Good morning marketers, what would it take to embrace agile marketing?

Think of “agile” as more than just a buzzword for the tech world. Marketing teams need to move quickly to respond to changes in our rapidly evolving digital environment. By taking on an agile approach to customer journeys, teams can explore new methods of translating data, responding to issues, and creating context to feed personalization.

Advances in areas like AI are creating new efficiencies for marketers, like the ability of machine learning to process huge amounts of granular data to develop contextual relationships with customers. This level of flexibility and agile efficiency, if leveraged the right way, could enable marketers to maximize their martech capabilities to more deeply engage customers and drive conversions.

Marketers are stepping up to take more ownership over customer experience (CX) programs, according to Gartner’s 2019 CX Management Survey. As a follow up to its 2017 CX report, Gartner surveyed 400 executives last year who were either CX leaders or supported CX programs. Of the various departments surveyed, marketing departments were more likely than others to claim ownership for CX initiatives, with a sizeable jump in the number of marketers taking over customer persona initiatives in the last two years. On the outside, the marketing shift to own CX seems like good news for marketing budgets – but unfortunately, CX budgets aren’t quite shifting to marketing as quickly as CX initiatives are.

There’s more to read below, including Snapchat’s exclusive partnership with NBC and TikTok’s latest efforts to separate itself from China. 

Taylor Peterson,
Deputy Editor

 
 
 
Pro Tip
 

The benefits of content upgrades

“Creating new content is not always needed when you have a body of good content that can be made to work harder and deliver quick results with some refreshing,” explains Chris Gregory of DAGMAR Marketing. “Upgrading existing content provides a better user experience. Users read your content for information, but if yours is out of date, it’s not useful anymore. Ensuring your content is current and accurate is the single best thing you can do for your readers’ experience.”

“It also maintains URL authority because every time you create a new page on your site, the new URL has zero authority. The URLs of older content have existing authority from any links they’ve acquired, and just from being aged.”

“One of the biggest benefits of checking your data is to see what types of search queries are resulting in impressions and clicks. Sometimes you’ll see a good keyword with a very low click-through rate. Simply editing content to include that keyword or its variations helps the content rank better and gain higher click-through rates.”

 

Create Landing Pages That Convert

If you’re looking to gather leads for your business, you need to have a landing-page strategy. This guide from Sharpspring is written for any marketer looking to initiate or improve their landing-page strategy. It will guide you through the entire process of creating and optimizing landing pages, highlighting key points along the way.

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Social Shorts
 

Snapchat couples up with NBC for the Olympics, TikTok lands a major music deal – and is sniffing around for a new CEO

Snapchat inks an exclusive deal. Snapchat is partnering up with NBC to host a range of exclusive programming for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics from July 24 – August 9. It’s the third Olympics the two companies have collaborated on, following the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. The partnership includes four daily original Snapchat Shows produced by NBC exclusively for the platform, using its vertical video format. Overall, NBC said it plans to produce more than 70 episodes for Snapchat – more than three times that of the 2018 Winter Games. 

Licensed music coming to TikTok. The youth-centric, video-sharing app has been building a new music streaming platform to compete against the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. As part of those efforts, TikTok last week announced a deal with Merlin, a global independent music licensing agency, for music to be used on TikTok’s platform anywhere the app is available. The deal marks the first major licensing agreement announced by TikTok as part of its wider efforts to bring legal music to the app and stake a claim in the streaming industry. 

TikTok’s quest for a U.S. CEO. Rumor has it that TikTok is on the hunt for a CEO in the U.S., Bloomberg reported last week. It’s a move that could help distance the company from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, and allay mounting concerns over its ties to the Chinese government (which has played a role in censoring content and accessing user data). According to the report, TikTok has been reviewing candidates “in recent months” to fill the CEO position, which would work alongside TikTok’s China-based chief, Alex Zhu, and Vanessa Pappas, who currently oversees TikTok’s U.S. operations out of its Los Angeles office. It’s still unclear how the new leadership structure for TikTok would work, but Bloomberg says a U.S.-based CEO could potentially be in charge of the app’s “non-technical functions” such as advertising and operations.

 

Immersive search marketing training

Technical SEO, Google Ads, Amazon Ads, paid social commerce… what’s your search marketing specialty? Attend one of six highly-focused SMX workshops Friday, February 21 in San Jose, to drill down into a specific aspect of search and soak up channel-specific tactics you can implement immediately.

See the workshops »

 
 
 
What we're reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader

Understanding User Intent: The Key to Transforming Data Privacy Policies – CMS Wire

Stop Competing On ‘Better’ And Start Competing On ‘Unique’ – Forbes

Marketers unify to stop flow of ad revenue to ‘harmful’ content – Marketing Dive

Amazon Pursuing Pay-With-Your-Hand Biometric Checkout Technology – Multichannel Merchant

Facebook’s dodgy defaults face more scrutiny in Europe – TechCrunch

Twitter’s Sarah Personette: ‘Business Is The Most Personal Thing In The World’ – AdExchanger

Jobs, Cook, Ive—Blevins? The Rise of Apple’s Cost Cutter – Wall Street Journal

TikTok’s shoddy data privacy practices aren’t even its biggest problem – Quartz