During a recent trip to London, I spent time with the Smart Focus team to discuss the promise and shortcomings of omni-channel strategies. It was a pretty productive collaboration resulting in a video that explores the new digital customer, an ebook focused on omni-channel experiences and a webinar on the future of marketing. Customers are more connected and more informed than ever. Digital marketers now need an entirely fresh perspective to succeed in a world where customers and prospects experience their brand in multiple ways…
The New Marketing Contract and Why Context is the Future of Marketing
We live in a time of great technology evolution and revolution. Innovation is not only upon us; it affects, even disrupts, us as marketers and as consumers of other businesses. Your customers are more connected than ever before and they’re always on. The number of touchpoints between businesses and customers has exploded. Technology is everywhere and something new is always on the horizon. Wearables. Smart watches. The Internet of Things. Everything is changing. Indeed, today’s consumers are more empowered than…
Today’s Digital Video Revolution & The Future of Brands
Guest post by Brendan Gahan (@BrendanGahan), a YouTube marketing expert helping Fortune 500 brands with their YouTube influencer and community building campaigns. He was named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising and one of the 25 Top YouTube Business Power Players for 2013. The past month there’s been a wealth of speculation in the blogosphere regarding livestreaming services Periscope and Meerkat. Who is going to win? Which platform will crush the other? Which app is the future of…
The Moment of Truth: Connected Customers and How to Re-Imagine Customer Experiences
And then one day, it happened. Customers changed. How they make decisions changed. What they value and how they want to do business changed. The funny thing is…we didn’t. Now we can and a new generation of technologies and services make it possible to not only react but lead customer experiences moving forward. To effectively compete in the digital economy, you are left with no choice; become customer-obsessed or lose! Every moment-of-truth counts when it comes to customer loyalty. For…
Using Big Data to Understand Small Moments of Truth
Guest post by Gib Bassett (@gibbassett), gib.bassett@oracle.com “Businesses today must invest in experiences because that’s what people want.” – Brian Solis So says Brian in this recent post. He goes on to qualify this statement further, saying people today simply don’t care about products, services or offers. What they desire and what they respond to with regularity are superior experiences. I don’t think this is limited to Millennials either – we are all being conditioned to have affinities for businesses…
State of Mobile Commerce: An Evening in San Francisco with Criteo
I recently had the opportunity to co-host an event in San Francisco with Jonathan Wolf of Criteo to discuss the past and future of retail and mobile commerce. That evening celebrated the release of the company’s quarterly State of Mobile Commerce Report, based on its pool of online shopping data covering more than a billion transactions totaling over $130Bn of annual sales. That evening, we would entertain some of the most interesting people documenting or contributing to the future of ecommerce,…
Completely Rethinking Marketing Is Essential in Today’s Customer-Centric World
Guest post by Fred Studer (@fredstuder), Chief Marketing Officer at NetSuite As my friend Brian Solis says, “This is a time to question everything.” Let’s start with marketing, because it’s overdue for a revolution. Today’s customers are in the driver’s seat – it’s a buyer’s market and the buyers are better informed than ever. Prior to making a purchase today, customers research and compare products assiduously while tapping into both the opinions of people they know directly and reviews from…
How the Next Five Years Will Revolutionize Business
Earlier in the year, I spent some time with Jason Ankeny. He was, at the time, writing an article for Entrepreneur on “the next five years” of business for the print edition. He assembled a pretty stellar cast to serve as his panel and I was more than excited to join in. Ankeny set up the discussion this way… The period between 2015 and 2020 is poised to redefine virtually every facet of how we live and work. It probably…
Embracing the Audience: 5 Tips on Customer-Based Marketing
After I presented at the Digital Media Summit in Toronto, Sylvia Ng, VP of Growth and Analytics at ScribbleLive, asked for an interview to discuss challenges and opportunities ahead for digital marketers. Following is her summary of our conversation. I wanted to share it with you here… In the midst of endless blogs, podcasts, tweets, instagrams, and snapchats, how does a brand or business get noticed? Creating a truly effective marketing campaign is about understanding your brand, and more importantly,…
When You Share Experiences You Help Strangers Make Decisions
Whether you realize it or not, when you share an experience you have, whether it’s through a post, review, video, image, rant, praise, etc., it helps a stranger make a decision about what to do next. Customers aren’t following the customer journey you designed because they’re too busy hacking it. No matter how much journey work you do, no matter how creative your marketing, no matter how responsive your website is, no matter how much technology you invest in, customers…
