As one of the official sponsors of Adobe Summit 2019, we’ve gotten some behind-the-scenes details about the year’s premier digital marketing event. If you’re going to be in Las Vegas from March 24-28, here are some superhero tips to help you make the most out of your trip:
A Superhero’s Guide to Flawless Marketing Automation Campaigns – 5 Steps That Prevent Villains from Tarnishing Your Brand
Growing up, my father used to say, “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, what makes you think you will have time to do it again?” He was an absolute perfectionist. He was also one of those people who would sit down at a restaurant and find the typo on the menu before anyone else had even picked theirs up. One of the greatest lessons I learned from my father was about quality and the impact of quality on my brand.
Today, as part of the Marvel Marketers team of superheroes, our namesake commands quality. After all, a superhero has very little room for error. I find myself being called in to save the day on campaigns where all the information we have is “something isn’t working.” Almost always, I find that a solid quality assurance (QA) process would have caught the problem. The difference between good and great is frequently just the simple step of slowing down and checking it twice.
With these 5 easy steps, you can keep the villains out of your marketing automation campaigns.
Marvel Marketing Minute – 3 Things You Have to Do to Make Marketo Programs and SFDC Campaigns Work Together
As marketers, we are always trying to find ways to make sure our marketing efforts are tracked and receive credit when they drive or influence sales deals. Before we can start taking credit to closed deals, we need to take a few steps back and make sure we have our Marketo programs, channels, and status set up and in-sync with our SFDC Campaigns.
Hosting a Webinar? Here’s Your 7-Week Prep Plan
Planning a webinar? Got the topic and speaker already figured out?
Great!
Now what?
The prep work you do now will determine how successful your webinar actually is. And you have to start early. Check out this superhero-approved 7-week prep plan:
Marvel Marketing Minute – Be the Superhero Who Saves the Day with Scalable Naming Conventions
Why do most of us admire superheroes? Their strength and perseverance motivate us to be like them. Just like a superhero, you can save the day—and streamline your Marketo instance—by following these naming convention tips.
The Time I Had to Import 50,000 New Leads into Marketo…
It wasn’t an unusual request from a client. Waiting for a data file to import leads into Marketo is one of the many things a marketing automation consultant does in a normal day.
Except this time, the list contained 50,000+ rows.
When I first opened the giant file, I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t make my computer crash. After my silent wish, I knew I needed to quickly get a handle on this massive amount of data. At first glance, I could see a bunch of typos, and I knew this was going to be an issue.
Marvel Marketing Minute – Don’t Forget About Time Zones!
“What time zone is this?”
It’s an important question to know the answer to when you land in a new place, and it’s also important to know the answer to when you send an email to your audience. Time zones can be tricky. Some countries observe daylight savings, while others do not, and the dates are different, too.
In 2018, our team was running a global program from September to November, with several weekly webinars across several regions. We had conventional reminder emails in Marketo that were pre-scheduled to send 30 minutes before the start of the webinar. So for a webinar starting at 10:00 am, we sent out a reminder email at 9:30 am. Everything felt timely until the last week of October, when we thought we made a mistake on the scheduled time of the reminder email. Instead of sending 30 minutes prior to a webinar in Europe, it sent 30 minutes into the webinar.
What happened?
Bogged Down by Details? Here’s a Superhero’s Plan for Super Career Growth
It’s been three years, and you are still the Marketing Operations manager at your company. You’ve gotten good, I mean, really good at your job. Your templates are flawless, you’ve reduced turnaround time by 70%, and your database is so clean you can eat tomato soup out of it. You’re in a good place, but you’re in the same place.
Meanwhile, everyone else around you seems to be doing things. How did Josh the SDR transition to become a Customer Success Engineer? When did Wendy the intern become Head of Brand? Sam left to start his own company?! (Who took the Honolulu Cookies that I left on his desk?!)
When your job requires you to hyperfocus on the details, it can be easy to get lost in the day-to-day that you forget to focus on your own self growth.
This has been one my biggest challenges, and one I’m constantly working on. Over the past few years, I’ve picked up a few best practices to shake me out of my tunnel vision and help me refocus on my own personal and career growth.
Marvel Marketing Minute – Outsourcing Your Content? Start with the Strategy
If you don’t have the internal resources to create your own content, you may be tempted to hire a freelance copywriter, send him some instructions, and wait for the magical prose to arrive. However, that’s the worst decision you can make. Here’s what to do instead.
5 Things That the Very Best Marketers are Constantly Doing
Have you ever wondered what you can do to be a better marketer? Throughout the years in different marketing organizations, I noticed there are 5 things that the very best marketers are constantly doing.
With that in mind, here are the habits you should start in 2019:
