Guide to what you missed at the fall 2021 MarTech Conference

As the upcoming spring edition of MarTech approaches, we thought it would be a good opportunity to look at all of the great insights and intelligence shared the last time we put on this show.

For the fall 2021 edition of the MarTech Conference, our theme was “Data. Decisions. Results” because nobody today would think of driving customer experience without data. All strategy – if it’s worth anything – is data-based, and technologies ingest and create data at a growing scale and speed.

Over those two days, we looked at the myriad ways marketers are managing and making decisions based on data. We also hosted dozens of presentations focused on some of the key systems powering marketing organizations.

We’ve taken those presentations and distilled them down to articles that you can reference, share and use in your next team discussions about marketing technology. That list is featured below.

And please join us online — for FREE — at the next MarTech Conference from March 29-30. This time, our theme is “The customer journey of a lifetime.” We hope to see you there.

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Marketing operations

• 2021 Stackie Awards announced at MarTech: See the winners: Once a year marketers lean on their Powerpoint skills to show just how connected their marketing platforms are.

• Stackies 2021: How the winning companies think about their marketing stacks: For example, Juniper Networks’ strategy is based on what it calls the ‘three Ds’ : “Deconstruct, Decompose and Design.”

• From Big Data to Big Ops: Brinker speaks on big shift in MarTech keynote: How marketers can navigate the tech explosion around every business function imaginable. DevOps and DataOps for starters.

• Why marketing ops professionals are on the front lines of marketing: Marketing ops is critical to the most important things marketing organizations do today.

• How agile is transforming modern marketing: Learn why agile is becoming the new foundation for marketing going forward.

• How brands can succeed in digital asset management: Assessing your brand’s relationship with digital technologies is foundational to campaign success.

• What it means to be an empowered marketer in today’s digital landscape: How marketers can empower their operations in a digital-first landscape.

• 6 reasons why marketing operations is foundational to successful campaigns: Brands that neglect marketing ops will find more than a few problems with their campaigns.

• Why brands must embrace responsible marketing practices: Responsible marketing practices are necessary to build customer trust and ensure long-term success.

• How to prove the benefits of webinars with engagement data: Here are some ways brands can prove the effectiveness of webinars.

• How to build a successful RevOps team: Sustained revenue growth is built on optimized RevOps teams and strategies.

• How to future-proof your digital marketing strategy: Marketers need to develop digital strategies that can weather and adapt to our ever-changing world.

• How to use display ads to build your sales pipeline: Display ads can help brands improve their sales pipeline with creative, persona-based strategies.

Customer journeys

• What marketers should know about customer journey analytics: Customer journey analytics tell you how customers are engaging with you at each touchpoint.

• 3 strategies to create better customer journeys across any channel: Successful customer journeys require both personalization and practical strategies.

CDPs

• MarTech keynote: Data is not always perfect: Individual market targeting or audience modeling? To CDP or not to CDP? Different marketing perspectives on the data challenge.

• How to choose and implement a CDP: The most effective CDPs are data orchestrators.

• 3 ways marketers can prepare for a cookieless future: How marketers can adapt their data strategies to third-party cookie deprecation.

• Getting the most out of first-party data with a CDP: How Michael Kors met its data challenge and orchestrated more efficient campaigns.

• How publishers can implement a CDP to improve customer experience and support ecommerce: Dennis Publishing walks through their transformation using BlueConic.

• What are the benefits of customer data platforms? Here are the top benefits and capabilities professional services network PwC sees in CDPs.

• 4 reasons to consider implementing a custom CDP: CDPs can help improve customer experiences and meet acquisition goals, but not all brands have the same priorities.

• U.S. Soccer uses customer data platform to make marketing automation personal: The organization revolutionized its approach to fan engagement by centralizing their data and personalizing campaigns.

Marketing analytics

• Using AI-powered predictive analytics to time your next move: And why aren’t more CMOs looking ahead?

• Why marketers should embrace product analytics: Product analytics can help marketers optimize digital customer experiences.

• How to choose the best marketing analytics tool for the web: Discernment is important when choosing a marketing analytics platform.

Customer experience

• How to improve CX in your marketing organization: The best customer experience strategies go beyond data and technology.

• Does ‘always-on’ marketing improve customer experiences?: This marketers-meet-machine strategy can help you target customers that have shown a real propensity for your products.

• How brands can create omnichannel customer experiences: Omnichannel marketing strategies go beyond multichannel engagement.

• How to improve campaign quality in a digital-first world: Without a digital-first strategy, brands will have a hard time creating high-quality campaigns.

• Improve customer experience and hit marketing goals by mapping out the customer journey: HCL Unica’s Tom Hannigan shares insights from a hotel client with MarTech conference attendees.

• 3 steps to win over B2B buyers: Business buyers have high demands, and sellers need to meet their expectations.

• Why marketers need to build customer trust: Compliance with privacy regulations is an opportunity to build trust and improve CX.

• Why empathy is the key to successful customer engagement: How brands can win over customers with empathy.

• Does ‘always-on’ marketing improve customer experiences? This marketers-meet-machine strategy can help you target customers that have shown a real propensity for your products.

• 5 ways marketers can improve customer experiences with personalization: Personalized CX can help marketers unify customer journeys.

• How marketers can create a CX that respects consumer privacy: Successful CX strategies rely on privacy compliance and well-orchestrated marketing tools.

• How Cinemark personalized the digital customer experience: Cinema chain finds that when critical points in the customer’s journey are personalized, it improves the customer’s speed in converting while also adding value to the experience.

• Why data-driven decision-making is the foundation of successful CX: How marketers can improve their decision-making processes using automation.

• 5 ways to improve on-site search: For starters, your whole marketing team should be on the same page when it comes to site search.

• 3 ways to deliver more relevant customer experiences: How marketers can build a better customer experience strategy using a CDP.

• How marketers can use behavioral data to improve customer experiences: Understanding customer behavior is vital to enhancing experiences.

• How to implement the best UX strategy in a changing digital environment: UX is more than design changes; it’s a marketing strategy.

Email marketing

• How email marketing is changing and what marketers should do about it: Find out what’s been added to the Email Marketing Periodic Table.

• How testing can give your email marketing a conversions boost: Holistic Email Marketing CEO Kath Pay shares tactics for getting the most from “the original push channel.”

• Improve email performance with these AMP strategies: Dyspatch’s Matt Harris shares his experience using AMP to bring live, app-like experiences to customers’ inboxes.

• 3 ways marketers can increase email engagement: Marketers can improve email engagement by implementing live, interactive elements.

• How to get the most out of first-party data with email marketing campaigns: Email marketing can help brands move away from third-party data.

• How BIMI will boost brand recognition, email engagement: Validity Email Strategist Danielle Gallant discusses the importance of BIMI in brand recognition and email engagement.

Privacy and compliance

• Why identity resolution is foundational in modern marketing: Identity resolution is a critical component of any marketing campaign.

• Ethical data management is a win for marketers: Compliance with privacy regulations is important. But ethically managing data goes beyond that.

• Value data privacy to build customer trust: More consumers want personalized experiences, but that does not mean they sacrifice trust.

Personalization

• How to execute customized ABM campaigns: Use your full range of marketing tools to develop account-specific engagement that supports your sales team.

• How to improve customer relationships with personalized messaging: Customer relationships are strengthened through personalized communication.

• How to scale personalization efforts with data-driven marketing: Gone are the days of assumption-based marketing. To succeed in today’s environment, marketers need data-driven strategies.

• Using personalization to create marketing moments: Data and creativity are key to delivering meaningful personalized marketing experiences.

• Why cross-channel customer journey orchestration is important: And how to do it: Responding to your customers’ needs is critical for a cross-channel marketing strategy.

• Consolidate and personalize: A winning data strategy for CPG brands: To achieve reach and personalization, many CPG brands have to strike a balance between how they organize and how they act on their data.

• Why data compliance is more than consent management: Protecting customer data goes beyond basic consent management.

• Targeting B2B personas in the right channels to optimize campaigns: One Door improved campaign engagement by meeting their customers where they are.

• 4 ways to drive customer engagement through personalization: Personalized experiences can determine the success of customer engagement strategies.

• What personalization looks like without third-party cookies: How marketers can reduce reliance on third-party cookies and improve personalization.

Content marketing

• How to measure content marketing ROI and ROE: Why Return on Effort is an essential metric for content marketers.

• How to meet your brand goals by organizing your content strategy: Keeping your brand at the center is crucial to meeting customer needs and addressing pain points.

Search marketing

• Think search-first to improve business outcomes: Better SEO means better experience and can lead to higher sales and loyalty.

• How to build a long-term, search-first marketing strategy: A transformed digital landscape means marketers must think search-first.

Digital transformation

• Though marketers wanted to save on cost, better features drove 2021 technology replacements: MarTech Replacement Survey finds teams wanted to indeed save money during the pandemic, but they wanted better capabilities even more.

• More executives become champions for replacing marketing technology: MarTech replacement Survey finds teams made faster decisions than in the previous year’s survey, too.

• How marketers responded to the pandemic: technology replacements: When marketers take a hard look at their tech stacks, what other considerations are they acting on?

• Why some marketers are moving to hybrid and headless CMS systems: Improved technical capabilities are making hybrid and headless CMS systems popular among marketers.

• How brands can build digital resilience: Neglecting changes in digital environments will make it harder for brands to adapt.

• How to drive engaging brand experiences with co-innovation: Co-innovation lets marketers use their engagement tools more effectively.

• How to implement new marketing technology to drive innovation: Results-oriented transformation comes with challenges.

• How marketers can build their brand’s digital maturity: A brand’s digital maturity goes beyond digital transformation.

• How to build a successful marketing technology roadmap: Courtney Trudeau of Merkle shows how marketers can adopt new technologies without disrupting their organizations.

Data strategy

• 3 ways marketers can build trust with data ethics: Why adherence to data ethics is the new standard for modern marketing.

• Here’s a data-driven strategy for better understanding use cases: What makes identifying use cases so difficult has much to do with generic and disjointed experiences.

• How Reckitt gained a competitive advantage with first-party data: Using Artefact’s audience engine, Reckitt improves segmentation and ROI.

• Why first-party data collection should be a priority for marketers: Knowing the value of first-party data collection and activation is the first step toward successful campaigns.

• Why businesses are hiring taxonomists: Claravine’s Christine Reges and Michael Shearer discuss the growing need for taxonomists to organize data and content and avoid missed opportunities.

• Creating value when content and experience are data-driven: GeekHive’s Gene De Libero connects the dots between CX, consumable content and data that links it together.

• 3 ways marketing and sales teams can generate buyer interest: Generating buyer interest relies on the combined efforts of marketing and sales.

• How to improve marketing ROI with clean data: Without clean data, marketers will have a hard time generating quality leads.

• How Sony Interactive Entertainment built a winning marketing data strategy: Sony Interactive Entertainment found ways to improve its data strategy in a transformed digital landscape.

• Transforming your organization to activate customer data: Snowflake’s Ganesh Subramanian maps out your organization’s marketing analytics maturity curve.

• How to overcome data silos and fragmentation: Marketers need robust solutions and strategies to overcome data fragmentation.

• 3 ways to gain more visibility into your lead lifecycle: How marketers can gain more insights from their lead lifecycles using status tracking.

• How marketers can keep customers engaged using data: Successful customer engagement depends on good data.

• Using intent as a unit of B2B campaign measurement: ZoomInfo’s Hussam AlMukhtar shares his intent strategy and how it can impact B2B marketing and sales.

• How to leverage intent and engagement in the buying cycle: Applying intent data to buying cycles can help foster customer engagement.

• Using psychology and better data practices to get customers closer to purchase: Optimizing campaigns with psychological insights saves time and makes you more competitive.

Marketing management

• How to transform your organization with a marketing taxonomy: Implementing a taxonomy will help navigate the shift to new technologies and regulations, as well as unexpected brand safety challenges.

• How responsible marketing impacts customer retention and value: Implementing a responsible data infrastructure will better serve customers who want everything now.

Marketing automation

• 7 tips for building brand identity: Before diving into amplifying the personality of your brand, it’s important to first decide “who” your brand is.

• Automating decisions with real-time situational context: Lisa Loftis from SAS Institute shows marketers at MarTech how they can get value out of data using a decision engine.

• What automation looks like in marketing operations today: Automation is taking on new forms in modern marketing operations.

Social media

• How to become a B2B influencer on LinkedIn: Businesses need to identify a person within their organizations to be their public face on this important social network, says Darryl Praill, CRO for VanillaSoft.

• How to personalize your brand on LinkedIn: Brands can benefit from influencers on social platforms; they can help personalize their public faces.