First: this is the last week to get the early bird rates for MarTech in San Jose, April 23-25. If you reserve your seat before this Saturday, February 10, you’ll save $500 on an all-access ticket.
“Act now. Algorithmic agents are standing by.”
But I’m more excited to share with you the news that we are launching a series of half-day workshops at MarTech that will offer you a deep-dive educational experience on these four topics:
- The Right Way to Buy Marketing Technology
- Using a CDP to Make the Most of Your Customer Data
- How to Achieve an Agile Marketing Advantage
- Creating Connected Customer Experiences
Each workshop will be a four-hour class on the afternoon of Monday, April 23, before the opening reception of MarTech that evening. Each will be led by a renown master in the field, such as Tony Byrne (selecting marketing technology), David Raab (customer data platforms), Andrea Fryrear (adopting agile marketing management), and Jeff Cram (creating connect customer experiences).
If you sign up for a workshop along with an all-access ticket to the rest of MarTech before February 10, the class of your choice will only be an additional $400. This is an incredible bargain to learn first-hand from these experts at a fraction of their hourly consulting rates.
Here are more details on each of these four workshops:
The Right Way to Buy Marketing Technology
Tony Byrne, the founder of Real Story Group, an exclusively “buy-side” technology analyst firm, and author of the book The Right Way to Select Technology will teach you a systematic way of evaluating vendors across the marketing technology landscape:
- Distinguish among features, architectures, cost, and ecosystems to assess how you can underpin your digital strategy with the best-fitting tools for your needs.
- Drive an agile, test-based selection process that engages your peers as advocates for the right solution.
- Understand how to adopt this methodology for selecting digital agencies and other consulting firms.
- Benefit from case studies and learning from those who have gone before you.
You’ll come away with a firm understanding of the major pros and cons of the key martech cloud/suite players. Each attendee will also receive a copy of Tony’s new book, “The Right Way to Select Technology” (Rosenfeld Media).
Using a CDP to Make the Most of Your Customer Data
David Raab is a legend in the marketing technology the world. The founder of the Customer Data Platform Institute, which educates marketers and technologists about customer data management, and principal at Raab Associates, Inc., he has been helping marketers to understand, find and deploy appropriate technologies since 1987. His blog, Customer Experience Matrix, is a must-read.
In this session, the man who defined the customer data platform movement will give you an in-depth understanding of the field and how to harness it in your organization:
- What’s a Customer Data Platform? We’ll define the features of a Customer Data Platform, how CDPs work, what makes them special, and where they fit within the larger scheme of marketing systems. Next, we’ll describe other systems that may solve some of the same problems as CDPs. You’ll learn the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and which is best for different situations.
- Defining Your Needs. Understanding and documenting your requirements is the key to improving your systems. We’ll practice a structured approach to defining business use cases, deriving system requirements from those use cases, finding gaps in existing systems, and planning how to fill those gaps.
- Conditions for Success. We’ll learn how to assess the technical and organizational factors that affect your success with customer data. Specific topics will include data quality, measurement systems, and business case preparation. You’ll build a comprehensive list of items to address before moving ahead with your project.
- Finding the Right CDP. With dozens of CDPs to choose from, there’s a good chance that one exists which fits your needs – if you can find it. We’ll cover how to quickly identify the most relevant vendors, running an efficient but thorough selection process, the key role of scenarios in making a sound choice, when you need a Request for Proposal and how to write one if you do, and making the best use of vendor references.
- Planning Your Deployment. We’ll discuss what you can do in advance to ensure a quick and successful deployment. Topics include a typical deployment plan, what to expect from the vendor, what your own staff will need to provide, and how to define project stages to deliver the most value in the least time.
How to Achieve an Agile Marketing Advantage
Andrea Fryrear is the president and lead trainer for AgileSherpas. She’s a Certified Professional in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) and a Certified Agile Leader (CAL-1), and a trained Scrum Master and Product Owner. She is a renown international speaker on all things agile marketing.
Her most recent book, Death of a Marketer, chronicles marketing’s troubled past and charts a course to a more agile future for the profession. In this hands-on workshop, she’ll teach you:
- Agile myths and origins. You’ll understand where agile and lean principles came, so you’ll apply them more effectively.
- Agile vs. traditional marketing. You’ll learn how modern marketing demands an agile process from case studies that juxtapose teams that failed using traditional methods with teams that succeeded using an agile approach. This segment also includes hands-on exercises to illustrate how agile differs from typical work management.
- Agile methodologies. There are several ways to put agile into practice, and Andrea will reveal the common ones used by marketers, and let you try them out.
- Roles, leadership, and team structure. Getting the most benefit from agile starts with transforming your org chart. We’ll look at cross-functional teams, silos, and agile leadership and offer some paths forward regardless of where you’re starting from today.
- Piloting agile marketing in your organization. Crawling and walking are prerequisites to running. And you’ll leave with the steps needed to roll out agile methods incrementally. Using this approach, implementing a successful pilot program will get you started in a few hours, not months or weeks.
Creating Connected Customer Experiences
Jeff Cram is the chief strategy officer and co-founder of Connective DX, a digital experience agency focused on helping organizations embrace the power of digital and align with the customer.
He is also the publisher of the popular CMS Myth blog, organizes the annual Delight Conference, and speaks nationally on topics including digital strategy, technology, and experience design.
In this special workshop, Jeff will help you through the challenges and opportunities of creating a connected customer experience:
- Creating a digital experience map. Building connected experiences starts with better understanding the relationship between your marketing technology and customer experience. We’ll share at how digital experience mapping can be used as a model for organizational alignment and a foundation for prioritizing areas of improvement.
- Common pitfalls and barriers. Learn where some of the most frequent challenges are for organizations trying to better connect their marketing technology (CRM, Content Management, Marketing Automation, Analytics and Testing) and what you can do to overcome them.
- Content as the Connective Tissue. Understand how the role of content can help bind your teams and digital experiences together and why it should be a capability shared across the entire organization.
- Organizational readiness. Learn how to assess how prepared your organization is to create connected experience and understand the key competencies required to have sustained success.
- Putting personas to work. Hear how you can get more from your existing personas and better align customer insight programs with marketing technology implementations.
Don’t miss this opportunity to attend these MarTech workshops at the best possible rate — sign up this week.
