🎛️ MOPs: Bringing order to chaos

After a day and a half of listening to presentations and conversations at the MO Pros Summer Camp in Atlanta, MarTech’s Kim Davis had an observation to make.

“I have been to countless vendor conferences,” he told the room, “at which I heard how their solutions could create seamless, delightful customer experiences. Here, however, I’ve heard that things break, APIs don’t work, there’s no customer service at weekends and deadlines for projects are impossible anyway.”

Welcome to the world of marketing operations, where the professionals try to inject some order into chaos but are constantly beaten back by faulty tech, unreasonable workloads, and meaningless requests from uncomprehending business teams. And that’s exactly how they like it.

If MOPs professionals are no longer seen as just “button pushers,” is there a clear path for them beyond a primarily technical role? Author and head of the Pedowitz Group, Debbie Qaqish would say yes: “What we will see is technology, and the use of technology to re-invent business is more of an imperative now than it’s ever been. I do think you’re going to see these multifaceted, multi-talented leaders of marketing ops step up to that CMO role. I absolutely do see that.”

But what about the MOPs professionals themselves? The question was put to the group: “How many of you are interested in becoming a CMO.” Three or four hands were hesitantly raised. Many MOPs people prefer, it seems, to be grappling with tools and projects. As one said, “You’re hands on, in the weeds, and you can lose that at the executive level.”

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Everyone agrees that third-party cookies aren’t perfect – they’re household, not individual, identifiers. Moving past cookie-based marketing makes philosophical, ethical and practical sense. However, this year-long reprieve enables companies to continue developing their own solutions and to make up lost ground and lost time.

After all, personalization, measurement, and general customer experience (CX) are getting harder to execute effectively. The pandemic accelerated people’s desire for meaningful, relevant and personal experiences – without sacrificing privacy and protection. Google is simply giving a temporary stay of execution, not a pardon.

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When talking about martech, we most often think about tools that allow us to perform a specific task related to marketing — analyze traffic on our websites, aggregate and understand customer data, deliver personalized messaging, etc.

But most marketing initiatives require we employ multiple tools to achieve our objectives. Just to use one example, we may use Google Doc to write a whitepaper, Canva to create graphics to illustrate it, and something like Adobe InDesign or Acrobat to bring it all together. Then, the asset goes into the marketing automation platform, which integrates with the content management system and other tools that drive traffic to that piece of gated content.

How are marketers tying all this together? Many are using a category of tool that’s undergoing a great deal of change, marketing work management (MWM). Some of the software we looked at in our just-launched MarTech Intelligence Report on the space are all-purpose project management tools, but, increasingly, vendors are adding features specific to common marketing workflows.

Read more and download the report here.

Failing to build authentic customer experiences can lead to low engagement, growth, and loyalty. Join experts from ActionIQ and Merkle who will share case studies of companies across industries building technology stacks that succeed in winning customers, even in complex and regulated operating environments like banking, wealth management, insurance and beyond.

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Global discovery platform Taboola today announced that it will acquire Connexity, a leading e-commerce media platform. The move is intended to better position Taboola to support an open internet by providing value to advertisers without reliance on third-party cookies.

Driving acquisition for clients such as Walmart, Wayfair, Skechers, Macy’s and eBay, Connexity reaches more than 100 million unique shoppers per month through a network of household name publishers. Uniting these capabilities with Taboola’s discovery technology will enable the display of relevant product recommendations alongside related content.

Why we care. More consolidation, of course. Whether or not native ads are your preferred reading, Taboola does at least power the distribution of contextually appropriate native ads in brand safe environments. The Connexity acquisition brings with it a lucrative retail customer base.

Video has been the “next big thing” for a while. Over 75% of GenZers age 15-25 watch YouTube. “Their most used platform is YouTube closely followed by Instagram – so video is clearly a priority for them,” wrote Sorilbran Stone. So it only makes sense that more search marketers are using Google’s video platform for both paid and organic reach.

This guide demonstrates how YouTube’s algorithm works and how you can optimize your video content to show up in those results. The key is to plan for your audience and work backward from there. Important metrics include things like watch time, retention rate, and engagement, but your keywords are also critical.

YouTube assesses keywords not just from titles, tags, and descriptions, but also from the audio of the video — which means it’s critical to actually say them in your audio script and transcription. How do you choose the keywords? Well, good, old fashioned keyword research, of course.

Join thousands of senior marketers online — September 14-15 — at MarTech! This two-day training experience will equip you with actionable tactics and proven strategies for meeting the challenges and opportunities data presents.

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“I’ve seen too many orgs build homegrown solutions and have the architect leave so it falls apart, or buy something off the shelf and customize it so much that the vendor support can’t help.” Sara McNamara, Marketing Operations, Slack