Are you feeling like your marketing has become less effective? Like your digital, content, and email campaigns are not creating the same amount of pipeline as they have in the past?
The marketing playbooks we’ve used for years just aren’t working. Buyers are numb to our traditional tactics.
In this session, Jon Miller, former cofounder of Marketo, and CEO at Engagio, will share his new playbook based on what works at Demandbase. It's filled with account-based techniques that are working today, including focusing on the right accounts, conditioning the market to your solution, and engaging the right accounts at the right time with the right plays. And he'll make you groan with some bad dad jokes as well.
In this session you will hear from CMOs and marketing experts on how to sustain market share growth in the face of economic headwinds and overcome the threat of marketing budget cuts. Each day marketers, like you, are at risk of getting their budget cut if you don’t drive the metrics needed to build your business. This panel discussion led by Josh Okun from Gravity Global is designed to open the conversation of what is preventing marketing team from growing, or even worse, keeping the marketing budgets. B2B marketing tends to be drawn toward “building fame” - typically through campaigns focused on tangible differentiators - or ‘transactional conversion marketing’. Typically ignored in either choice is the need to build positive sentiment, admiration, and emotional competitive advantage across all touch points with prospects and customers. As the pandemic accentuated the pressure on marketing budgets, the focus on conversion and trackable performance marketing heightened, while long-term brand building, through distinctive emotive-led marketing and communication fell further by the wayside.
The discussion will briefly introduce F.A.B. as a means of highlighting problems and potential solutions in relevant categories of the panelists.
In this panel discussion we’re joined by Pamela Jacques, VP Corporate and Experiential Marketing at NETSCOUT, who’ll bring first-hand experience of how selectively investing in brand has directly led to an increase in customer engagement and demand generation performance. We’ll discover what doing more with less has meant for Pamela and NETSCOUT, given the current economic climate. Have expectations remained the same despite budgets being cut? What measurement solutions have helped her achieve her goals?
We’ll also share the findings of a joint report we conducted with B2B six months ago which surveyed over 200 B2B marketers and look at what’s changed since then. Have all those predictions come true, or has there been a shift of emphasis within the market? One thing’s for sure – maintaining a strong brand presence remains essential, as it helps accelerate deals and builds customer loyalty. Other organizations cutting brand spend can work in your favor as well – making yours cheaper and more efficient.
Although the market is volatile, we’ll discuss why you shouldn’t be tempted to cut brand budget. We’ll find out how their brand strategy has helped NETSCOUT get the message to market that they’re a platform company – not just a product company. On paper it may look as though you’re making savings to the bottom line, but this has proved to be a false economy for many organizations. While there’s no silver bullet to measure brand to demand, and defending brand budget can be a challenge, this session will show how organizations can quantify their brand spend, hearing how NETSCOUT has done just this.
You will learn:
Essential tips on how to do more with less.
- Why having a strong brand presence is essential for accelerating deals and building customer loyalty.
- How you can benefit financially when other organizations cut brand spend.
- Why cutting brand budget is a false economy, especially when the market's volatile.
- Strategies for quantifying and defending brand spend to maximize its impact on demand.
Starting right now, any B2B marketer in any industry can begin using powerful AI tools like ChatGPT to significantly improve their productivity, creativity, and performance.
In this highly actionable talk, Marketing AI Institute's Mike Kaput shares specific ways B2B marketers can leverage ChatGPT and other AI tools for targeted B2B marketing use cases. In the talk, you'll learn:
- Why AI is fundamentally different from the software you already use—and what that means for your work.
- How to identify AI use cases in your B2B marketing work, along with examples of how real B2B marketers are using the technology.
- 11+ recommendations of AI tools to begin exploring across high-impact use cases.
Each year, marketing teams spend weeks building a demand funnel to forecast how they’ll reach their goals. Then those same teams are surprised when they meet their Lead and MQL goals, but the Opportunities just aren’t there. This problem occurs because the funnel forecast is typically a blend of all sources from high-intent hand-raisers (i.e. demo and contact us) to low-intent activity (guides, webinars, etc). Surprises result when the forecast doesn’t account for the massive differences in prospect intent or conversion rates.
The team at Workiva decided to hack the funnel. Knowing that high-intent MQLs convert to opportunities at roughly 6x the others, the team focused on increasing demo requests by 20% in 2022. The team took swift action, focusing on velocity, high-quality MQLs and a great user experience. In the end, they achieved their goal with a quarter to spare resulting in $22.5M in pipeline creation and $2.6M in closed/won bookings.
Learn how to hack your funnel in 5 steps:
● Identify your highest intent MQLs
● Establish a streamlined buyer’s journey
● Invest in the right channels
● Partner with Sales to leave no prospect behind
● Ensure your martech is setup for success
Marketing has always been on the forefront of the “new and shiny” be it technology, strategy or methodologies. Although exciting, too often the hype and vanity matrix take away from the core of marketing i.e., to create and drive awareness and ROI for the organization.
Content is King but more often than not content is created without clear purpose or a plan for consumption or distribution. And when it comes to distribution the buzz words take over, terms like ABM and Intent are thrown around without understanding how to truly leverage them and build programs that keep the CMO, the CRO and the CFO happy at the same time.
This session will cut through the jargon and help create a clearer understanding of content strategy from creation to syndication and help create clear roadmaps to higher RoI and a robust funnel- leveraging account and intent based marketing tools and strategies, ensuring they deliver consistent and dependable value.
With a tough business outlook ahead, marketing and marketing ops are struggling to prove their ROIs. One of the best ways to show an instant impact of your teams and efforts is to directly tie to the sales team and/or sales activities. There are many ways that you can support or enable sales. Pam Didner, author of Effective Sales Enablement and Global Content Marketing, will share with you the creative and actionable ideas that you can implement after attending this workshop.
You will learn:
- Understand salespeople's mindset and their challenges
- Identify gaps and opportunities that you can enable your sales
- Craft a workflow to build a process if you need to integrate martech and sales tech
- Learn how to quantify and communicate your contribution to sales
*Be sure to book on to this workshop as spaces are limited*
In a court of law, we’re required to provide evidence for our claims, but in business, we don’t always share adequate proof that validates the claims we make. Content can be the perfect antidote to the “because I said so” claim-making that rarely creates the customer trust we want to achieve. This session will share how to corroborate your claims, demonstrate your value and educate your audience on all of the differentiators that are most important to your business and brand.
You will learn:
- Why trust is a KPI we should be focusing on more
- How content can help you build audience trust
- The five types of claims that need the most evidence
- What three types of content works best as evidence
This session will present marketing organization structure options, the critical marketing skill sets that should be included in all organizations, how to collaborate with key constituencies (especially sales), and real life examples from a range of industries.
Key takeaways:
- Consider a range of organizational structures and select the one that makes the most sense for your business
- Determine the skill sets you need / accountabilities
- Hire/train the right people for the right seats
- Collaborate and communicate early and often with sales
Marketing is getting ever-more digital and measurable, and yet most marketers still struggle to get beyond high level metrics like traffic and engagement to understand the impact of their marketing on the quality and quantity of leads. In this session, get the checklist that every team must implement to power marketing decision-making through more relevant measurement and smarter analysis.
Takeaways:
What are the processes and systems that are needed to help your team connect the data dots
How to build a holistic measurement program that’s proactive, not reactive
How to surface the kinds of data that can serve as the backbone of a powerful thought leadership program
DEI and authenticity are the buzzwords of the day, but not everyone knows how to achieve it. This lack of confidence results in an uncertain dance between appreciation, appropriation, performative action, cancel culture, and allyship. So, how can marketers use their strategic prowess to build an inclusive brand that strikes the right chord and speaks to the hearts and minds of their community?
You will learn:
- Why CMOs play a critical role in driving DEI
- How to partner with Chief Diversity Officers and Procurement teams to drive change
- Key takeaways and insights from your peers on their everyday successes and challenges
- A framework for progress
- A copy of the 2023 inclusive marketing report
As a leading global B2B logistics organization with aggressive growth goals, creating, leading, and maintaining an expert marketing team can be challenging. How do you manage multiple, hyper-focused partners to drive bottom-line results? How do you create a culture of collaboration, unifying your marketing teams with internal stakeholders and business initiatives?
SEKO Logistics has created a collaborative environment and structured workstreams to clearly define roles and responsibilities, identify opportunities for cross-partner collaboration, and optimize workflows to execute strategy and tactics cohesively across teams.
All teams work together regularly to execute campaigns and evergreen strategies. SEO integrates with PR to capitalize on linking opportunities and content. Paid Social works with Design to create and approve imagery. Paid Media works with Web Dev to create and optimize landing pages. All teams have clearly defined workstreams to ensure maximum efficiency.
Big goals mean tight execution. Ensuring you have the proper teams, processes, and governance in place are the only way to grow effectively and with purpose.
Things you’ll learn during this session:
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The benefits of integration across multiple marketing teams, channels and partners
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Key lessons learned in creating a collaborative environment and its impact on performance
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The challenges of managing diplomacy across multiple, hyper-focused, competitive partners
B2B content isn’t thriving the way it used to. Learn about three essential components that will help you revive your content — from content pillars, execution and atomization — to create a content marketing program that wins share of voice, trust and leads.
In this session with author and media & publishing lifetime achievement award winner James Meyers, you’ll learn:
- The three elements of a content marketing program that B2B marketers must adopt to convert buyers
- What it takes to position your thought leadership content in a louder and increasingly digital marketplace
- How a journalistic-enabled content program can transform your content creation
Influencer Marketing has taken a hot seat for B2B brands with 86% saying their programs are successful. But is working with external thought leaders enough? Research shows that employee content sees 8X more engagement than content shared on brand channels. Growing influence from within is becoming an important differentiator and priority for B2B brands to build credibility with customers, industry thought leaders and improve sales conversations.
In this presentation from Lee Odden, editor of the B2B Influencer Marketing Report and CEO at TopRank Marketing, you'll learn:
- Use cases for developing internal influence with employees and executives
- Ways to partner internal SMEs with industry experts to grow brand influence
- Top content formats that build executive influence and influence sales
We’ve become confused!
We are living in times of consumer, business and marketing crisis. We are either swaying towards cutting marketing budgets, turning to short-term activations to meet sales targets or chasing the latest shiny and new metaverse technology. Now is the time to bring clarity back to marketing and helping businesses and their brands grow, focussing on the fundamentals, not the fads!
In this session for senior strategic marketers, Mani Sian from The Croc will challenge your assumptions on your annual paid media investment and guide you with proven principles on how to build more bang for your buck.
The world of B2B is constantly evolving, with radical changes in buyer behavior and game-changing technologies seemingly being launched every day. In order to keep you ahead of the curve, this panel conversation will bring together industry experts to discuss the new frontiers of B2B marketing and the strategies and technologies that are driving growth and innovation.
The conversation will cover a range of topics, including the impact of emerging technologies on B2B marketing, the importance of personalization and customer experience, the role of data and analytics in driving business outcomes, and the challenges and opportunities of marketing in the digital age.
Our pioneers (sorry, we mean panellists) will share their insights and experiences from the frontiers of B2B marketing, offering practical tips and advice for attendees looking to stay ahead of the curve. Whether you're a marketing manager or a CMO, this event is a must-attend for anyone looking to understand what the future of B2B looks like, and unlock the full potential of their business.
Hear more about Anna Johannes story from winning a Bronze medal at the 2012 London Paralympic Games, to her pursuit for an inclusive design experience, in this inspirational closing keynote.
The Elevation Awards celebrate the very best in B2B from across the US, those who display the greatest talent.
Get Day 2 of Ignite off to a great start.
Join Richard at 7.00am for the Propolis: Rise & Run. Meet at the entrance to Convene (look out for the Ignite USA Flag) for an invigorating start to you day. He will lead you on a run around some of the sights of Chicago. No need to book simply turn up.
2023 has been a wild ride. The world of B2B has been disrupted in a very major way. And many of you, find yourselves trying to find creative ways to reach bigger goals, with fewer resources. So how do you do more with less?
Partnering with influencers can be an incredibly efficient and cost-effective way to scale marketing efforts. However, many stakeholders are sceptical about adding new tactics to marketing plans. Here’s the good news, there are an incredible number of ways to integrate influencers into the campaigns and programs that you already have planned.
You will learn ways to:
- Phase your influencer marketing approach
- Map content tactics to objectives
- Nurture & grow influencer relationships
- Build your influencer marketing strategy
- Get stakeholder buy-in
We live in an era where algorithms rule. They are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and impact a lot of things in our lives, from package delivery to movie recommendations tofinding a kidney or love online. Will there be a point where the robots take over? Can our
humanity be automated?
It is helpful to strike a balance between robots and humans because it’s the human brain that creates demand, which keeps the economy strong, and it’s the machine that augments our human capabilities.
During this keynote, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, addresses from a neuroscience perspective how to balance the human and the machine and create loyalty and better engagement with your internal teams and clients.
Specifically, you will learn tangible and practical answers to these current business questions:
- Does the machine really have more power compared to humans?
- How can we help the machine and the human brain to evolve?
- How do we sustain our humanity in an engineered age?
Digital fraudsters are hardly a group that deserve credit, but there's no denying the sophistication of their scams. Quantexa's Decision Intelligence Platform was the perfect defence against ever-evolving threats for some of the world's largest Retail Banks.
But getting this message in front of time-poor, hard to reach professionals would require an ABM strategy as creative and dexterous as the scammers themselves.
Join Digital Radish and Quantexa to for a step-by-step walkthrough of how to:
- Scale an ABM programme to deliver an increased level of personalisation and coordination of activity to more accounts
- Choose the right technology for ultra intelligence on account and person behaviour
- Make your abstract product/technology feel real in a creative way
- Leverage an omnichannel approach to drive successful ABX
- Integrate ABM with Demand-Gen effectively (it is possible)
We’ve all been there. Your GTM action plan has been frameworked. Your content has been created. Now you need to deliver it to the right people at the right time to get the results that you need. But who are they? How do you define your target audiences across channels to make sure you’re delivering your communications effectively?
As brands seek to deliver against the rising pressures from Sales and the Board, media delivery has been thrown under the spotlight. MQLs just don’t cut it, it’s all about Sales pipeline and revenue driven from integrated engagement to demand campaigns. Your media at scale needs to be very carefully balanced against activation that delivers specific, measurable results to win against the competition.
In this session, Izzie Rivers from Realm B2B will discuss how to identify and build the right audiences across channels to deliver bigger returns from your investment.
Izzie will demonstrate this via three client case studies:
• How HPE delivered an integrated Persona to ABM audience approach.
• How Algolia drove greater audience segment focus for greater returns.
• How Okta activated against a specific vertical ABM pilot.
The fairytale growth story for the enterprise technology sector is becoming harder to realize.
While net-new customers have long been the prime target for B2B marketers, lower growth and higher inflation are recalibrating acquisition and retention marketing efforts in the tech sector.
To date, existing customers have been underserved by marketing when compared to the effort assigned to securing new business. But research suggests the balance is shifting. Leaders are putting more emphasis on customer marketing in 2023, and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is fast becoming companies' most important growth metric.
What’s more, existing customers can offer a strategic springboard: allowing you to win platform deals or break into new categories, all the while helping create a resilient source of recurring revenue.
In this session we’ll examine how tech marketers can find and take advantage of new growth opportunities by:
- Better balancing acquisition and existing customer growth
- Bringing customer quality to the fore
- Building customer marketing muscle across the entirety of the post-sale customer lifecycle
The singularity, a term coined by mathematician John von Neumann and popularized by Ray Kurzweil, is when artificial intelligence growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in dramatic changes to human civilization. For marketers, with the advent of large language models and generative AI, the singularity is here. Models like GPT-3 and GPT-Neo-X have trivialized some tasks, allowed others to scale rapidly, and are changing the very foundations of digital marketing, particularly around SEO. Marketers are profoundly unprepared for what's happening right now and what's just around the corner.
In this keynote talk from TrustInsights.ai Chief Data Scientist Christopher Penn, you'll learn:
- What large language models can and cannot do
- How large language models are built
- How your organization should be thinking about their usage
- What other applications of the underlying technologies apply to marketing
- How various marketing jobs will be impacted
This workshop will cover:
- Polycrisis – opportunities and threats and what this means for marketers
- The importance of Culture – yours and your target markets
- Are our organisation GTM models fit for the future?
- What does great look like? – some international award winning campaigns to inspire
- Practical Tips and Takeaways for success
- There will be plenty of interactivity, so to help tailor the discussion to your needs please can you let me know
Click! You have a new visitor. What happens next? Do they barf and bounce or smile and stay?
The answer depends on a lot of little things, some obvious, some not.
This session is a breakdown of the best practices for B2B lead generation websites, based on hundreds of website projects. You will learn:
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What are the key elements of high-performing service pages?
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What features are common to blog templates but probably shouldn’t be?
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What three elements determine if visitors sign up for emails?
From social proof to CTAs, videos to contact forms, we will break down the options for UX elements and how they work with (or against) the psychology of your visitors.
Join us for "Bridging the Gap: Integrating Go-to-Market KPIs across Multiple Motions," a session focused on aligning key performance indicators (KPIs) from the boardroom to frontline sales strategies. We'll discuss how to make marketing KPIs understandable and relevant to high-level stakeholders unfamiliar with marketing-specific language. We'll also show how to integrate these KPIs into Salesforce for comprehensive, unified reporting across all go-to-market efforts. Attendees will gain insights on bridging the gap between strategic and operational KPIs, promoting better alignment, communication, and overall business effectiveness.
You will learn:
1. How to align sales and marketing to facilitate clean and reportable handoffs
2. How to reconfigure sales structure, alignment, and lead routing to support pod development
3. How to transition from an MQL only model to one that can handle any go-to-market motion
Are marketers putting acronyms before people and leads before revenue? Are you relying on the same-old lead generation processing and demand generation funnels developed 15 years ago? By focusing on MQLs, marketers have lost the true link to revenue. The key to B2B and marketing success and sales success and business performance is value creation.
The success of a business depends on its ability to create and deliver value to its employees, prospects, customers and stakeholders. Ted Kohnen, CEO of Park & Battery, will talk about how marketers need to identify and activate four types of value:Functional value: The solution/service/offer that you deliver to the customer (or customer’s customer)
Monetary value: The function of the “price” paid relative to the perceived worth
Social value: The extent to which engaging with your brand allows the consumer to connect with others.
Psychological value: The extent to which engaging with your brand allows consumers to express themselves or feel better.
Sales and marketing misalignment is a persistent problem that costs organizations an average of 10% in annual revenue (IDC). According to Forrester, B2B organizations with aligned revenue engines grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable. So what’s the problem?
In this interactive talk, Dan Swift taps his 20 years of sales experience to provide marketing professionals with a clear understanding of how to align with Sales Leadership to drive execution in the field.
The results? A connected and empowered enterprise that breaks through noisy industry chatter and transforms the organization into one that buyers want to do business with.
You will learn:
- How to bridge the alignment gap between marketing and sales
- Strategies for engaging and activating sales leaders and their teams, including incentives, training, and leadership
- How your sales team is the key to realizing ROI on your content and event investments
- The real role of technology and data in driving a successful go-to-market strategy
- How to extend brand reach in a measurable and meaningful way—and how not to
Companies have become over-reliant on technology and use it as a silver bullet for everything from how campaigns are managed to the core pieces of content and the channels they are disseminated through. But marketers would be wise to revisit history and find out why things that are old are new again.
As B2B marketers, we’ve grown over-reliant on some old habits, and fallen behind on new sea changes in technology and audience behavior. Our business is due for a rebrand. By following the data and honoring the humanity of our audiences, we can drive a renaissance for B2B.
Marketing Operations teaches us the “holy trinity” of People, Process, and Systems.. but how does that translate into the greater marketing organization? This session dives into how we can use the power of systems thinking to accelerate our return on time, investment, and ultimately support the bottom line.
You’ll learn:
- How to set up a working system for agility
- Signs it’s time to take a hard look at your processes
- How to create a talent inventory
- How to measure success to prove value in your new process
You've heard it before: the buyer journey has changed and B2B buyers are now in control. Oh and your CEO wants to see greater ROI from Marketing, like yesterday!
That's why ROI-focused content is the key to solving both challenges in 2023. But it's going to require a change in mindset, a focus on your buyers, and the courage to fight for ROI-producing content over the promotions no one wants.
Join veteran B2B Marketing expert Michael Brenner to learn practical steps you can take right now to start meeting buyer needs and your CEO's expectations.
You will learn:
- Considerations for AI's role in the future of B2B Marketing
- The difference between Marketing with content and real Content Marketing
- A list of practical things you can implement right now to start to meet buyer needs
- How to measure ROI from your marketing activities
B2B marketers that prioritize audience-first storytelling and video as the cornerstone of their content strategies will win the business of the future.
Brace yourself as James Soto, INDUSTRIAL founder and CEO, gives a fast-paced look at what B2B technical products and services storytellers are doing to break through the noise, capture the imagination, and compel audiences to take action.
In this session, you get a first-hand view of the rise of creators of original manufacturing content and the playbooks they are using to drive measurable business results.
In this session, you will:
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See the power of story and video in action.
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Hear why B2B marketing must gradually shift to B2B entertaining.
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Get a feel for what creators of original manufacturing content can teach all B2B marketers.
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Download the data that supports adding branded entertainment to the B2B marketer's toolkit.
This session is perfect for the B2B marketers who need to take note of the Industrial Marketer's playbook. Don't miss the opportunity to learn from the best and take your B2B marketing and storytelling efforts to the next level!
B2B marketers today are well aware of the importance of retention and reactivation in optimizing the value of the customer base. The facts are clear: It costs far less to reactivate a dormant customer than to acquire an entirely new one; recent activity is a powerful indicator of customer lifetime value; and investments in retention marketing deliver the highest ROI of any strategy.
But some marketers may still be missing out of some of today’s best practices in reactivation marketing. Let’s review the strategies that are most effective in stimulating a renewed relationship with your dormant customers, to reduce customer defection and churn.
You will learn:
- The best way to define inactivity in your particular business
- How to surface the reasons for dormancy, and develop strategies to renew customer activity
- The importance of determining whether a customer is worth reactivating
- A ten-step process for B2B customer reactivation
- The best metrics for proving the value of your reactivation program
NOW is the moment to re-think your go-to-market strategy -- to improve customer engagement and to maximize growth, both pre-sale and post-sale.
Research has made the opportunity clear. Gartner has noted that companies embracing Converged Growth strategies with blended teams and programs outperform peers by 50%, while Forrester say companies taking a full journey approach to go-to-market can be twice as successful and see higher retention rates and improved brand awareness.
This keynote session will tackle the why, what and how that your organization must consider to transform its go-to-market strategy through what ANNUITAS refers to as a Converged Growth lens - building continuity throughout marketing, sales and customer success interactions to create a perpetual, predictable and scalable Growth Engine.
Adam Needles, CEO of ANNUITAS, and Martin Schneider, Head of Research for ANNUITAS | research, will break out the business case, outline an ideal 'to-be' state and set forth a roadmap for organizations to drive this transformation.
Key areas the session will dig into include:
- What 'is' a Converged Growth approach to go-to-market?
- Operationalizing go-to-market around customer journey -- both pre- and post-sale
- Converged Growth organizational design - bridging marketing, sales and customer success
- Rationalizing system architecture and other technologies to enable the Customer Data Value Chain
- Re-thinking GTM KPIs and accountability for a Converged Growth mindset
The session explores marketing strategy – and how companies take the big swing for the fences when repositioning a company while still delivering on activities like lead generation. The session explores marketing’s value along the lines of two primary vectors – a firm’s evaluation multiple and EPS. In the conversation Phil plans to demonstrate - through case studies and past experiences - how marketer’s actions translate into both metrics and the importance of purpose and passion in that business mix. Marketing stories from experiences sponsoring global football with Manchester United to his current mission around sustainability and saving the planet.