Breakdown of Marketo Marketing Nation 2014

• Marketo

While writing these thoughts down on the flight back from San Francisco, I reflected on this year's Marketing Nation™ Summit organized by Marketo at the Moscone Center on April 7 - 9, 2014. The keynote speakers were Hillary Clinton, Former Secretary of State, Former U.S. Senator from New York, Former First Lady along with Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer at GE and Phil Fernandez, Marketo's Chariman & CEO.  The rich ecosystem of partners, consultants and customers from around the world came together to connect, learn advanced marketing and create meaningful business relationships. The marketing automation space was extensively impressive and the industry is flourishing! Everyone at Macromator is very excited to work with Marketo and follow the developments in the marketing technology space.

1. Hillary Rodham Clinton
2. Beth Comstock
3. Phil Fernandez
4. Network in the Nation
5. The Revvi Awards
6. Most Dramatic Business Impact
7. Champion Nation
8. Dan Radu becomes a Marketo Certified Expert
9. Other CRM's
10. Where is Marketo going?

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton

The former First Lady came officially to give a speech on innovation, get some marketing advice and definitely not to test the water for a presidential campaign. Of course, nobody believed that. She was asked if this is a campaign swing but she admittedly danced around the question. The topics that she touched on were the renting issues in the Bay Area, the situation in Crimea, the role of digital technologies in the Arab Spring and gender equality in the work place. It was a great opportunity for her to be exposed to a female majority audience. Very smart marketing initiative!   

 

Beth Comstock

The Chief Marketing Officer from GE talked about change in her organization and how important scalability is for all their initiatives. At Macromator, we believe all marketing automation campaigns should be built with scalability in mind.

Her quote, "You cannot be a 130 year old company without getting used to change" really resonated, as Macro's business has to change and adapt quite rapidly. Clients adopting Marketo need to go through a change management process.

 

Phil Fernandez

Phil Fernandez, CEO founded Marketo in 2006, along with Jon Miller, VP Product Marketing and Jon Miller, CTO. His main message was focused on the importance of innovation.  

Marketers are notorious for coming up with slogans like "Innovation in the Nation" and overusing the word innovation, but the marketing space certainly changed significantly from Marketo's initial release.

The company was built in the early days of social media and before the rise of content marketing. Keeping up with all of the new marketing strategies made available by technical developments is crucial for a company like Marketo to survive and that is what they are successfully doing.

 

Networking in The Nation

At the Summit, I got the chance to meet in person few of my remote clients and partners we virtually collaborate on projects. Tools like Join.me, Citrix GoToMeeting, Cisco WebEx, Google Aps and Skype bring us together and changed the way we collaborate but nothing replaces face time.  

It was a pleasure to speak with the presidents and CEOs of some of the other marketing automation consulting agencies. They were the leaders that I admired and was inspired by even before setting up my own shop. I am certainly looking forward to working with you on exciting Marketo marketing automation projects.

 

The Revvi Awards

Some of my clients were Revvi Award Winners for the projects I worked on. That made me and my team very proud. Client and partner confidentiality is very important for Macromator that's why I won't be able to mention your names but the winners are:  

• Most Successful Global Rollout: Kaspersky Lab
• The Integrator: CA Technologies
• The Upgrader: Genesys
• Most Creative Integrated Marketing Campaign (B2B): SmartBear Software
• Most Creative Integrated Marketing Campaign (B2C): Zoetis
• The Engager: Algonquin College
• The MOPster: Sungard Availability Services
• The Socializer: InsideView
• The Visionary: Christine Nurnberger, Sungard Availability Services
• The Hot Rod: Sarah Shelnut, NanoLumens
• The Champion of the Year: Jeff Shearer, Egencia
• The Platform Innovator: Cloudwords, Inc.
• LaunchPoint™ Evangelist: InsideView
• North America Partner Excellence: The Pedowitz Group
• International Partner Excellence: Datarati

 

Most Dramatic Business Impact

• B2B - Enterprise: Kaiser Permanente
• B2B - Small / Medium Business: Acquia
• B2B - Enterprise: Curves

For more information, read the full press release titled: Marketo Honors Best of Marketing Nation™ with 2014 Revvie Awards.

 

Champion Sessions

Few champion sessions I found partially interesting where the excellent use of the Revenue Modeler by Algonquin College, from the province of Ontario in Canada, the global Marketo roll-out at Kaspersky Lab and the strong sales & marketing alignment at SmartBear Software. We are very excited to apply everything learned at the sessions for our clients and partners.

 

Dan Radu Becomes a Marketo Certified Expert (MCE)

I had the chance to become a Marketo Certified Expert, which will bring more value, knowledge and skills to Macromator clients. With lots of experience on Marketo projects wasn't anything difficult. Now that Dan Radu is a Marketo Certified Expert instantly creates more credibility for everyone in the industry, but our sound work examples are still the most important thing.

 

Please don't forget about the other CRMs!

You can't talk about Marketo without looking at the customer relationship management part as well. At Macromator, we love Salesforce and how well they integrate. Although the focus was on Salesforce.com integration, I wanted to see more tips and tricks in other CRMs.

Some of my clients who use Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for example, could benefit from sessions on best practices and integrations.  

Salesforce recently purchased their own marketing automation software. Pardon my comments, integration with other CRMs is very important, please don't forget about it.

 

Where is Marketo going?

The vision presented by Phil Fernandez, CEO, is to become the all-in-one digital marketing platform, a single system for marketers to login daily around the globe. 

Some of the features announced and re-highlighted were:  

• Real-Time Personalization made possible by the acquisition of Insightera, an Israel based company, allows marketers to make their website and mobile channels as personal as their emails.
• Marketing Calendar enables teams to plan, coordinate and communicate everything marketing is doing in a single, dynamic calendar. Many of Macromator's clients have been requesting this feature for a long time in order to get away from colorful Excel charts.
• Search Engine Optimization(SEO) drives more quality traffic to your website and allows you to measure the impact of SEO on revenue. SEO space better watch out! Here comes Marketo!
• Marketo & Acxiom announced the industry's first joint solution that allows you to provide a truly personalized experience that follows each consumer from the first display ad to your website and throughout your outbound campaigns.
• Marketo Ofiice in Japan will allow the expansion of operations in Japan and North Asia. Marketo also makes available a Japanese language version of its software.

These features along with it's pricing strategies will allow Marketo to reach more into the small medium size (SMB) market, offer better inbound marketing features, have more applications for top of the funnel marketing and give more accurate insights to decision makers outside the marketing realm such as CFOs, for example.   O

Overall it was well worth attending and I plan to go again next year. Now its time to get back to billable work and put everything that I've gained to good use for my clients and partners. I am looking forward to working with everyone I meet. We are very excited to deliver an abundance of Marketo services.  

Dan Radu   Marketing Automation Consultant   Macromator