance between the expectations for output and the resources available to fulfill them. We developed Studio in response to this demand, enabling our customers to transform a painstaking manual content creation process into an automated and efficient one and helping them scale up content creation across platforms and markets whilst saving costs. This will allow them to reach their audience well before the competition and thrive faster in a demanding marketplace.”

The post Bynder Unveils Studio, A Unified Digital Content Creation & Templating Solution appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Video has long been recognized as having more impact and a range of advantages over other messaging formats. From brand visibility and recall to a sales tool that can boost conversions, video is the potent tool that can increase customer retention while delivering a better experience. For businesses, video content has never been more important — and sharing videos with customers starts on day one.

Onboarding a new customer is a critical moment and you need to get maximum value from it. Video welcome messages are extremely valuable and can be used in a variety of ways, including turning customers into brand ambassadors and/or providing all the information the customer needs.

Beyond onboarding, key ways of engaging customers through videos include:

After-sales customer service — To ensure customers are getting the maximum value from the product or service that you sell, you can create and share anything from product explainer videos that reduce the need to plow through thick product manuals to more generalized information packages.

How-to guides — An explainer video that shows new customers exactly how to use and maintain what they purchased is one of the best kinds of video content. Explain your product(s) in short and informative video bites that highlight best practices and show how the product solves the pain points that led to its purchase.

Video FAQs are ideal for SEO purposes and elevate your FAQ pages to a new level. Customers with definitive queries about you, your business or your products can be guided straight to your solutions. Look at your existing FAQs or speak to your customer service team about the questions that they get asked the most and answer those queries in an easily digestible format.

Customer testimonials are a blessing and a curse in the connected world; it’s easy (and all too common) for brands to get hundreds of written reviews on different sites and platforms. The problem is that those written reviews are often anonymous or fail to connect with potential customers; putting a face to the claims is much stronger. Video testimonials make it easier to increase customer retention and improve confidence in your brand and products among potential customers.

Have a brand face — Contrary to what social media algorithms might tell us, people buy from people — and what better way to improve brand awareness and increase customer retention than showcasing your people? You could opt for a single face for your company (think of Apple and Steve Jobs), humanize your brand by going behind the scenes or showcase your entire team to reveal a more “human” side of your business.

Get personal — Personalization can be tricky to get right, but it’s the best weapon in your arsenal to increase customer retention. Personalized videos are memorable and speak directly to an existing customer — if they were on the fence about taking advantage of a new service, that advert could be the final convincing message.

Always measure — Look at the analytics on each piece of video that you create. Are they being viewed all the way through? How much more likely is someone to buy a product after watching your video explainer guide? If the conversions aren’t happening, it could be a sign that your CTA isn’t strong enough. If customers “bounce” away in a few seconds, then your hook may not be quite catchy enough.

Increase Customer Retention Through Video

In the E-commerce age, brands often rely on generic sales messages with only an entire, broad demographic intended as its audience. Sales intelligence tools for successful buyers’ journeys can be strengthened and complemented by a personalized sales video when a customer is ending their buying journey. Nurturing clients with bespoke content can go a long way to encouraging them to delve deeper into your products or commit to a purchase.

You don’t have to spend Hollywood-style budgets to create high-value video content that will increase customer retention; even the smallest businesses or brands will have access to the most basic resources, and there are hundreds of online guides that can help you get professional results with very little financial outlay.

Creating video, just like anything else in business, involves constant monitoring and improvement — but the results are transformative. If you’ve yet to make videos for new and existing customers, then there’s a good chance that you’re losing customers to the competitors who are.

Take a closer look at the video-making tools that are available. You don’t need to be Spielberg to create video content that will increase customer retention, improve conversions and grow your profits.

Richard Conn is the Sr. Director of Demand Generation at 8×8, a communication platform and cloud VoIP solution with an integrated contact center, voice, video and chat functionality. Conn is an analytical and results-driven digital marketing leader with a track record of achieving major ROI improvements in fast-paced, competitive B2B environments.

The post The Ultimate Guide For Conducting Customer Support Through Video Interaction appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Folloze Live Events’ release comes at a time where 61% of event organizers indicated their biggest challenge with virtual events was keeping remote attendees engaged, no matter the size. The feature’s key capabilities include:

• A Zoom integration that includes viewing Zoom on a Folloze board, interactive features, registration, event follow up and contextualized content;
• Native support for simu-live and on-demand streaming via industry-standard video hosting platforms, such as Brightcove, Vidyard, Vimeo and Wistia;
• Out-of-the-box simu-live streaming with a native video player;
• Dynamic personalization to provide attendees with targeted experiences;
• Automated registration, private events and orchestration with sales; and
• Granular measurement of attendee engagement, including time spent and content viewed.

“Smaller, high-touch events have always played a critical role in educating and creating relationships with buying teams,” said David Brutman, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Folloze, in a statement. “We have seen growing demand for digitizing those customer engagement touchpoints and being able to execute them at a scale of hundreds of events a year. This requires a true agile model of democratizing the creating and managing of virtual events by any marketer that wants to include it in their demand program. With Folloze Live Events, frontline marketing teams are empowered for the first time with the tools to quickly launch bespoke virtual experiences that engage and move prospects and customers to the next stage in the buyer’s journey.”

For more insights and best practices into executing high-touch events, Folloze is hosting a webinar on Nov. 3 as part of Demand Gen Report’s Strategy & Planning Series. More information on the webinar and event can be found here.

The post Folloze Launches Live Events Solution For Personalized & Targeted Virtual Engagement appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

By now, most companies recognize the value of ABM, as marketing leaders report that ABM increases average deal size and annual revenue. And according to Terminus’ “2020 State of ABM Report,” mature ABM programs account for almost 80% of sales opportunities.

While the results are encouraging, you might discover that ABM is among the more challenging marketing/sales strategies to initiate. After all, rather than responding to an inbound lead, you target companies and set the agenda.

You’re asking someone to opt-in to your offer whether or not they know about your company, product or service. You also don’t know if they are actively in the buying market or even realize they have a problem that you could solve. To help develop an omnichannel message for your target accounts, here’s a six-step ABM process to follow.

1. Set Your Company’s ABM Objectives

Before you can build a target profile, you need to determine what you want to accomplish. This starts with a strategic assessment of your goals and your ability to reach them. For example:

• Do you want to focus on all your products/services, or a select group?
• What are your business priorities? Do you want to increase the average size of your accounts, boost your revenue or build your dominance in a particular industry?
• What type of accounts do you want to target based on size, revenue, industry, location and technology?

2. Build Your Ideal Account Profile Around Key Customer Accounts

Once you know your endgame, it’s easier to identify the accounts that will help build your ideal account profile. Remember, you are not simply looking at one-and-done deals. For example, in addition to sales, your account segmentation strategy will include accounts with the most significant lifetime value.

ABM means selling at the account level — you’re not going after CFOs or even CEOs. You want to reach as many key decision makers as possible within an account, so start by looking at your existing accounts for those where you have reached the most decision makers.

Once you have identified the accounts that best meet your corporate goals, you need to build an ideal account profile based on as much public information, personal account experience and predictive insight as possible. As you dive deeply into the firmographic, demographic and technographic data, look for intelligence that will enable you to target similar accounts with a greater likelihood of becoming your future best customers.

3. Align Sales & Marketing

Internally, ABM needs to be an inclusive process. Just as all decision makers should have input into setting the corporate goals for ABM, the messaging and campaigns used to reach target accounts require sales and marketing teams work together.

Campaigns need to be coordinated, and the marketing message used to generate initial interest among leads must be the same as the sales message that reps use to close an account.

If you have more than one objective for ABM, you may want to build separate, strategically aligned teams of marketing people, sales reps, business development reps and product managers.

4. Craft Your Marketing Message

Creating your message is always a challenge, as you want to find just the right hook to capture a decision maker’s attention. The good news is that when you are working from an ideal account profile, the task can be easier as you know:

• What worked in the past;
• Key wants and needs;
• Likely pain points; and
• Which products and services can offer value.

Remember to keep the focus on your prospective customer. It’s not about what you’re selling but generating interest with the prospect. Your message needs to take a consultative position. Demonstrate that you understand (and care about) their business, can solve a specific problem, expand their capabilities, increase their bottom line and help them become more productive.

For example, rather than push the features of your product or service, the message needs to focus on their industry, such as the problems that can hold a business back and the opportunities awaiting them.

Better still, if you uncover an interesting statistic or fact — maybe something that is helping their competition boost their bottom line — lead with that. Provide enough detail and data to show that you know what you’re talking about and demonstrate how you can work with them to make a difference.

Since your message is directed to a specific account, you can personalize it with industry-specific examples and appropriate solutions for the company’s size and revenue. Again, the more you know, the more personalized you can be.

Furthermore, your experience with similar accounts will help you anticipate a prospect’s questions. You can address these as part of your message.

Once you’ve increased their appetite, demonstrated your consultative capabilities and addressed vital concerns, you need to leave them with a next step or call to action. There’s no value in drumming up interest unless you invite them to engage.

5. Select The Distribution Channels For Your Message

As part of your research, be sure to identify the channels that your target accounts use most often. Where do decision makers go for industry and product updates? Which social platforms do they use in the course of their buying journey?

Once you identify your go-to channels, you’ll need to format your message accordingly. This can include articles, blog posts, videos and even webinars to ensure messaging remain consistent, especially with an omnichannel approach.

6. Monitor, Measure & Adjust

Even with all the effort you’ve invested in developing an ideal account profile and honing your message, your work is never complete. It’s a good practice to continue to enrich your profile, refine your message and set the metrics that best measure success.

Always ask yourself and your team:

• Are we meeting our business objectives?
• Are our initial assumptions correct?
• Is our messaging converting and getting results?
• Are conversions resulting in engagement and, ultimately, sales?
• Where in the buyer’s journey are we connecting with accounts?
• Are we able to contribute to the buying decision?
• Are we enjoying shorter sales cycles?

Although it’s challenging to target your best accounts with the right message, it’s easier when you follow a process that starts with a clear understanding of your goals and a carefully crafted ideal account profile.

Tania Russo is originally from Germany, where she grew up and started her professional journey. She joined 3D2B in 2016 and brought value to client engagement with lead conversions, and overall team spirit and support. In her current role as a Project Manager, Russo manages inside sales teams on a daily basis for inbound/outbound campaign execution, lead generation, account-based marketing, account/contact profiling and campaign planning/tracking. Russo is fluent in German, Italian and English.

The post How To Target Your Best Accounts With The Right Messaging appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The feature leverages 6sense’s Company Graph to retrieve account-level details for the person to whom an ad is served and help customize HTML5 ads with dynamic text or images. Examples include the viewer’s company name or tailored messaging based on account segments created in the 6sense platform. Just like static ads served through 6sense, dynamic ad campaigns are designed to be configured by customers in an entirely self-service manner.

“Display advertising is an essential component of a comprehensive account-based sales and marketing strategy,” said Jason Zintak, CEO of 6sense, in a statement. “With dynamic display ads, our customers have even greater abilities to reach target accounts with highly personalized, relevant ads that drive a better experience and meaningful engagement.”

6sense also recently added an external media campaigns feature to its suite that embeds impression and click-tracking pixels within ads. This feature enables customers to track account-level engagement metrics within 6sense regardless of the platform used to serve display ads.

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