1. What are your biggest opportunities & challenges for the next 12-24 months?
At ScribbleLive we believe our biggest opportunity is the market’s readiness for content to be a critical part of marketing strategies. CMOs are shifting away from traditional advertising methods towards content marketing. They understand the value of content marketing in the current marketing landscape, making the need for our software very timely.
On the other side of the coin, the challenge at this juncture is to help marketers understand the value proposition of content marketing software. Marketers are inundated with tools, and often use up to 100 different software programs in the course of a day. We need to demonstrate to marketers how software can help them grow the top of their marketing funnel, and how data-driven insights will help them optimize content and drive business results.
2. What are some unmet needs in the marketing technology landscape?
There is a definite need for data science in the current marketing landscape. Now that marketers are ready to embrace content marketing, they are going to start looking for ways to measure the effectiveness of their content and leverage that data. CMOs are feeling more pressure than ever to measure the effectiveness of content and demonstrate ROI. Marketers know that they need to use data to optimize their performance, but struggle to find the right tools to do so effectively.
According to IBM, marketers can cope with the challenges of today’s technology landscape by capitalizing on new tools and using advanced analytics to improve decision making and demonstrate accountability. However, the marketing landscape is lacking a set of effective tools that will do more than merely crunch data and calculate medians and averages. To really measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategies CMOs need tools that will provide data mining or predictive modeling that can give them a statistical model of future behaviour. This type of forecasting is much more beneficial and is lacking in the current marketing technology landscape.
3. What keeps your clients up at night?
Our clients are kept awake at night by the continually changing behaviors of their audience. Targeting a diverse and complex audience that is constantly shifting between screens and social channels is daunting and difficult. Decision-making becomes complicated when juggling both the complexity of the customer base and the sheer number of social channels that currently hold their attention. In the 1960s and 1970s, advertisers dealt primarily with television, radio, newspapers, and billboards. Now CMOs have to consider these traditional forms of advertising, plus a plethora of social media channels and new devices, like iPhones and tablets. CMOS have to be fluent in their audience and keep up with their rapidly shifting social preferences, which is no simple task.
4. What social network do you anticipate accelerating growth in the next year?
I think it will be a social channel we haven’t even heard of yet. Just eight months ago Periscope and Meerkat were virtually unknown apps. Today, major brands around the world are using them. It’s difficult to say which social network will see the most accelerated growth because it’s likely that it hasn’t even entered the mainstream yet.
Even if we could anticipate which social channel will gain popularity over the next year, content marketing is about more than simply predicting what will be popular and allocating advertising to that channel. You can’t just take an advertisement intended for a billboard and adapt it to a social channel.
Though you may get eyeballs on your advertising by changing the location from a physical billboard virtual or social space, it doesn’t guarantee results. Marketers need to figure out how to use these new social networks to engage with their audience and generate a conversation.
5. What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about?
Marketers generally agree that they need to invest more in content marketing, but many marketers are having trouble understanding precisely what this means. Content marketing isn’t just about pushing out useful content on a blog–this won’t help you stand out amongst all the other noise. Our stance at ScribbleLive is that marketers need to involve their audience, promote user generated content, align with influencers, utilize data, and break from their preconceived notions of what constitutes content marketing. Essentially, marketers need to plug into the new technological landscape and aim to be just like their audience–“always on.”
Vince Mifsud is Chief Executive Officer of ScribbleLive.
