In the second part of a two-part article on why community is becoming increasingly important to marketers, we spoke to two people from very different backgrounds, each of whom has created a technology to enable community — very different offerings representing very different perspectives.

“A lot of people feel isolated and wonder why they can’t find someone that gets them – and you can find that online in the right places,” said Melanie Aronson, founder and CEO of Panion, a community management platform. Aronson is far from a typical tech CEO. She continues to work as a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, she has master’s and post-master’s degrees in the visual arts and a bachelor’s degree in social anthropology.

Communities can be built on Panion, including paid communities, with the opportunity to organize and host events or spontaneous gatherings. Users range from informal groups of individuals with shared interests to corporate clients seeking to build a community around their products and services.

Commsor, on the other hand, is not a community platform, but a kind of CRM for existing communities, allowing brands to tie together and analyze community activities on a range of platforms — Slack, Twitter, Zoom and others — all in one dashboard. Mac Reddin, who stumbled across the idea for Commsor while participating in a no-code hackathon, explains that the current challenge is to build out the ROI engine, demonstrating the impact community can have on every aspect of a business, including marketing, sales and customer service.

Read more here. »

Ever since we coined the phrase “MarTech is marketing” in 2019, it has only become clearer to us that the art of building brands, prospects and customers today cannot be separated from the tools we use to power those activities. But it’s also clear that the pace of transformation is leading marketers to continually evaluate their tech stacks as platforms add features and new tools emerge that enable marketers to create, integrate and orchestrate better than before.

The first MarTech Replacement Survey in 2019 showed just how frequently marketing organizations replaced technology. The survey found homegrown platforms were often displaced by commercial, out-of-the-box applications. This had a direct effect on hiring, as most respondents said they had recruited new teams to run the platforms they were installing.

Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has gripped the world, forcing us more closely to embrace digital operations. We know that many digital-first businesses thrived during the pandemic, but questions remained about how the disruption of the past year-and-a-half affected marketing technology decisions.

This year’s report, the result of a survey fielded through April and May of 2021, answers several of those questions.

Of the 374 marketers who answered our survey, 252 told us they replaced a marketing technology application in the past year, representing 67% of respondents. For the most part, organizations were upgrading from one commercial solution to another — and the upgraded solutions were exactly the kinds of technologies you’d expect given how digital transformation picked up during the pandemic.

Read more here. »

Email has long been one of the most reliable marketing channels for getting your messaging in front of your customers. But many obstacles can get between you and your intended recipients. The MarTech Email Marketing Periodic Table will tell you everything you need to know about sending emails that your customers want to receive and that inboxes won’t block from being delivered.

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Event management platform Bizzabo announced a new partnership with video-for-business company Brightcove to bolster their virtual hybrid events capabilities. With the partnership, Bizzabo customers have access to Brightcove’s broadcast-level video support, creating a full end-to-end package to design remote video presentations, while also managing and executing them. Importantly, marketers can also measure the success of the event experience with Bizzabo’s intelligence-gathering engagement.

This integration comes on the heels of the Bizzabo Partner Program, which was announced in February. These integrations focus on the CRM, web integrations and marketing automation categories and include top tools like Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot and Slack.

Why we care. Whether or not we go back to live events next year, virtual events are here to stay, and virtual content will remain part of many live events — the combination we’ve all learned to call hybrid.

The silver lining with hybrid and virtual events is that, with more digital touchpoints, the hosts and sponsors of an event can have a better grasp of how the attendees responded to various sessions and features of the experience. It’s a bigger ask at a live event for each attendee to turn to their mobile device and take a survey. And of course, a robust video solution is at the heart of executing virtual and hybrid.

Read more here. »

Grab your free MarTech pass now and get ready to learn actionable tactics for creating unified digital experiences, leveraging customer journey analytics, increasing inbox engagement, getting marketing and legal teams on the same page, and loads more.

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Starting June 30, 2022, responsive search ads will be the only Google Search ad type that can be created or edited in standard Google Search campaigns, the company announced.  That means you will no longer be able to create new ETAs or edit existing ETAs in Google Ads. “Your existing expanded text ads will continue to serve alongside responsive search ads, and you’ll still see reports on their performance going forward. Additionally, you’ll be able to pause and resume your expanded text ads or remove them if needed. You’ll also still be able to create and edit call ads and Dynamic Search Ads,” said the announcement.

Why we care. This is the latest move that Google is making to push automation through their ad products. The announcement says that “15% of search queries every day are new searches we’ve never seen before” and therefore “Automation is key to keeping pace with these trends.” Many advertisers do use RSAs well, but they also like having the control and capabilities that ETAs offer. The future phase-out of ETAs means advertisers are moving further away from direct control over their accounts and having to work with the Google Ads machine learning and AI.

Read more here. »

“There are many things you can do to get fewer email unsubscribes. But hiding the ability to unsubscribe should not be one of them. Create better content and optimize your mail frequency and cadence!” Brett Rudy, Head of Marketing, MedSchoolCoach