Good morning, Marketer, and let the sun shine. The debate about what is and isn’t martech continues to see people rushing to the ‘anything goes’ side of the question. There’s room for different views, of course, and we can agree to disagree. But here’s where I’m coming from (and sure, it’s something to do with my academic background). If you don’t have any criteria for identifying what you’re talking about, you’re not really talking about anything. This doesn’t mean the criteria have to be strictly defined. I certainly believe there are solutions out there which fall into a grey area between martech and some other kind of tech. But there are solutions which just aren’t martech, whether marketers find them useful or not. It doesn’t follow, as some seem to think, that making that distinction blocks good business outcomes. Nobody is saying, ‘That’s not martech, so don’t use it.’ The modest proposal is that we don’t inflate an already vast martech landscape by adding every other tool which looks cool. There’s an analogous debate to be had about dividing lines (probably very blurry ones) between marketing and marketing ops. I just like to let the sunlight in on questions like these, rather than take the position that definitions don’t matter and we should just get on with it. Kim Davis
Editorial Director |
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| | | Digital Marketing | | | | | How Special Olympics is supporting digital health and strength | | Special Olympics, the non-profit which supports a community of athletes with intellectual disabilities, if flexing its virtual muscles to provide virtual support in a time when in-person training and competition remains unsafe. “There was an event going on almost every hour of the year, outside the pandemic — across the country and globally. We had to make adjustments, not only to maintain the safety of our athletes, but to keep the community strong,” said Crystal Hudson, Director of Digital Fundraising and Strategy at Special Olympics. The nonprofit boosted its ability to respond rapidly to the communities needs by leveraging Brightspot’s Business Content Platform, a decoupled CMS, to rapidly design and create new web experiences. Also in the stack, Falcon.io to manage social media outreach, and EveryAction, a CRM and email solution designed for nonprofits. Special Olympics hopes to get back to in-person games later this year: “But we have to be safe, we have to make sure the athletes feel safe and continue to be healthy,” Hudson said. Read more here. |
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| | | | 5 habits of top-performing email marketers | | Email remains one of the most important and effective marketing channels. Yet, a recent study suggests email marketers are running the risk of negatively impacting their email program by not following best practices. Join our experts from Validity for this webinar where they will walk you through five best practices of top-performing email marketers and explain why these strategies are necessary for your email program. RSVP Today » |
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| | | Content | | | | | HubSpot + The Hustle | | Inbound marketing platform HubSpot has announced it will acquire the business and tech publisher The Hustle. The Hustle supplements a blog featuring short news items with newsletter, podcast and research products. The move is expected to allow HubSpot to make content available, especially to growing companies, building on the success of its own educational blog, Academy. The Hustle’s subscription research service Trends has some 10,0000 subscribers, and the free daily email 1.5 million. Why we care. For a software company, HubSpot has always been highly focused on content, whether educational content for HubSpot users, or more general informational content at the HubSpot blog. With this acquisition, HubSpot is betting on the trend for B2B brands to offer richer, content-based experiences to prospects and customers — much more than just technical information and white papers. |
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| | | PPC | | | | | Google expands phrase match to include broad match modifier traffic | | | | Since 2014, when Google ended support for the “true” exact match type, the company has periodically thrown advertisers for a loop by making more changes to its keyword matching options, favoring machine learning and automation over manual controls. This time around, the company is expanding phrase match to include broad match modifier traffic, and ending support for the latter. These changes will start rolling out in two weeks. The updated phrase match will continue to respect word order when it’s important to the meaning, the company said. In July, after the new behavior rolls out globally, advertisers will not be able to create new broad match modifier keywords. Because the change is happening to both match types, there’s no need to migrate keywords and advertisers will get to keep their performance data. This could, potentially, save advertisers time spent managing keywords, but it’ll certainly mean that some will have to spend a lot more time recalibrating campaigns. Traffic may fluctuate as this rolls out, so keep an eye on your performance metrics so you can adjust accordingly. And, get used to using the updated phrase match moving forward. How will this affect your campaigns? Or, why won’t it affect your campaigns? Send your thoughts my way, and spare no detail: gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com. I appreciate it! Read more here. |
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| | | Quote of the day | | | | | | | “Research by McKinsey found more than 75% of buyers and sellers said they now prefer digital self-serve and remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions. That’s a remarkable shift, but one that makes sense in the context of recent events.” Michael McGoldrick, Senior Marketing Manager, MRP. |
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