🔊 If you've got time, we've got an e-book for you

In an age of compelling images and short, snappy sentences, the e-book comes across like a dinosaur. It’s just a few thousands of words of tightly packed information, backed by a few charts and graphs. Yet it remains a vital tool in converting a prospect into a customer in the B2B marketing world.

That lead you are trying to reach has to make an “informed” buying decision. Getting that person to purchase will require time, effort and facts. Here the e-book delivers, as B2B customers are looking for authoritative sources to inform, confirm and validate. Contributor William Terdoslavich spoke to three B2B marketing experts to get the best advice on the length and format of e-books, and how they can dovetail with a cross-channel B2B marketing strategy, incorporating landing pages and email sequences.

“’Thought leadership’ is absolutely a buzzword,” said Adam Smartschan, Chief Strategy Officer at Altitude Marketing. “We’re not here to simply sell our smarts. We’re here to advance a user toward becoming a customer. If we gain a reputation along the way, awesome. But ebooks and other lead magnets serve a specific purpose. They’re about getting some information and providing real, actionable value.”

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2020 didn’t go the way many digital marketers were expecting. However, challenges often present new opportunities and ways of approaching strategies and campaigns. Learn more about the pivots and shifts and the acceleration of various trends that were already transforming the world of digital marketing.

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This week, cybersecurity company HUMAN (formerly known as White Ops) announced the formation of “The Human Collective” to root out ad fraud in the digital ecosystem. The collaboration is notable for the flagship members represented across the ad supply chain, including programmatic vendors, agencies and brands. Among them are The Trade Desk (a major DSP), independent SSP Magnite, media agency Omnicom Media Group and Amica Mutual Insurance.

HUMAN brings to this collective its Human Verification Engine, which protects digital media, APIs and apps against bot attacks. They boast verifying over 10 trillion interactions per week for companies and web platforms. Spelling out the value of the collective to brands, James Bussiere, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Amica, stated: “Participating in this initiative is just one further step we’re taking at Amica to maximize our digital media investments and hold everyone in the ecosystem more accountable for business outcomes.

Bussiere added: “Our role as advertisers is critical to this mission, as it’s advertisers’ budgets that fraudsters are taking advantage of.”

Why we care. Programmatic exchanges have opened up inventory to premium content on maturing channels like CTV. An omnichannel SSP like Magnite offers addressability at scale. However, bots and other ad fraud schemes have gotten more sophisticated as these premium channels become more lucrative. As a result, greater steps must be taken to ensure confidence and trust. Otherwise, brands can’t be completely sure that they’re getting the most bang for their buck.

Now more than ever, your customers are craving a personal connection. Your email messaging connects you to your customer, and when you deliver individualized messages, you are making that relationship a strong one. Join Salesforce for this live webinar and learn how personalized email campaigns can empower you to build strong connections with the people who matter most to your organization.

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RSG’s 2021 martech vendor map shows a subset of martech vendors represented as a kind of subway map. Each line on this subway represents a capability (web content and experience management, digital asset management, and so on) and the layout shows the range of capabilities offered by the larger marketing suites.

It’s possible to see at a glance, for example, that Adobe offers the most comprehensive suite, while Salesforce lacks digital asset management and a content platform, both of which Adobe and Oracle offer. It’s also easy to distinguish pure-play CDPs like Zylotech and ActionIQ from platforms that include a CDP as one integrated component of a broader offering — like Acquia, Optimizely and Sitecore. Read more from RSG here.

Why we care. There’s room for more than one martech landscape, and RSG’s version has both advantages and disadvantages over Scott Brinker’s Supergraphic. Advantageously, it’s easier to read, and it shows the capabilities offered by each vendor. The price paid is that it’s a much smaller sampling of vendors, and that’s not just because it’s confined to technology developed exclusively for marketers (Trello and Asana make appearances). Significant parts of the landscape are missing — social media management, for example — and therefore major players like Sprinklr and Sprout Social.

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“Edge intelligence (processing, including AI, done locally in deployed devices instead of the cloud) is predicted to hit $12B this year, growing at 35%. Says Deloitte: ‘We’re about to create