10 Takeaways From The 2014 TrackMaven Marketing Summit

On October 8th, 2014, we gathered some of the brightest minds in marketing for our 2014 TrackMaven Marketing Summit!

This year’s Summit took place in New York City, and featured a full day of panels, keynotes, and customer case studies chock-full of insights for keeping up with the rapid rate of change in the realm of digital marketing.

The featured speakers — which included Joe Chernov, Meghan Gill, Rishi Dave, Paul Marcum, Jill Rowley, Matt Heinz, Joe Payne, and many more — shared best practices for engaging customers with data-driven marketing, as well as a few predictions for how marketers’ roles will change with time and technology.

Here are the key takeaways from the day of conversations, supplemented with tweets from the #TMSummit attendees.

1. We Are In The Midst Of A Content Marketing Arms Race.

The explosion of digital channels has created myriad opportunities for marketers from any industry to interact with their audience. This technological escalation in marketers’ means of output has created a “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality in the world of content marketing.

Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet, summed up the many lines of conversation surrounding this explosion of content, succinctly noting that “if you’re not pumping out new content all the time, you’re not a part of the conversation.”

 

2. To Cut Through Content Overload, Marketers Need To Overcome Data Overload.

There is a lot of content out there, which means there is incredible competition for brands to connect with their audience. And thanks to advances in marketing technology, there is also an explosion of data at our disposal about how people consume, share, and interact with all of this content.

During his session on Personal Value: The Secret Weapon Against Consensus Buying, Paul Marcum, Global Head of Digital Video at Bloomberg Media Group, quoted his former boss Beth Comstock‘s maxim on Data Overload, which fellow Summit speaker Matt Heinz tweeted:

The surplus of data now available to marketers has created a new conundrum: what data should I pay attention to? Again, Matt Heinz provided the best response of the day, emphasizing the need for relevant, real-time feedback.

 

3. Successful Content Marketers Experiment And Optimize.

While the sharp increase in both content and data was a jumping-off point for many conversations at this year’s Summit, the featured speakers were quick to point out that best-in-class marketers don’t simply churn out content and throw it to the winds.

Rather, successful content marketers monitor their content performance in real-time, analyze results, and iterate for continuous improvement.

4. For Credibility With The C-Suite, Marketers Need To Shift Their KPIs From Activity To Revenue.

In the panel Moneyball Marketing: How to Avoid Drowning in Data, former Eloqua CEO Joe Payne noted that “marketing is the only team that reports their activity, not results.”

Payne then posed the following question to his panelists: “What do you do when your gut feeling about a marketing campaign don’t align with the data?”

The responses and conversation amongst panelists Joe Chernov, Meghan Gill, and Matt Heinz spoke to the necessity for marketers to shift their reporting focus from marketing activities (i.e. volume of content produced) to marketing-generated revenue (i.e. pipeline contribution).

 

5. Content Creators Needs To Adapt To Our Mobile Means Of Consumption.

During the Storytelling for Marketers panel, Jacob Weisberg, Chairman of the Slate Group, proclaimed that “everyone understands that all further growth is on mobile.”

Josh Rubin, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Cool Hunting, took this mobile-centric view of the future a step further, noting that the next big thing in media and storytelling is “a seamless continuity of content between screens” so that our content “moves with us in real time from our mobile devices to tablets to desktop computers and back to our phones again.”

And speaking of cell phones — Jill Rowley, Founder and Chief Evangelist of SocialSelling, stunned the audience with this factoid about the omnipotence of mobile devices:

 

6. The Media Business Is Becoming Synonymous With The Marketing Business.

The featured speakers at this year’s Summit ran the gamut from in-house content marketers to traditional media publishers. Throughout the day, panelists from both sides of the spectrum reinforced the need for marketers to take a publisher’s approach to content, and for publishers to adopt a marketer’s approach to distribution.

 

7. To Be Nimble In Today’s Digital Landscape, Marketers Need To Have Both Creative And Analytical Skills.

On the panel Moneyball Marketing: How To Avoid Drowning In Data, Joe Chernov noted that he looks for candidates that are “more athletes than specialists” when hiring for his marketing team at HubSpot.

Throughout the day, this notion of the need for “Unicorn Marketers” with exceptional creativity, technical expertise, and analytical responsibility was reinforced by a number of speakers.

8. We Are At The Forefront Of Our Capacity For Personalized Marketing.

From marketing automation to retargeting, technological advances in the realm of digital marketing have created an unprecedented potential to deliver personalized content to audiences on the right channels at the most opportune times.

During the sessions Content as Product: The Future of Media and The Content Marketing Platform Showdown, panelists Chris Bolman and Russell Glass both noted that when it comes to personalizing content, we’ve only reached the tip of the iceberg.

 

9. This Potential For Personalized Content Will Define The Future Of Advertising.

With great power comes great responsibility. This adage is just as relevant to superhero franchises as it is to the world of digital advertising.

During the 2014 Summit, speakers and panelists reinforced the need to expand the notion of a personalized buyer experience to our advertising strategies. The end of irrelevant ads is nigh!

 

10. Design Is Essential To Marketers’ Ability To Execute Digital Storytelling.

And finally, the design perspective! In the name of cross-departmental harmony, the 2014 Marketing Summit also featured all all-star cast of designers, all of whom shared their insights from decades of experience collaborating with marketers.

On the Better Marketing By Design panel, Max Pfennighaus, Executive Creative Director for The New York Times, called for marketers to listen more and sell less:


Ted Irvine, Senior Design Director at Vox Media, highlighted the visual power of storytelling in the marketing process:

 

Conclusion

All in all, Anastasia Khoo, Director of Marketing for the Human Right Campaign, provided the most succinct summary for the day in her presentation on her work on the Human Rights Campaign’s uber-successfull Red Logo meme:“Be Opportunistic. Think Externally. Have A Plan. Personal Stories Matter.”

 

What was your favorite takeaway from the 2014 TrackMaven Marketing Summit? Tweet us @TrackMaven!

Posted in Conference Insights on October 10, 2014

Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts

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