Wayne Lockwood: Top 5 Sessions to Watch at Marketing Nation Online

Wednesday, 7 September 2016

Top 5 Sessions to Watch at Marketing Nation Online

Author: Mary Kate Francis

The Marketing Nation Online: Tomorrow’s Marketer is right around the corner!

Hopefully by now, you already know why you shouldn’t miss our one of a kind virtual event. But once you’ve registered for this free event, what should you expect? With nearly 30 different sessions lined up to be delivered by thought leaders and subject-matter experts from around the world, how do you choose which ones to watch first? (Pro tip: most sessions will be available on-demand after the event for those with busy schedules.) The options are endless! These sessions fall within a wide range of categories from thought leadership, to Marketo@Marketo, to digital marketing, to demand generation, and more.

As the big day approaches, I wanted to share a few insights I’ve gathered over the past several months while working on this event.

In this blog I’ll disclose some insider knowledge about what’s coming your way and share five sessions you really won’t want to miss come September 14th:

1. Tomorrow’s Marketer: The Three Ts for Success in the Digital Age

This is why you’re all attending, right? So you can understand what it takes to become tomorrow’s marketer and be successful in this ever-changing digital landscape. In this session, Chandar Pattabhiram, CMO of Marketo, will discuss the steps that marketing must take to further solidify its place as a strategic function, drive digital transformation, and own the customer experience.

To stay ahead, marketing will undoubtedly need to undergo radical change. Chandar will discuss three primary areas of change that will transform your marketing organization and prepare you and your team to become tomorrow’s marketer. The areas include:

Techniques you should adopt to build and maintain long-term relationships with your buyers and measure marketing’s impact on revenue
Talent you should hire and team you should structure to build a team equipped for success
Technologies you should implement to navigate a complex ecosystem of technologies to find what’s right for your business.

2. A Women-Targeted Strategy

You might be thinking that this is an obvious choice seeing as it’s the opening keynote. Fair point, BUT I personally think it’s worth reiterating why this is an important session to attend. Lara Balazs, SVP of North America Marketing at Visa will be discussing how having women in leadership roles in your organization will uplevel your marketing strategy–allowing you to keep one of your most powerful audiences, women, top-of-mind. She’ll demonstrate the buying power of women in today’s marketplace with real case studies and provide insights for how to understand and engage this critical audience so that you can optimize your marketing strategy.

3. The ABCs of ABM: How to Build the Ultimate ABM Program That Delivers

In case you haven’t heard, account-based marketing (ABM) is the new standard for strategic, account-centric, B2B marketing. With new technologies making ABM more cost effective and attainable than ever before, there’s never been a better time to get started.

In this session, David Cain and Heidi Bullock, Group Vice Presidents of Marketing at Marketo, will provide tips for when to start driving an ABM initiative in your business and how to get the ball rolling. They’ll cover the five critical steps for successful ABM and use practical examples to demonstrate how Marketo leverages ABM to drive demand in high value accounts. Put simply, by the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to pick your target accounts and begin marketing to them.

4. Everything You’ve Heard About Influencer Marketing is Wrong

Today’s buyers are owning their journeys and increasingly relying on self-driven searches and recommendations from their peers and communities. Enter influencer marketing (another hot topic in marketing these days). Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, is here to clear the air and reveal how many of the influencer marketing “best practices” floating around are simply wrong!

In this session, Lee will debunk five of the most detrimental influencer marketing myths and help realign the value of influencer relationships and the role of content co-creation. You’ll learn what it really takes to use influencer marketing as a means to expand your reach to your most critical audiences, improve audience experience and engagement, and ultimately drive new business.

5. Building Your People-Based Marketing Strategy

To close us out is our closing keynote! One of the key aspects of being tomorrow’s marketer is an avid focus on customers above all else. To excel in this digital-first era, we need to focus on the people and meet them wherever they are, on any and every device. That being said, the brands that will thrive tomorrow are those who seamlessly integrate across channels. But we’ve all known this for a while, so why has this ambitious approach fallen short?

Martin Gilliard, Global Head of MarTech and Data Partnerships at Facebook, will reveal what’s been missing. Using customer case studies, Martin will explain how businesses can actually achieve the lofty goal of people-based marketing and connect with buyers in a personalized way, across channels.

And there you have it! These five sessions will cover some of the key topics that will be discussed at this year’s virtual event. AND we’ve got 24 more where that came from! Don’t miss Marketing Nation Online: Tomorrow’s Marketer, where the sessions are only one of many reasons to attend. Register now, and get ready for a day of unparalleled thought leadership, exclusive content, networking with marketers from around the world, free swag, and much more!

Which Marketing Nation Online sessions are you most anticipating? Comment below!