It’s up to marketers to make the case for the technology they want to use. More than they might think, marketers hold the future of their organization’s digital transformation in their own hands. This was the message from Michael McCune, Senior Director at Gartner, at our recent MarTech Conference.

“Every marketing leader wants to break free of the constraints to their transformation, and often these constraints are portrayed as obstacles that others put in marketing’s way,” said McCune. “But it’s actually marketing that presents the biggest obstacle to its own transformation ambitions.”

That’s because marketers fail to define a goal or “end state” for the technology they want to implement, according to McCune. They also need to enable continuous improvements towards that end state, and they need to obtain consistent funding to execute those changes, over time.

Read more here.

Mailchimp, a marketing platform that serves primarily small businesses, has announced new functionality to help optimize email campaigns. Content Optimizer will recommend specific improvements to email campaigns based on an AI-driven comparison of the content with best content practices gleaned from Mailchimp’s billions of marketing data-sets.

The launch represents the first leveraging of Mailchimp’s acquisition of AI platform Inspector 6 in July of this year. Inspector 6’s offering analyzes brand content and makes optimization recommendations. It provides text and visual analytics and can now draw insights from Mailchimp’s extensive data.

Content Optimizer will make recommendations relating to readability, typography, CTA placements and compliance with brand standards.

Why we care. Content is king, as the saying goes, and no less so for SMBs competing in the digital experience economy where email remains an important channel. The difficulty SMBs face, of course, is being able to make a sufficient investment in content creation and optimization. They are either lacking in-house know-how and tools or reluctant to spend on agency support.

Read more here.

While 96% of Sales and Marketing leaders agree that personalized communications to prospects are the most effective, the majority agree that feasibility is a major challenge to personalization at scale. Stop missing opportunities! It’s time you got the most out of your investments in ABM. Join this October 26th webinar to learn the findings of new research from Renegade and Conversica and explore practical tips for executing lead outreach like a champ.

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Conversation intelligence platform Invoca will announce new capabilities at its annual Summit conference today and tomorrow. The impetus of the updates is to boost the ability of revenue teams to take swift action based on conversation intelligence data.

The news follows the high-profile acquisition of DialogTech in May this year and the consequent doubling in size of Invoca’s R&D capabilities and acceleration of its development roadmap.

In June, Invoca launched Invoca for Sales to promote call-handling quality at the individual agent level and to automate the call scoring process.

Why we care. Invoca’s acquisition of DialogTech marked a very significant consolidation in the conversation intelligence space, and it’s reasonable to expect the organization to take the lead in innovation. What’s more, customers still talk to brands; they still pick up a phone and expect a relevant response. Conversation intelligence aims to wring as much actionable data from such interactions as can be gathered from online and social engagement. That’s where these updates are headed.

Read more here.

More and more, the key to solving critical marketing and marketing ops challenges is marketing technology. But with 7,000+ solutions on the market, finding the right one for your needs can be overwhelming. MarTech makes it easy. Discover dozens of time-saving, profit-boosting solutions and the actionable tactics to effectively leverage them… all in one place, all without leaving your desk, and all for free.

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Choosing the best marketing analytics tools for your organization’s website takes a certain level of discernment. Not every business depends on pageview tracking; product teams rely on valuable data that some tools aren’t designed to track.

“Over the years I’ve seen teams build up troves of unusable data,” said Lex Roman, Growth Designer at website optimization and design company Super Easy Digital, in her recent MarTech presentation. “If you want to be able to act on your data, your team has to be able to easily access and understand it.”

She added, “You want to use a tool that lets you decide what information matters to your team.”

No marketer wants to add more work to their plate, especially when it comes to tracking customer data. That’s why it’s so important to choose the analytics tool best suited for your business from the get-go.

Read more here.

“People making jokes about the Facebook services going down make me sick. Anyone who was using an Oculus headset at the time is currently trapped in VR, and if they die there then they die in real life.” Gavin Young, Programming Project Lead, Ubisoft Montreal