The Builder is based on templates and no-code modules allowing non-technical staff to collaborate on landing page creation. Stensul is emphasizing that this is not a repurposed email creation tool but a separate solution.

Why we care. The trend is for vendors who built their business on offering solutions for niche parts of the customer experience to seek its broader application. We have already seen vendors offering sophisticated email content capabilities pivot to offering those capabilities to experiences beyond email. Stensul’s territory is creation rather than content, but it makes sense that the Stensul platform would look to support creation and collaboration in other areas.

This reflects, of course, the need for marketers to think and strategize across multiple channels rather than one, no matter how important the email channel might be.

Dig deeper: Stensul is first email creation platform to integrate with Pardot

Marketo Engage integration. Stensul’s email creation capabilities have for some time been integrated with Adobe Marketo. It’s now announcing an API that will allow users within Stensul to embed Marketo forms in landing pages and upload the HTML to Marketo Marketing Activities with a single click.

The post Email creation platform Stensul expands its offering to landing pages appeared first on MarTech.

Digital asset management (DAM) stores and organizes all of an organization’s digital assets — images, PDFs, photographs, audio, video and even virtual reality or other cutting-edge formats.

It is the “single source of truth,” where marketers can find every relevant version of media assets created for the brand. A DAM also adds metadata that can provide information on anything the marketer might want to know before using it. These include things like does the company have perpetual rights to use a photograph, whether the legal team has approved a video, and if an infographic or whitepaper was checked for brand design standard compliance.

How do companies use DAM?

Marketing agencies might leverage DAM technology to maintain consistency across in-house content and creatives developed by partners. B2B businesses might draw on the benefits of a centralized hub for sales collateral and event marketing materials. DAMs are being integrated with other technologies, especially content management systems and digital experience platforms, to unify marketing asset management and distribute digital content directly to the channels where they’re consumed.

Why are so many organizations using DAMs?

First is consumer expectations.

Nearly three quarters of customers expect companies to understand their unique wants and needs — up from two-thirds in 2020, according to the fifth edition of Salesforce’s The State of the Connected Customer. The benefits of this personalization are clear. Companies using more granular personalization experience significant gains in conversions, revenue per visitor and average order value, according to an Incisiv Adobe study.

Second is the expanding number of channels and devices consumers are using.

DAMs make it easier to create and repurpose marketing content according to the different needs of the medium and format. They also support the entire content lifecycle – from upstream creative to downstream delivery. They support work-in-progress for content, speeding asset workflows, reviews and approvals, as well as connecting with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva and Microsoft Office.

This guide is for marketers who are looking to enhance their campaigns with digital assessment management technologies. Here’s what’s inside:

• Capabilities of digital asset management platforms
  • Workflow management
  • File formats and handling
  • Asset conversion, editing and customization
  • Distribution and user permissions management
  • Search and metadata
  • Digital rights and corporate governance management
  • Reports and analytics
  • Data storage and security
  • Integrations

• What are the benefits of using a digital asset management (DAM) system?

Capabilities of digital asset management platforms

Digital asset management platforms have everything from legacy features, like file management, to emerging capabilities due to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Here is a detailed look.

Workflow management

DAM systems differ in the extent of their workflow management capabilities. Some allow collaboration through @ tagging, while others have more full-fledged project management offerings. This can help marketing teams, along with outside creative resources, communicate about changes while an asset is in development or being updated.

Later, they can allow for approvals to be obtained from brand managers, execs and the legal team, while some systems also facilitate asset distribution. These capabilities may be built into the core platform or offered as an add-on or integration. Most DAMs are SaaS and can be accessed from browsers, but some have developed native apps.

File formats and handling

One area of differentiation is the ability to manage a variety of file formats. Most support common popular video, image and audio formats. However, if your workflow requires the use of a specialized format you need to ensure any system you’re considering can handle it.

Asset conversion, editing and customization

Some platforms allow an asset uploaded in one format to be downloaded or distributed in another — with conversions happening on the fly. Also, some have lightweight editing capabilities within the platform. To be clear, connections with common image editing software (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) are typically more useful.

Distribution and user permissions management

The content production supply chain can involve many departments, agencies, freelancers and more. The ability to provide flexible permissions, so the right people have access to the right assets –– and only the right assets –– is very valuable.

Within agencies, in particular, these capabilities can give clients/customers convenient self-service capabilities. It also lets large enterprises maintain a consistent brand message across geographies and verticals, while still letting marketers and salespeople can help themselves to the materials they need.

Search and metadata

One of the most important benefits of a DAM is the ability to find assets after they’ve been created and filed away. Most providers now use artificial intelligence, either proprietary or through a partnership, for image and video recognition and tagging. Vendors are also exploring ways to use AI and machine learning to find insights and automate content transformations based on usage patterns.

Digital rights and corporate governance management

Most marketers license content from individual creators or stock libraries. DAMs can keep track of the specific license terms governing each piece of content, ensuring they’re not used in the wrong market, an unapproved context or after license expiration.

Corporate brand guidelines, as well as timelines associated with particular marketing campaigns, can also typically be managed with DAM functionality.

Reports and analytics

Analytics capabilities allow marketers to trace the return on the investment made in the development of digital media. They can also determine which assets are used most often and in what ways, proividing insights for planning future content creation.

Data storage and security

The majority of DAM providers partner with Amazon Web Services or Google to host their software and their clients’ assets. This means following those companies’ policies for geographical distribution, backups and security protocols. However, some players offer clients a variety of options for data hosting. This is useful for enterprises working with strict data governance regulations.

Integrations

Since a DAM is meant to be the central “single source of truth” repository for all of a brand’s assets, it must integrate well with the rest of your martech stack. Vendors differ greatly in terms of the number and types of integrations they offer. Some are beginning to specialize in serving a specific sector with unique integration needs, such as online retailers using product information management systems.

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

What are the benefits of using a digital asset management system?

Digital asset management systems can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.

The specific benefits of using a digital asset management platform include – but are not limited to – the following:

• Improved communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
• More efficient utilization of existing resources.
• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals.
• Speed the conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types.
• More efficient creation and distribution of assets to martech and adtech systems.
• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms.
• Ease of presenting a more consistent brand face to the customer.
• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution.

Read next: Does your organization need a digital asset management platform?

The post What is digital asset management and how can it help you? appeared first on MarTech.

Passive collaboration

“Passive collaboration realizes its value when project details and collaborative elements are visible and managed, and when its results are visible and managed well,” said Patrick Rohlfsen, principal consultant for work management software company Wrike, at The MarTech Conference.

These are types of collaboration occur in emails and other messages that don’t require an immediate response. In the old days, they were the assignments that were dropped in a person’s physical inbox at their desk.

“Passive collaboration is becoming more integrated into your [digital] work stream now,” said Rohlfsen. “For a long time now companies have used tickets or request forms to collaborate with clients or employees, but I’m seeing more desire from people now for a simpler way for others to make requests of them.”

A lot of current work management technology deals with supporting passive collaboration, allowing multiple team members to work simultaneously on a project, according to their individual work timelines.

“It’s not uncommon for marketing or IT teams or legal teams to build a request form — something simple that can standardize the requests and integrate them into their work stream,” said Rohlfsen. “The expectation is going to be that if you want me to do something for you, you’re going to need to put your requests in the same place where I manage all the rest of my work.”

Collaboration becomes easier or more efficient when everybody knows where to find it, all in one place. But committing too much work to this passive mode risks taking the “human element” out of work. That’s where active collaboration comes in.

Active collaboration

Active collaboration is those real-time interactions that happened during in-person meetings at offices or on video conference platforms like Zoom.

“Active collaboration realizes its value when you realize the potential we have as human beings,” said Rohlfsen. “The more intentional we are about our relationships, our tendencies, the faster we get to that magic collaborative point. The more thought we give to creating environments and experiences for stakeholders, the better the results can be as project managers.”

Visual cues increase the potential of a breakthrough during active collaboration. To make the most of these occasions when multiple people are actively brainstorming with one another, use a digital whiteboard or encourage screen-sharing.

Also, to make active collaboration more efficient, and more inviting for those who attend, limit the time for these meetings when appropriate. In many cases, the “magic” can happen in a 10-minute meeting. Resist falling back on the default 30-minute time block in people’s digital calendars.

After the active collaboration session, produce some kind of record of the ideas that were shared. Maybe it’s a screenshot of the whiteboard or a video of the meeting. This record has action items that can now be integrated into the passive-collaboration workflow, bridging the two modes of collaboration.

It’s very important to keep in mind that humans have worked face to face since the dawn of time, and when we put our heads together, we can do incredible things. We can deliver projects faster, we can be more efficient with our resources, we produce better products when we work closely together and we collaborate more effectively.

By combining active and passive collaboration, organizations build stronger relationships between team members that communicate actively in real time, while retaining the advantages of passive work that can get done any time.

Dig deeper: How work management tools are connecting marketing teams

The post How to improve efficiency by combining two kinds of collaboration appeared first on MarTech.

Creating new meeting spaces in a digital office

“The fact is that any company that becomes successful becomes ‘distributed’,” said Howard Lerman, founder & CEO of Roam, a cloud-based headquarters for remote staff. “You have engineering centers, people in the field, people in flex spaces, remote team members. Any company that succeeds has people anywhere, and frankly, even before the rise of remote work, distributed engagement was already broken.”

Roam, currently in beta with about two dozen enterprise and smaller-sized clients, allows users to navigate a floor plan where each employee has their own office and can move around and meet with their colleagues.

Large organizations can build multiple floors in Roam that resemble an office building, with each floor serving a different department or function. Conference rooms hold more people for formal meetings, while a theater includes a “stage” for Zoom-style video presentations.

Dig deeper: Top 3 marketing use cases for the B2B metaverse

Employees have a bird’s eye view of who is at their desk, which employees are meeting with each other and the status of individual users. This way, team members can know at a glance if someone is available for an informal meeting.

“There are too many meetings,” said Lerman. “Things that should take two people five minutes right now are scheduled for 60-minute Zoom meetings with eight people next week. We’ve been living in a world where our workflow supports the technology, and what we need to do is get to the reverse.”

Supporting workflow and individual preferences

Instead of structuring a team’s workflow with lots of large-scale formal meetings, remote work apps put employees in the driver’s seat, giving them flexibility to meet briefly when they need to.

The average meeting time in Roam is eight and a half minutes, according to Lerman. Of the five hours the average user spends in Roam, only 80 minutes are spent in meetings.

“Most Roam members see their overall meeting times cut by 50% because you can just walk over to someone and meet with them right now instead of scheduling everything in the future,” he said.

Users can also personalize their work area in Roam similar to a social media profile, with family pictures, books they like and other preferences. There’s even an option to play a brief three-second entrance tune when a user enters or leaves a meeting space.

But of course, serious work must also get done. And important work processes have to fit in with the digital experience provided by remote work apps.

Frameable Spaces, a remote work app launched by Frameable, also uses a floor plan and personal offices to support collaboration. Their clients include Amazon, Uber, Airbnb and HubSpot, among others.

“In terms of integrations, you’ve chosen tools you want to use,” said Adam Riggs, Frameable’s founder and CEO. “From a strategic perspective, we don’t want to pick and choose [integrations].”

He added, “We’ve invested heavily in excellent video technology so multiple people can screen-share at the same time.”

Using screen sharing, team members can be logged into other critical work tools individually and then show their screens and share ideas with colleagues. Another use case Riggs pointed out was that Frameable Spaces could be used as a bridge for two separate physical offices. This way, one team could be in an office building together and know instantly who is on call at the other physical office by looking at Frameable Spaces — and the team at the other location would know the same about the first team.

The emphasis here is on synchronous work, whether physically together or remotely connected.

“Without being outright against asynchronous work, we think synchronous enables a variety of talent types to work together,” said Riggs. “It doesn’t have to be ‘camera on’ all the time, but it’s important to have a flow. Email and chat alone do not deliver that.”

Dig deeper: Why we care about AR & VR

Building workplace culture with virtual events

Remote work apps like Roam and Frameable Spaces bring colleagues back into a shared space, digitally. They allow clients to customize the office layout to reflect the company that employees work for, replacing some of the needs that physical offices served, while making work more efficient and flexible for a new era of “distributed” organizations.

Neither, by design, is immersive. Instead, care goes into the experience to provide nuance to virtual interactions.

For instance, in Roam, when people go into the large theater for presentations, they encounter several levels of interaction coded into the UX. First, a user can pick which row to sit in audience. Once seated, they can chat with others in their row, but not with the rest of the theater, just like in the buildup to an in-person PowerPoint. Meanwhile, only those on the “stage” can be seen and heard by everybody, which removes much of the confusion and chaos of massive multi-user Zoom calls.

But in this brave new world of remote work, some companies are experimenting with immersive virtual events. Party.Space, a B2B metaverse platform, hosted a virtual company retreat for Zapier and a Halloween quiz for Google.

Party.Space’s CEO and founder Yurii Filipchuk makes a clear distinction between virtual spaces for work, which handle the brass tacks of Google Docs and task managers, and his own platform, which provides a virtual space for socialization.

“Certainly, any work process is about efficiency and results, but they can hardly be achieved without a social component,” said Filipchuk. “To be more productive, a person needs to feel an emotional bond with his company and colleagues. And here the metaverse comes in.”

He added, “Organizations should create an environment for non-formal social communication as part of their remote format implementation. And again, the metaverse is an excellent tool for it as you can host whatever parties, gatherings and meetings you need, and unite all your team members globally.”

Party.Space hosts fully-immersive virtual 3D spaces that are also easy to use and browser-supported, so that users don’t need any additional hardware to participate. These party spaces are customized to reflect a company’s culture and to keep workers interested with a dynamic environment to explore. Plus, gamification is also included, in the form of themed quizzes.

Remote work is potentially less social, with more distractions, said Filipchuk. Because of this, companies need to step up and make the digital work experience more engaging and persistent.

The post How new remote work apps and virtual meetings are transforming employee experience appeared first on MarTech.

What’s interesting, of course, is why the big deal happened and how it fits into Adobe’s overall strategy.

It’s all about roots. My contention is that this all stems from Adobe’s roots. The big players in what was once known as the “marketing cloud” space, but might now be better called the “customer experience” space, each approached it from a different direction. Salesforce, of course, had started out as a cloud-native offering for sales teams. The clue is in the name. Oracle came out of computing and data, as did SAP.

Adobe, which can actually be credited with creating the first fully-fledged marketing cloud, ahead of IBM and Hewlett Packard (remember when they were in the race?), came out of creative and content, as well as analytics (Omniture).

“The reality is, as any designer knows all too well, that when you work in an organization, creating content is a collaborative process.” That may be obvious, but as Stensul founder and CEO Noah Dinkin points out in a thoughtful commentary on the acquisition, this insight is the connecting thread in Adobe’s acquisition strategy (Stensul is a collaborative platform for email creation).

From Workfront to Figma. At the end of 2020, Adobe acquired the work management platform Workfront. One distinguishing feature of Workfront is that it is absolutely not what Dinkin would call a “single-player tool.” It gives stakeholders common visibility into workflows, approvals and project status.

Figma, similarly, is not just a sophisticated web design solution. It’s specifically a solution that lets a team collaborate on web design — and not just a team of designers, but content creators, copywriters and other stakeholders.

Beyond specialism. As I said earlier, Adobe was originally known for creative solutions. Illustrator, created back in 1987; Photoshop, acquired by Adobe in 1988; Acrobat, released in 1993; and so on — these and other apps now constituting the Adobe Creative Cloud.

As Stensul points out, these solutions presupposed use by experts: creative specialists. But for many reasons, these specialists don’t work in siloes any more. Among reasons, I could cite:

• Accelerating demands of go-to-market that require many components of projects to be underway simultaneously, rather than tackled serially.
• The increasing complexity and scale of projects, driven not least by the proliferation of content delivery channels.
• The need for many teams to be represented at the virtual, from sales and marketing to product, IT and, yes, often legal.

In doubling down on collaboration, Adobe is acknowleding the way we work now. And to be fair, not just Adobe: Slack did cost Salesforce $27 billion.

Dig deeper: Adobe CEO — Make the digital economy personal

Why we care. Observing these kinds of deals means looking beyond sticker shock. It’s a matter of looking for the underlying trends they highlight. Demandbase acquiring Engagio, for example, shone a light on the need to personalize the ABM journey. Twilio’s acquisition of Segment underlined the need to be able to use data, not just collect and manage it.

Adobe’s strategy reflects the reality that from workflow management to content marketing, specialist input is being superseded by a collaborative team, or even multi-team, effort.

The post Adobe’s Figma acquisition doubles down on collaboration appeared first on MarTech.

Attendance is estimated at 40,000, a sharp decline on the 171,000 reported in 2019. Star guests range from Magic Johnson and Bono to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Genie is out of the bottle. Genie, now generally available, marks the latest stage in Salesforce’s long and winding customer data journey. In 2019, at Salesforce Connections, the CRM giant announced the launch of a CDP within the Salesforce 360 customer platform with Customer 360, its comprehensive product suite. The new CDP would allow advanced audience segmentation, based on access to real-time data, as well as execution against these segments across marketing, commerce and service.

It took a full year to launch the CDP, to be known as 360 Audiences — in the short term, at least. In early 2021, the name was withdrawn in favor of the simple Salesforce CDP. Now we have Genie to conjure with, described in a release as “a hyperscale real-time data platform that powers the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform.”

Genie aims to ingest customer data at scale, across marketing, sales and service, create unified customer profiles, and do it all in milliseconds. In terms of what is announced here, the distinction between Salesforce CDP and Genie is not immediately clear, although Genie is implied to be larger in scale and faster.

There are some new elements, however. Tracking a clear trend in the CDP industry, Genie will be able to query data directly from Snowflake as well as the usual range of marketing channels. There’s also a boutique App Exchange known as the Genie Collection, so far featuring 18 Genie partners, including data activation and enrichment platforms and some high profile data strategy consultancies.

Slack innovations to boost productivity. Salesforce also announced the launch of Slack Canvas and enhancements to Slack Huddles.

• Canvas, available next year, is described as a new “surface” within Slack where teams can organize and curate resources and pull in Customer 360 data.
• New Huddles features include lightweight video and multi-person screen sharing. They will be available in the coming weeks.

Also, a series of major consultancies, including Accenture, Deloitte and PwC are working on Slack roll-outs aimed at specific industries.

Why we care. Long-established as by far the market leader in the CRM space, whatever Salesforce does is news. So far, at the year’s Dreamforce, the talk seems to have been less about CRM and more about CDP (not to be confused). The question to be resolved is whether Genie is a rebranding of Salesforce CDP or an authentic advance on it. Simply calling it “a hyperscale real-time data platform” is not enough to make it something other than a CDP, especially when it’s actually described as CDP on the Genie Collection home page.

With the Slack innovations, even if Canvas looks a long way down the road, Salesforce might catch a wave. Collaboration — and indeed remote collaboration — is very much front-of-mind, not just for marketers but across business units.

Dig deeper: Salesforce unveils features to boost automation for marketing and sales

The post At Dreamforce, a new data platform and enhancements to Slack appeared first on MarTech.

At most companies, martech procurement goes through a formal request process involving reviews by legal, finance, procurement, other IT professionals and maybe information security. This is when buyers in procurement are your friends.

That’s why it is essential to foster positive relationships with people in the decision-making process. You’re not alone and need to partner with others. As Taylor Swift will tell you, it’s all about #squadgoals. 

To be sure, we weren’t placed on earth to shepherd requests through all of these bureaucratic hoops. However, it’s important to understand the organizational hurdles so they don’t stymy marketing. 

Many people need to chime in

While everyone on the team should have at least a passing knowledge of this process, it’s best to pick a couple of people to handle them. They can be the SMEs who understand the needs and quirks of everyone involved. In particular, they should get to know the various approvers in the process early on. That way, when there’s a rush request from a VIP stakeholder, they’re more likely to get a positive response. 

It’s also a good idea to get to know executive assistants and chiefs of staff. These folks can make a lot of things easier or a lot more difficult. They can also help track down the CEO mid-flight to approve or sign something. Something I’ve had to do!

Dig deeper: How to leverage intent and engagement in the buying cycle

Gather the essential information

Keep in mind, anyone working closely with a C-suite approver is bombarded with requests from people who want that top exec to do something. So, when you get in touch, make their lives easier by having all the information they’re going to want. That way they will prioritize your request ahead of the ones requiring them to do more work. 

The essential information:

• What’s needed? For instance, does the executive need to approve and/or sign something?
• The why. What’s the justification for the purchase?
• Who has OK’d it. If your organization doesn’t have a procurement system, you’ll need to get creative with documenting previous approvals.
• What’s at stake? Is this saving us money? If this purchase isn’t made, who can’t do their job?
• Deadlines. Does the exec need to sign a contract within the next two hours to get the special vendor discount? 

This will let the assistant understand exactly what needs to happen by when and why.

While all this may seem ancillary to your “real” job, it’s anything but. Getting martech procurement approval at the right time can literally be the difference between success and failure. To paraphrase the old proverb: For want of a signature, the campaign was lost.

The post Winning the martech procurement process appeared first on MarTech.

Here are four tactics to help your team adapt.

Improve visibility and centralize

Virtual meetings, chat apps, automated calendars and workflow management software all became necessary to bring together teams from remote workspaces. In many cases, these remote work tools brought better visibility to small or subtle tasks that slipped under the radar in a traditional work environment.

The next step is to make sure all the key people can see into the workflow.

“You would want to have visibility across the board about what’s happening and who is delivering what at which time,” said Annie Schneider, senior product marketing manager for Wrike, a Citrix company, in her presentation at The MarTech Conference (scroll down to watch the video of their session).

The work can be consolidated into a calendar or united around a specific project, like a campaign or major content project.

“It could be looking at some sort of bird’s eye view or dashboard, or things that are coming in, so you have the view of things that are coming and things that are already live,” said Schneider.

This unified view into the work can also be divided by regions, according to the specific countries or timezones where a global workforce is doing their work.

Dig deeper: What is digital transformation?

Encourage effective collaboration

At each step in the creation of a project, individual team members have to be able to mark their progress and move the project forward.

“There needs to be an easy way to collaborate on asset creation, including proofing and approvals,” Schneider said. “There also needs to be an easy way to control versions of the assets, and the ability to track who made the change.”

One especially important tool for effective collaboration is an audit log that team members can sign, and also have the ability to revert and go back after a change is made in the project.

It’s up to leadership, in coordination with IT or a committed martech team, to make sure that members have the right access to the workflow, and that the user experience is seamless.

“Marketers thrive when they’re able to do their work all in one place instead of toggling between multiple tools,” said Schneider. “So on the back end of this, it means the tools and processes in martech are connected in a way that the transition from one tool to another is seamless to the user.”

Remove bottlenecks

The traditional office environment is very dependent on meetings, where everybody stops work and waits for the next cues to happen. This creates bottlenecks with a truly remote team that is dispersed in different regions and timezones.

“Because of the evolving global workspace, work often doesn’t get accomplished in the same location or pretty much never does anymore,and it usually doesn’t get accomplished at the same time,” said Schneider. “People have to sometimes wait 12 hours to move along on a project collaboration with their counterparts across the globe.”

When team members can’t have conversations about the work, the technology that manages the project should be able to guide members instead. Individuals will have the ability to see directly for themselves at what stage the project is, instead of learning this indirectly through other team members in conversation or meetings.

Track results and optimize

When marketing projects are centralized using digital tools, this also makes it easier for the team to track the project’s results.

“It’s important to be able to track results of your marketing activities and the impact that they actually make,” said Schneider.

By comparing the impact of campaigns and projects with the individual tasks that go into creating it, the marketing team can get a better handle on ROI and optimize the workflow with fewer steps on future projects.

“It’s all connected because data gives you the information that you need to optimize your content and the use of your marketing channels in an effective way,” said Schneider. 

She added, “This means that because marketing has such diverse functional teams within one department, companies have to be very thoughtful when selecting a work collaboration tool to ensure that it has the capabilities to address the needs of the entire marketing workflow and enable marketers to complete the whole process — from content creation to publishing, as well as including optimization, all in one place.”

Reimagining collaboration: Removing barriers to better output from Third Door Media on Vimeo.

The post 4 strategies to help marketing teams improve workflow and collaboration appeared first on MarTech.

He gave us the grand tour, which included a cozy and scattered live/work area and what looked like a full-blown production studio. Despres had been making some remarkably interesting mixed media content, and I was eager to understand his creative process. Before I had the chance to get into any probing questions, he kindly explained it was well past his bedtime, and he had an early morning. I checked my watch, and it was only 7 p.m., and then, as if on cue, Despres was gone. He had logged off.

Yes, this was a virtual meeting, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. The oldest and arguably most successful virtual world or metaverse Second Life (SL) had been our first meeting place. The platform allowed me to meet and chat with someone who lived across the globe, in a different time zone, while feeling like he lived right down the street.

Despres and I — or Bernhard Drax as he is known outside of SL — met several times after that first fateful meeting. He was a regular content contributor to the publication I founded almost 15 years ago, SLentrepreneur, dedicated to “making money in the metaverse.” For years, I managed a global team of writers, photographers and editors, all within the virtual world of SL. I knew immediately that the platform offered something extraordinary. However, it would be over a decade later before anyone in my profession would start taking the metaverse seriously.

Despres has been heavily involved with virtual spaces for almost twenty years and has become my go-to for all things related to building and engaging virtual communities. Despres and I eventually met several times in person and became fast friends. I interviewed him while he was attending Augmented World Expo in San Jose, and we presented together at AWE Europe in Munich. It was a HUGE highlight of that trip to explore Despres’ home city of Munich together, IRL or “in real life.”

I recently asked him to share his knowledge with my XR students at the University of Oregon. What follows are the top ten insights from our lively discussion. You can view the entire interview on my Twitch channel and several other XR-themed expert interviews.

Ten rules of the road for metaverse marketing

1. Understand the true potential of the platform

The term metaverse has been around for a long time and only recently has been co-opted by companies claiming that they have built or are building a metaverse. A true metaverse does not exist. It is a purely aspirational concept that would allow for an open, connected and interoperable network of virtual environments dedicated to social interaction. The metaverse is meant to be like a 3D Internet, where you can digitally move from virtual environment to virtual environment.

Each environment could have a different set of rules, different “owners,” different citizens — similar to different countries if you like – with underlying infrastructure that allows for seamless travel between these virtual worlds. That infrastructure needs to be decentralized and ideally open-sourced so that nobody is left behind and one company doesn’t monopolize our digital universe. A recent Fast Company article discusses this concept and highlights OpenSim or OpenSimulator, an open-sourced network of virtual worlds created in 2007.  

2. Understand the technology and the terminology

It is essential to understand the technology and terminology of virtual platforms. Virtual worlds and the metaverse are different. I would argue that the metaverse is an open and interoperable network of virtual worlds or environments. A “virtual world” is a digital space where you can spend time together and do nothing – you don’t need to play a game, for example – and no headset is required. Accessible 3D virtual spaces that users can access on a tablet, smartphone or laptop offer the same immersion and interaction as headsets or VR-based virtual worlds.

The media uses the term metaverse as a synonym for all the offerings in a virtual space, and often the term is associated with headset-based experiences. Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and anyone else who claims they have built a metaverse, has instead created a privately held, virtual world. These companies, of course, want you and everyone else to believe that they own the metaverse, thereby monetizing the data of its users and potentially monopolizing revenue from the required software to access the space.

3. Get smart on the benefits of immersion

There has been much research on the benefits of using virtual spaces to connect with and engage users. Virtual spaces improve recall of information, provide a greater sense of embodiment and presence, allow for greater interaction and agency, and help limit distractions. There are many different types of immersion: Strategic, tactile, sensory, narrative, spatial and virtual environments can help marketers and comms professionals leverage them all, making their experiences more interactive and less passive.

4. Refer to your audience as residents or citizens instead of users

Using the term “resident,” or “citizen” for virtual world users indicates they have a stake within that community and moves them into an active role instead of a passive one. This tenant reminds me of the great work done by Jonah Sachs and what he terms “empowerment marketing.” One of the tactics of empowerment marketing — forget the consumer and call on the citizen — reminds us that inspired citizens make better brand evangelists than helpless consumers. You can read more about Sach’s empowerment marketing in this great series of articles featuring his work.

5. Understand the differences between consumption devices

Just like you need to become familiar with a new social media platform before launching a campaign on the platform, you need to understand how your audience is consuming the virtual world. Within the splintered virtual world ecosystem, different virtual communities and platforms are consumed through a variety of different devices like smartphones, tablets, PCs, Mac computers, tethered headset devices like the Rift, tetherless headset devices like the Oculus Quest, mixed media devices like Microsoft’s Hololens and mobile VR devices like Google Cardboard.

This is one of the reasons building an interoperable network of virtual worlds is so daunting. There currently is not a set standard method of consuming these immersive environments. Each virtual world has been built to support very specific hardware, so understanding these requirements is essential before diving in.

6. Speak their language

Become familiar with the thriving virtual environments that exist today. Each virtual world requires a different avatar, language, etiquette, etc. If you are building a marketing plan for a virtual space – you need to understand as much as you can about the residents. Some great questions to ask include: What are the demographics of residents? Why are they on the platform? What role or need does the platform play in the life of the resident? What is the unique language of the platform? What are the community norms, rules and regulations?

7. Location, location, location!

Any good marketer understands you need to GO TO your audience, and tapping into an already thriving and active community is much cheaper than building one from scratch. When choosing a location or platform for your virtual experience, a strategic approach is required. The platform you choose can mean the difference between success and failure and should depend on your overall marketing goals and objectives and your target audience. Factors to consider: Who is spending time on the platform, how are people spending their time on the platform, and what is the cost (money/time) to spend time on the platform?

8. Use the design thinking process

Approaching your virtual world or metaverse strategy from a design thinking perspective is essential to make sure you are solving a real problem for the user. Leverage the tenets of design thinking:

1) Empathize with your target audience.

2) Define the problem statement.

3) Ideate.

4) Prototype.

5) Test.

This allows brands to understand residents’ core concerns better and ensure they are using technology to provide solutions rather than just sizzle. Big brands can succeed in virtual spaces if they respect the residents and design for their needs, not focus solely on the brand objectives.

9. Prioritizing short-term economic gains sacrifices resident experience

Today’s economic climate forces companies of all sizes to continually prove value to investors, with a quick ROI becoming the focal point to succeed. Therefore, it is no wonder that technology companies use short-term tactics to get their user numbers UP at the cost of longer-term considerations for the residents/users. It IS possible to build a lucrative, online platform without selling user data and force-feeding advertising down users’ throats.

For example, SL has slowly but steadily grown over the last decade because it is a freemium or subscription-based model. They rent virtual space to their residents, and the resident can do with it what they want. This business model allows SL not to sell resident data to advertisers. Linden Lab, the creator of SL, also gets about a 9% transaction fee for all virtual goods sold by users on the platform. Philip Rosedale, the founder of SL and an outspoken leader in the virtual world space, positions SL as a place where you can have digital sovereignty. Isn’t that refreshing? Rosedale has rejoined Linden Lab’s board of directors in hopes of providing a viable alternative to Meta’s (Facebook’s) virtual environment, where they are purportedly planning to charge over 40% for transaction fees while at the same time making billions from offering user data to advertisers.

10. Join an active community of virtual world explorers and pioneers

Trying to become familiar with all the virtual environments can be daunting, if not downright impossible. It is much more enjoyable to explore these worlds with natives, who speak the language and can help you learn the customs quickly. Several great communities bring together professionals looking to expand their knowledge in this space. I am involved with the VRAR Association, Augmented World Expo, Despres SL Life Book Club, and I host my own XR Pub Crawl. You can read the highlights from my last XR Pub Crawl with Billie Goldman in this recent post or register to join me LIVE on my birthday, where we’ll explore the latest virtual spaces being used for marketing and communications.

If you’re looking to get additional training on marketing in the metaverse, read my post “Become a Metaverse Marketing Maven,” where I outline some great online resources to help you flex your metaverse muscle. Remember, as I always tell my communications students, with XR and immersive media, we are only limited by our imagination. Together we can build something that will inspire, engage and immerse our digital citizens and communities!  

The post 10 rules for successful metaverse marketing appeared first on MarTech.

“If we just had more time and resources then we could produce a better result.”

This might sound familiar. In fact, most marketing teams are drowning in work, overwhelmed with requests, and unable to keep track of everything that’s happening.

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I’ve worked with marketing teams of all sizes across a wide range of industries and it’s often the same scenario — complete chaos. You’re not alone.

If marketing organizations hope to deliver on the promise of marketing then we must address and fix this fundamental problem. Marketers have a responsibility to recognize and accept that this problem is within their control. 

It’s time for ruthless prioritization.

Accepting limitations

Capacity is arguably the biggest challenge facing marketing teams. In today’s environment there are so many options and avenues to explore in order to pursue the goals of marketing.

There are dozens of ways to reach your ideal customers with new channels and distribution methods popping up constantly. Change is the only constant of marketing. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the persistent barrage of updates and algorithms. And new tools and technologies lure us in with their bold promises of better, faster, and easier results.

On top of it all, the marketing organization is inundated with innumerable requests that pile up and create a massive logjam. 

When will we get all of this work done? And how will we ever achieve our goals?

If we are to be successful as marketers we must first accept our limitations. After all, we have finite time, resources, and energy. 

There is an important difference between the limit of what we can do and the limit of what we can do exceptionally. The most successful marketing teams are the ones that focus on the latter and not the former, which happens to be the lower limit.

I’m fond of the analogy from Jerry Weinberg who calls it the “Law of Raspberry Jam”. The more you spread it, the thinner it gets.

For our marketing efforts to be impactful we must stop spreading ourselves, our budget, and our team too thin.

Prioritizing ruthlessly

As marketers, we like to think that great marketing should be complicated or complex. After all, doesn’t more effort and involvement imply, and justify, an increased outcome?

There isn’t enough capacity, time, or budget to waste on marketing that doesn’t work. We must be critical of every initiative from the beginning before embarking down a road destined for disappointment.

For every initiative we undertake, we must understand how big of an impact it will have on our results and how confident we are in our ability to achieve that impact.

In short, we must prioritize ruthlessly.

Prioritizing ruthlessly is a simple process that:

1. Applies an objective and consistent evaluation filter to every initiative and commitment
2. Rigorously focuses on ensuring confidence and consensus among decisions
3. Allows the marketing organization to evolve and make smarter bets over time

In other words, every initiative must pass a trial by fire. And every decision is revisited, reviewed, and used to tweak the prioritization process. 

The obvious outcome is that only a few priorities emerge as worth executing. But the secondary outcome is just as valuable, if not more-so.

Stop turning around

Imagine taking a road trip and making a few wrong turns. No big deal, right?

Now imagine making wrong turns so often, and needing to turn around time and again, that you run out of gas before you reach your destination.

That’s exactly how most marketing teams approach their marketing. Taken off course time and again from internal requests, the promise of a new channel, or adopting new technologies.

Prioritizing ruthlessly helps prevent your team from wasting time, money, and effort on useless activities, assets, and endeavors that wouldn’t have a major impact anyway. In other words, it stops your team from having to turn around more than necessary.

Marketing strategy is what sets the final destination. Ruthless prioritization is the GPS system to keep your team on the fastest and most direct route.

How to prioritize ruthlessly

There are four steps to prioritizing ruthlessly and the entire process is collaborative, fosters useful discussion, and takes little time.

Here are the steps, demonstrated via example of a marketing team considering which marketing events to pursue and invest in.

Step 1: List out all of the potential activities, efforts, or decisions

Write down every event and the high-level details (name, date, brief description). Share the list with the team who will help evaluate the potential alternatives to select from. Everyone will have their own opinions and biases of which events are best, which should be chosen, and which are a waste of time. These opinions aren’t bad (they might actually be right), but they can’t be accepted blindly.

Step 2: Map the list of items onto the prioritization matrix

One at a time, place each event onto the map based on the two axes:

• Potential: How much will this move us towards our goal and produce the desired result?
• Confidence: How certain are we that we can realize the expected impact?

For instance, one event may have a huge attendance of ideal customers (a high potential) but it may be our first time attending that event (low confidence).

The team — as a group — decides where to place the item on the map. This is where the discussion and debate enter the picture. Go back and forth until the team comes to a consensus on a reasonable place for the item.

During this mapping process, the team can discuss ways to mitigate risks, improve odds, and thereby move the placement of items on the map. For example, attending a big event for the first time is a risk and constitutes low confidence, but perhaps there are partners you could work with to increase the confidence of being able to successfully participate or sponsor the event. If so, that would raise the confidence of attending the event.

Step 3: Identify the Top Choices

Items located in the top right quadrant of the map will reflect those that have a high potential of success and that the team has a high degree of confidence in achieving. These are the top choices, but we’re not done yet. It’s time to be even more ruthless in our prioritization by passing each of these items through a series of filtering questions.

If there are too many items in the top right quadrant, take only those items that fall within the extreme top right corner of the map and continue on.

Step 4: Evaluate & Reject Options

The last step is to take each item and ask the following questions, keeping in mind that eliminating options is desirable. If too many options pass through your filtering questions then the team’s assumptions or objectivity may be faulty.

Here are the questions to answer for each option:

• Why now? Justify the immediate need and identify dependencies.
• What’s better? Compare the alternatives to this option and ensure it is the superior choice.
• What if we don’t? Uncover the risks of not choosing this option, or if it is chosen and fails.
• Are we ready? The final question to ensure that the team accepts this as a priority.

After answering each of these questions for the remaining items, the decision will become clear. The items that have survived this quick yet rigorous process are worthy of becoming full fledged priorities—and nothing else.

These are a starting set of filtering questions you can use. As your team embraces the process and revisits the outcomes of their choices, they will develop more filtering questions that will help in further tightening the selection criteria.

Dig deeper: 6 steps to help you prioritize tasks when everything is a priority

Building marketing momentum

Prioritizing ruthlessly doesn’t end once you decide and commit to the finite set of actions you and your team will pursue. Having a retrospective at the conclusion of every effort is a vital part of reflecting on whether or not it was a valuable priority to have selected. 

Whenever an initiative is completed and it was deemed a successful and worthwhile priority, celebrate with your team. And if it wasn’t successful or worthwhile, reevaluate the assumptions and data points used to accept it as a priority, then tweak the prioritization filter accordingly. This often takes the form of notes, guidelines, and additional questions you and your team develop over time.

Marketing isn’t going to slow down. In fact, it’s only going to keep accelerating. Things will continue to change because that’s what marketing does best.

The most successful marketing teams are those who can embrace the volatility, maintain the requisite speed, and prioritize ruthlessly.

The post Ruthless prioritization: The key to marketing momentum appeared first on MarTech.