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Title: Health Tip: Healthy Skin Doesn't Have to Cost a Fortune
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TopRank Marketing Top Takeaways & Words of Wisdom from MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum #MPB2B

Last week, the amazing Ann Handley and her team at MarketingProfs put on a phenomenal conference for B2B marketers from all over the country. The information, networking, events and even the swag were all top-notch.

On the first day, Ann set the stage and asked everyone in attendance to find their squad of other marketers at the event, and to take their work seriously, but not to take themselves too seriously. I’m so thankful to have gotten to know some familiar faces a little bit better, and to make some new fast friends in a short amount of time.

This great conference inspired me to share what I thought were the top takeaways and words of wisdom from the speakers for those of you that weren’t able to attend.

Top Conference Takeaways:

Learn to Focus Your Digital Marketing on User Intent – Avinash Kaushik

Thinking about how your company can connect with people and execute process and structure will make you masters of marketing. It’s time that marketers begin re-thinking the traditional marketing funnel and follow a framework that is based on user behavior to determine what is most relevant to your target audience.

To learn how to focus on the think and not the ink, read: Digital Marketing That Focuses on User Intent

How to Add More Participation to Your Content Marketing Program – Lee Odden

The race to create more content, at a higher quality on a consistent basis is leaving many marketers out of breath. Trying to scale a content program that meets all of these objectives is no easy undertaking. However, did you know that your employees, customers, industry influencers and online community are prime candidates for helping your brand create content that resonates with your audience.

If you want to find a way to tap into the wisdom of others to co-create great content, read: If You Want B2B Content to be Great, Ask Your Community to Participate!

Tap Into Employees for Content Amplification – David Honig & David B Thomas

One of the most powerful and underutilized methods for content promotion may be the person sitting next to you. Working with employees to leverage brand content can help employees create a better connection with your brand and even grow their own online audience. For the organization, it provides a way to increase brand awareness, strengthen culture and drive leads and sales.

If you’re curious to know some best practices for including customers in your content promotion strategy, read: How to Tap Into the Social Media Power of Employees for Content Amplification

Create Better Landing Pages That Convert – Oli Gardner

Landing pages can be an incredibly powerful tool for moving prospects through the sales process but they are not all created equal. The most important element of any landing page should be the customer experience. If a customer is bombarded with too many choices or distraction, they’ll quickly bounce to another company that can better serve their needs.

Amp up the quality of your landing pages by reading: 13 Considerations for Creating Successful Landing Pages from Oli Gardner of Unbounce

B2B Marketers Need to Up Their Facebook Game – Andrea Vahl

While organic reach hasn’t completely disappeared, it is on the decline. That means that B2B marketers now more than ever need to find a way to better serve the followers that are seeing their information.

To win on Facebook, brands must to find a way to entertain and inspire their audience through a variety of different methods including videos, visuals and paid advertising. Are you ready to learn what you brand can do to improve visibility, track leads and improve Facebook ad targeting?

If so, read: How B2B Marketers Can Use Facebook to Drive Engagement & Generated Leads

How Reinventing Your Brand Can Change Perception – Deon Newman

IBM is one of the most iconic brands of our time. This year, IBM was celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of their most popular products, the mainframe. Unfortunately, when many people think of a mainframe, their heads are filled with images of big rooms filled with clunky equipment.

The team at IBM found a unique way to include some of their largest customers in a movement to bring the mainframe back to life and into the 21st century.

To find out how IBM accomplished this goal, read: Case Study: How IBM Changed Perception & Increased Revenue by 20% YOY

B2B Marketing Forum Words of Wisdom:

“The difference between great companies and those that die is understanding how to obsess about the THINK.” @avinash

“The secret to the clarity of your value proposition lies in the information hierarchy of your headlines.” @oligardner

“The wisdom of your community is a bank rich with useful marketing content.” @leeodden

“If you don’t teach your children to be alone, they will only learn how to be lonely.” @STurkle

“What would happen if you had your employees become the storytellers for your brand?” @davehonig

“The role of content is to build relationships.” @HanaAbaza

“The key to stories is conflict.” @petersagal

“Don’t wait for someone to tell your story. Own it, tell it yourself and then promote the heck out of it.” @JasonMillerCA

“For every piece of content that targets conversion you need 10 that don’t. Show you have experience & leadership.” @BrennerMichael

“Lead nurturing allows marketers to be the resource buyers turn to for answers.” @ardath421

“Runners gotta run.. Writers gotta write.. Yoga-ers gotta yoga – there is something for everyone at #mpb2b!” @jjulian

“The role of marketing is changing to become the customer advocate within a company.” @KatieMartell

How do top B2B Marketers MAKE Marketing Magic?

To answer that question, we talked to four of the speakers at MarketingProfs B2B Forum to get their insight. Check out their interviews below:

• How LinkedIn’s Jason Miller MAKES Marketing Magic
• How Uberflip’s Hana Abaza MAKES Marketing Magic
• How Mark Schaefer MAKES Marketing Magic
• How Katie Martell of Cintell MAKES Marketing Magic

See You Next Year at the 2016 MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum!

Overall, the entire B2B Forum conference was a great experience. We’re already counting down the days to next year’s conference!

If you attended or were following along on Twitter, what was the most useful piece of information that you learned?

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Twitter Hopes To Sell Moments & Woo More Users With World Series Ads

Twitter starts major marketing push with a series of ads aimed at getting more people to use Twitter regularly.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Your Great Content Doesn't Matter If It Isn't Reaching the Right Audiences

All content should be produced through the lens of strategic objectives. Otherwise, you may be wasting time producing content you like but your customers and prospects never see. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Bridge the Offline and Online Divide with New Oracle Marketing Cloud Features

We still live in a world where nearly 80% customers receive a fragmented experience from companies as they move from marketing channel to marketing channel. While solving this challenge is complicated, the Oracle Marketing Cloud believes it comes down to three fundamental areas: Identify your ideal customer correctly, connect with the right data about that individual, and optimize that experience with relevant content.

Today we’re excited to announce four new features that help marketers make progress in their goal of a more consistent, cross-channel experience. Many of these features are made possible because of key integrations between Oracle products, and we’re excited to bring them to market today at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.

1. Connect Online and Offline Behavior with “Offline Data Append” from Oracle Datalogix

As digital marketers in industries such as retail, CPG and travel orchestrate new campaigns, they’ve often been in the dark as to whether portions of their individual known customers have purchased products in their key categories. In fact, around 95% of customer purchasing happens offline.

With offline data append, marketers can pull offline transaction data stored in Oracle Datalogix and match it against their customer profiles that reside in the Oracle Marketing Cloud. For example, if a retailer wanted to target customers who have purchased shoes offline in stores, Offline Data Append allows marketers to leverage that information as they build their audience and orchestrate a cross-channel campaign within the Oracle Marketing Cloud. This capability is made possible through an integration between Oracle Datalogix and Oracle’s cross-channel marketing solution for consumer marketers, Oracle Responsys,

Oracle Datalogix accounts for consumer purchase data in 110 million households, and accounts for $2 trillion in consumer spending. This new feature is available first in North America before going broader to global markets.

2. Improve Your Ability to Pinpoint the Right Customer with “Match Multiplier”

Match Multiplier helps solve a very complex challenge companies have with identifying their customers across channels, especially via anonymous channels, such as display advertising. So in order to understand Match Multiplier, you must first understand the concept of the Oracle ID Graph. Announced last March, the Oracle ID Graph is an enabling technology in the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Data Management Platform that aggregates a variety of identifiers individual end users generate across marketing channels and device types and ties them to an actionable profile.

What types of identifiers do individuals generate? One example would be cookies on your desktop computer. Another example would be device IDs collected from their engagement on mobile phones. The Oracle ID Graph helps tie IDs like these together.

Now comes Match Multiplier. Using Match Multiplier, marketers can target previously unknown prospects by adding their known customer IDs (i.e. email addresses) to a wider pool of anonymous IDs. By creating a larger combined audience, marketers and advertisers can target a wider range of prospects with relevant messaging, products and services and grow their acquisition base effectively. This also provides the ability to identify target audiences across multiple channels and devices.

This is also done in a privacy compliant way that enterprises expect. Oracle Marketing Cloud customers must opt in to Match Multiplier. When marketers join the program, Match Multiplier anonymizes each of their unique identifiers (like email addresses) and replaces it with an anonymous ID. Once IDs are made anonymous, those IDs are then placed into a larger pool of IDs where all participating companies can leverage them for targeting.

What’s an example of Match Multiplier at work? Consumers often have different preferences for which channel they want to consume a relevant message from marketers and advertisers. For example, a customer may never open an email for a promotion about a new line of jeans. However, upon matching that contact via Match Multiplier, we learn they have engaged with display advertising for casual clothing. Now, the marketer knows to orchestrate a display ad for the same product, diversifying their engagement strategy and increasing the chances of conversion.

Match Multiplier is currently in controlled availability and in the United States only to start before getting rolled out to global markets.

3. Enhance Customer Experiences with Oracle Service Cloud Integration

While marketers can orchestrate and control a wide-array of marketing generated interactions, there is a number of ways customers interact with their brand, product or service not in a marketing context. One of the most prime examples is customer service.

Today, we’re announcing integration between the Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud. With this integration, marketers can leverage customer service data from Oracle Service Cloud when orchestrating campaigns inside the Oracle Marketing Cloud. For example, when creating a cross-sell or upsell campaign, the marketer can create a rule that removes customers who are currently in a negative customer service situation.

This integration is available for Oracle’s cross-channel solution for B2B marketers, Oracle Eloqua. It follows the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s commitment to integration across the Oracle Customer Experience portfolio. Back in April, we announced integration between Oracle Commerce and the Oracle Marketing Cloud, which you can read about here.

4. Business Units from Oracle Content Marketing

You can identify the right customers and connect the right data, but if you don’t have relevant content, it can be all for naught. Today’s marketers need to think like publishers if they want they want to create the quantity and quality of content they need to keep the modern customer engaged.

To do that at scale, you need to account for all the departments, teams and organizations involved in the content creation process. Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Business Units. Part of Oracle Content Marketing, business units provide business leaders with a central view of all marketing efforts through a tiered structure.

Here’s how it works:

First, the centralized content team sets the groundwork to ensure brand consistency across business units. This parent team determines the overall Content Strategy in alignment with overall business goals. They set brand guidelines for the organization while also deciding on key themes or topics that should be covered by all divisions. Then, sub business units have their own central content repository, where marketers can easily through existing content in order to locate materials to repurpose and repackage. In some cases, the decentralized teams have more customized plans for publishing and promoting certain content.

We’re excited to share these new features with our customers this week at Oracle OpenWorld. But the digital marketing innovation won’t stop there -- we have Modern Marketing Experience in London in November and new batch of features to announce soon. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, be sure to download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Content Marketing and get tips from leading content marketers and thinkers, new content categories to consider and a lot more.