23 Marketing Experts Share Their Digital Insights Staying ahead of the digital curve isn’t easy. To help, we talked with some of the most results-driven digital marketers out there - the trendsetters - and asked them for accessible, actionable insights. Unlike what you might read in other eBooks, these guys don’t just talk about marketing, they do marketing—in fact, they set the industry standards. In this eBook, you will hear from thought leaders at Google, Dell, Amazon’s Audible, Hubspot, KISSmetrics, and many others. Key insights include: The smartest ways to use social, mobile, video and email in campaigns Targeting audiences based on time, location and device Analytics, testing and optimization Defining—and surpassing—success metrics, like Lifetime Value

1. Share this:

2. Introduction
We interviewed nearly two-dozen of our favorite marketers to understand the key issues
facing marketers today. These digital experts are leaders. They are winning. Not because
they have big budgets, but because they are in the trenches figuring out the stuff that
works every single day.
As we read and synthesized the interviews, what struck us was the diachotomy that
has evolved in marketing today, marketers must be capable of addressing two sides
of the same coin:
• Possess a deep understanding of the customer
• Understand that marketing has evolved into an analytically-driven discipline
Understanding strategy and data is necessary but still insufficient. The new marketing
magic is more about storytelling and less about slogans. The preferred methods are
social and content marketing.
The modern day marketer must be a brand strategist and data scientist, a social maven and
storyteller. Growth hacker and publisher. Deep thinker but also a roll-up-their-sleeves doer.
It’s a lot. But as these marketers will tell you, the reality is, they wouldn’t have it any other way.

3. Rishi Dave
Executive Director, Digital Marketing
Dell
“‘What technology do I have, and what tools are at my disposal?’ In reality, the
marketing journey should start with, ‘What is our customer story, who is our
brand, and who are the customers we should be reaching?’ When you look to
solve your customer’s pain points, you’ll see something surprising — the answer
isn’t always digital. Pick and choose marketing channels that can make your
customers’ lives better.”
The biggest mistake that marketers make is that they
start from the bottom up.
CUSTOMER

4. Andy Tretiak
CMO
Sporting KC
“Marketing is more than pushing out content. It’s about understanding who
your customers are, what they’re doing, how they’re reacting, and determining
the best way to connect with them emotionally. Technology helps us navigate
this process.”
Marketing is not just about collecting information, but
taking that data and making experiences that enhance
those emotional connections with your brand.
CUSTOMER

5. Heather Carson
Co-founder
Onboardly
“Marketers need to remain memorable and add value to their subscribers
without becoming irritating. And above all, don’t serve your potential customers
something you wouldn’t eat yourself. Remember that authenticity in everything
you do is key.”
As a marketer, you’ve got to be your subscriber’s least
annoying friend.
CUSTOMER

6. Jeff Fromm
EVP
Barkley
“In the participation economy, consumers are co-creating their marketing
messaging through social media. As a result, brands are under pressure to be
radically transparent and create higher levels of trust. Over time, brands will
move from storytelling to ‘story-doing’. Story-doing is a participation economy
by which you’re creating experiences and opportunities for consumer
engagement more than what has happened in the past.”
Useful is the new cool.
CUSTOMER

7. Adam Smith
Marketer
Investopedia.com
“As marketers, we must be able to clearly explain, 1) why our product or service
is of value and, 2) what makes our company unique. I live and breathe the ad
tech industry — I go to a vast majority of these companies’ websites and I
couldn’t explain what they do. Everyone seems to do everything and offer you
the world. You may have an incredible product and offering. If you don’t
communicate that as part of your story, no matter where you’re telling it, you’re
doing your business a grave disservice.”
One of the overriding themes of ad tech (or any industry)
is the simplification and the differentiation of what
companies can offer.
is the simplification and the differentiation of whatis the simplification and the differentiation of whatis the simplification and the differentiation of what
CUSTOMER
page 1

8. Ellie Cachette
VP of Product Marketing
Koombea
“The best way to optimize campaigns for scale is to focus on your most
valuable asset — your customers who already love your brand. If you can focus
on getting a smaller group excited about your products and what you are doing,
they will often do the amplification for you.”
As marketers, we don’t believe in fighting for attention;
we believe in two marketing philosophies: beauty and
usefulness.
CUSTOMER

9. Mattias Guilotte
CMO
Coworks
“Publishers are masters at crafting headlines that pull you in. They also have
quality content. They can deliver on being compelling and being true. And
then there are content forums that are compelling but can’t deliver on their
promises. Celebrity gossip forums are a great example. You click on the
headlines, and all of a sudden, the brand deteriorates. Consumers do that once,
twice, and then lose trust in your company altogether. It’s still boiling down to
compelling and true.”
Advertisers struggle with a conundrum. You need to be
compelling, and you need to be true. How do you
combine these two disparate goals?
CUSTOMER

10. Lars Lofgren
Growth Manager
KISSmetrics
“If you’re struggling to move the needle, the first place you should focus is the
quality of your product or service. Since marketers are at the top of the funnel,
they usually catch blame for any missed targets. But in most cases, the product
isn’t nearly good enough to support such aggressive growth targets. Spend time
measuring customer satisfaction, repeat purchases, long-term engagement,
churn rates, etc. If word-of-mouth isn’t giving you a positive organic growth rate,
no amount of money in marketing is going to give you hockey stick growth.”
Marketing doesn’t produce growth. In merely fuels
the fire.
MARKETING

11. Scott Zalaznik
VP Digital
Sprint
“Everybody is getting involved with storytelling. Marketing and advertising
are reverting back to their roots, which is back to brand-building and even
better — brand-building with the use of video. I think you’re going to see the
roles of the screens converge around key pieces of content. How do top
brands connect audiences from one interface to another?”
The new marketing paradigm is where storytelling and
screens emerge.
ANALYTICS

12. ANALYTICS
Chris Kilbourn
VP of strategy
Fit Marketing
“So many types of marketing are so hard to measure, but you have to overcome the challenge
to figure out what works best for your business. Marketing analytics are both easier and harder
than ever. You have infinite resources at your organization’s disposal — but you also have
infinite resources at your organization’s disposal. Focus is key. Your business will have a range
of proven tactics in your back pocket. Analytics make this process of testing, iterating, and
refining possible. You’ll know what’s working because you can measure it. What we’re starting
to do is test strategies very rapidly. We start with an idea, measure it, fail as fast as we can, and
then pivot. We try to keep testing — over and over again — until something sticks.”
Marketers aren’t measuring the right success metrics.
For instance, they’ll start with in-session revenue rather
than lifetime customer value (LTV).

13. Ben Legg
CEO
Adknowledge
“Out of all the metrics that we marketers monitor in our business, there is one that
captures the heart, soul, and ROI of our efforts: lifetime value (LTV) of our
customers. The measurement of marketing has evolved dramatically over the
years. The next phase, perhaps the most important, is calculating lifetime value.
Few CMOs are taking the leap to position this metric as the core, key performance
indicator of their marketing teams’ success. The reality is, the moment your
competitor starts to figure out LTV and you can't – you’re dead.”
The reality is, the moment your competitor starts to
figure out LTV and you can't – you’re dead.
ANALYTICS

14. Lance LeMay
Managing Director
Open Air Equity Partners
“Everyone should be mindful of LTV because this concept drives everything. If
you’re not thinking about that, you can’t think about customer acquisition costs,
then it becomes incredibly difficult to understand the basics of how you
manage your business and customer relationships.”
If you are not thinking about LTV, you are not thinking
about your customer.
ANALYTICS

15. Neil Patel
Founder
KISSmetrics
“Content marketing and social media are going to have the same emphasis. The
difference is that people will need to be more creative and invest more in
quality. More unique pieces will stand out from what’s saturating the market. A
lot of marketers focus on quantity, which is why their campaigns don’t perform
that well. Creativity, quality, and innovation are going to become a necessity,
not a choice.”
Creativity, quality, and innovation are going to become
a necessity, not a choice.
MARKEtING

16. Jessica Meher
Head of Corporate Marketing
Hubspot
“Good content combined with context (delivering the right information, to the
right people, at the right time) makes your marketing far more powerful and
effective because it’s highly targeted and relevant. People don’t want to be
treated like mass market anymore.”
Good content without context simply creates an
overwhelming amount of information that no one
cares about.
CONTENT
MARKETING

17. CONTENT
MARKETING
Suzanne Baran
Founder
Content Empress
“Brands need to be more savvy about entire content and social marketing
ecosystems. As goals become more defined and aligned, sales funnel
engagement is becoming even more critical. Serving up the right content to the
right consumer at the right stage of the cycle is a sought-after winning formula.”
Effective content marketing boils down to four steps:
attract, convert, close and delight consumers.
Effective content marketing boils down to four steps:Effective content marketing boils down to four steps:Effective content marketing boils down to four steps:

18. Anita Newton
VP Marketing
Adknowledge
CONTENT
MARKETING
“Video is an extremely effective form of content marketing. Today brands
choose written content because it is easier. Humans process video easier than
text. Video significantly helps SEO juice, and accounts for a whopping 50% of
mobile traffic. Punchline? Six billion hours of video are watched on YouTube per
month. Advertisers who choose to ignore video should do so at their own peril.”
If content marketing is king, video is queen. Together
they make the perfect marriage.
If content marketing is king, video is queen. TogetherIf content marketing is king, video is queen. TogetherIf content marketing is king, video is queen. Together

19. Thad Langford
Head of Video Advertising
AdBistro
"Brands are driving success by collaborating with their customers. This is one of
Adknowledge’s key product goals — to help marketers reach their audiences,
wherever they are online. We built our platform to be flexible and to engage
consumers across devices."
Every device and interface requires some level of customization.
The challenge involves utilizing the right platforms to optimize
user experiences accross all digital device types.
CUSTOMER

20. Joe Pulizzi
Founder
Content Marketing Institute
Make sure you have a documented content strategy. Find and own a content
niche where you can be the leading informational expert in the world. Find
great storytellers in your organization or hire people that can engage audiences
outside of the products and services you sell. And above all, stop talking about
your products and services so much.
We are seeing the evolution of the marketing
department within enterprises start to look and feel like
a publishing department. A few years ago, that would
have been truly unbelievable.
CONTENT
MARKETING

21. Ted Buell
Head of Telecom
Google
“The more we can understand the impact of digital on the offline world, the
more we can help those advertisers who get sales from brick and mortar stores
get a full view of their advertising ROI. Think beyond the online conversion,
especially on mobile. With mobile approaching half of digital activity in some
cases, it’s critical for advertisers to understand this and measure this value.”
Think beyond the online conversion.
MARKETING

22. Mladen Raickovic
Head of Social Advertising
AdParlor
“Across the board, folks are developing high standards for how they should be
tracking conversions and ROI. Brands that weren’t tracking ROI are now
starting to measure conversions. Companies tracking conversions are going to
start looking at lifetime value. Companies advertising across single channels
(e.g., display-only or search-only) will start looking at multiple channels. Those
leveraging multiple channels will start building better attribution models.”
Success via social means tracking all touch points to
see how they work together and optimizing towards
well-defined ROI goals.
SOCIAL

23. Jo Zablud
Director, Social Media
Audible
“We see social as a legitimate digital channel and treat it with the respect and
investment that it deserves. The premise of paid, owned and earned is at the
cornerstone of Audible’s social ecosystem, enabling us to balance efficient
customer acquisition, brand awareness and customer engagement, based on
measurable analytics. Social behaviors have changed the way consumers
interact with content and it’s exciting to be integrating those changes into our
ecosystem as a whole.”
Social has earned its rightful seat at the adult
dinner table.
SOCIAL

24. Danny Wong
Growth Manager
Shareaholic
“Marketers should take advantage of the social web, which connects you with
more consumers than ever. Studies show SEO is a mature channel while social
referrals are exploding. Sites would be wise to ensure they enable share
buttons, identify their most engaged readers and continue ensuring loyalty,
and prepare to invest more ad dollars in social media.”
Publications need new, innovative revenue channels
and advertisers need new ways to market to consumers
who’ve long developed banner blindness.
SOCIAL

25. Matt Hoggatt
Head of Email Advertising
AdStation
"Not only is it critical for marketers to tailor the design of their message to adapt
to different types of devices and screens, but they must also understand the
nuances of how consumers respond to messages on mobile devices vs.
desktops."
Marketing messages — especially emails — need to be
information-rich while balancing a human component.
Marketing messages — especially emails — need to beMarketing messages — especially emails — need to beMarketing messages — especially emails — need to be
CUSTOMER

26. Contact us today: 1.816.931.1771