Making a Smart SaaS Choice: Six Key Questions to Ask

Many businesses don’t have a digital marketing strategy. Others don’t even have a marketing strategy. Just tactical campaigns. To learn how to take a more strategic approach, join PR Smith, creator of the widely used SOSTAC ® Planning system voted as one of the Top 3 global marketing models in the CIM Centenary Poll. Paul will take one component, ‘engagement’ and show the strategic options a business can employ to maximise returns.

When global IT solutions distributor, Avnet, wanted to create unique channel value for its vendors and business partners, it turned to purechannelapps to leverage the power of socialondemand®.

Now working with Microsoft, IBM, EMC among others, Avnet uses socialondemand® to provide a regular source of free social media content for its entire channel of business partners and its own internal staff.

Over 120 of Avnet’s partners have seen over 55,000 clicks or downloads from content provided by socialondemand® and recent survey of participating Avnet partners revealed 100% believe socialondemand content adds value to their business.

Join Julie and you’ll get an insight into the key components of Avnet’s social media strategy and how their channel partners are amplifying their message and generating increased brand awareness and lead generation.

Email has been declared dead a thousand times already but it's still alive and kicking - and stronger than ever. Running an eCRM strategy without email is like swimming without water, it just doesn't work. In this session, email marketing guru Tamara Gielen will share what works and what doesn't when it comes to using email to manage customer relationships both in a B2C and a B2B environment.

Are you guilty of content dumping? Join Christine Crandell, President of New Business Strategies as she discusses the real numbers your marketing team should be accountable for.

Dave Scott, author of The New Rules of Lead Generation, will unlock the secrets behind marketing measurement and calculating ROI. He’ll then examine lead generation’s seven tried and true tactics through this mathematic lens. Attendees will leave able to measure and compare performance between marketing tactics, and track each tactic’s contribution to their organization’s bottom line.

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In an ever-changing digital world, the inability of some brands to respond to consumer needs has caused many stalwarts of the high street to disappear …. This workshop will explore some of the ways in which companies can look at improving customer engagement both for today’s market and for the market of tomorrow.

Head of Sales Tom Bailey joined Teradata eCircle in 2010 and works with clients and prospects to bring Teradata eCircle's award-winning solutions to market and consults with a wide spectrum of marketers to propose effective digital strategies. He has over 10 years’ experience in digital technology for both in-house and agency solutions.
A number of case studies will be covered in this session

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is one of the fastest-emerging technologies at the moment, with much to know and understand. This presentation will begin with a basic introduction to Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and why it matters to marketers. It will then cover how RTB can be used as an acquisition channel, along with specific actions that marketers need to take before getting started.

About the presenter:
Ratko Vidakovic is the Director of Marketing at SiteScout, the leading self-serve advertising platform for Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Retargeting. He regularly writes on the topics of display advertising, retargeting and RTB. His articles have been published in places such as FOX Business, Marketing Land and AdMonsters.

Want to know the secret to ending the age-old battle between Marketing and Sales? A clear set of metrics that make both teams look like superstars. With the right metrics in place, you can shorten your sales cycle and improve marketing ROI.

Join Derek Grant, Senior VP of Marketing Automation at Pardot, as he takes you through actionable and easy-to-implement tips on measuring marketing and sales success using Salesforce and marketing automation. Along the way, you’ll learn more about current marketing analytics and how you can leverage those to improve your marketing and sales groups.

Using disparate systems for email campaigns, online events, social media and web tracking only takes sales and marketing part of the way towards engaging prospects. Many progressive teams are realizing they need holistic tools and tactics to see the full picture on buyer behavior. Attend this Act-On session and learn how to identify key areas where sales and marketing teams are missing out on engagement opportunities with prospects by failing to connect the dots on behavior between core channels. Then, learn about some of the most fundamental steps to align your social and content strategies to tell the right story to potential buyers.

Act-On will discuss:
· Creating a continuous, consistent program to align social media and content marketing disciplines over time
· Buyer touch points and lead nurturing throughout different stages of each strategy
· Metrics for measuring contribution of social media to marketing performance, and much more

Learn how the marketing function at Kronos, a workforce management software and solutions company, collaborates with Sales to create and deliver a differentiated value proposition. The webinar will feature a best practice case study that shows how Kronos:
· Developed a new value proposition that targets core customer needs
· Documented the value proposition in a Foundational Messaging Guide for employees
· Conducted messaging workshops with the sales force to drive implementation of new messages and techniques
· Established Sales and Marketing Leadership Councils to spur ongoing collaboration

Marketing is about influence. It is about changing behaviour or nudging people towards a win-win decision. In today's market our customers interact with us across multiple touch points at irregular times and our job as marketers is to ensure this experience is as engaging as possible. But do we really understand all of the things that influence their decisions? By mapping our customers' sphere of influence we gain two significant advantages: more focused marketing and a tool that helps explain marketing's role in this brave new world to the businesses we work for.

Neil Cooper is Head of Marketing at Team Consulting, an innovative product development consultancy in Cambridge, and is organiser of the annual Another Marketing Conference.

Links about Neil: on twitter: neilcooper77, linkedin: uk.linkedin.com/in/neilcooper77 bio: http://www.team-consulting.com/people/neil-cooper

B2B marketers often feel as though they are following their B2C colleagues in terms of marketing innovation, branding and social media. They feel that their world is very different. This webinar will challenge that as marketers it is the communication between individuals rather than organizations that makes us social businesses and that in the B2C world the most social businesses are the ones enjoying most growth.

From strategy and segmentation to content and measurement, we will explore what B2B marketers can learn from the successes in some of the best performing B2C companies and cover the following areas:
- Setting an appropriate strategy and objectives
- Understanding the nuances of audience profiles
- Optimum content and digital marketing tools
- Resourcing and fuelling the marketing plan
- Measurement and continuous learning and the future

Presented by Neil Wilkins BSc (hons), FCMC, MCIM; MD of Viper Marketing & Communications Group and Fellow of Cambridge Marketing College
Neil's Profile http://uk.linkedin.com/in/neilwilkinsatvipermarketing

Integrated marketing isn't just about bringing together the various marketing disciplines: the need to maximise revenue growth means that B2B-focused companies must also closely align their marketing and sales functions. Unfortunately, there are still far too many dangerous disconnects between the messages propagated by marketing organisations and the conversations their sales people are actually having with their prospects. Bob Apollo of Inflexion-Point uncovers the obstacles and offers effective real-world remedies.

This presentation will appeal to any marketing leader who is determined to do a better job of sales enablement - and any sales leader who is determined to collaborate more effectively with their colleagues in marketing.

In this session, Rob summarises the 10 key decisions businesses face when getting to grips with mobile commerce.

He recommends how to make the business case for adopting and investing in mobile, considerations around business strategy, how to select the best channels to reach, interact, convert and engage today's digital consumers. And how to maximise conversion rate optimisation.

The session draws on case studies from pioneering mobile brands including FT, Heineken, M&S, O2, Starbucks and TicketsNow, which all feature in Rob's book 10 key decisions for mCommerce success

The challenges for enterprise and SMB marketing automation are quite different. Join Atri Chatterjee, CMO at Act-On Software as he discusses how organizations of all sizes are using the sames tools for quick success.

When was the last time you took a hard look at your Co-op/MDF/JMF program? When was the last time your guidelines were updated? While joint marketing programs often represent a high dollar spend, many companies leave their programs on auto-pilot year after year, leaving millions on the table in missed opportunity.

In this informative webinar you will:

• Learn the 8 key program variables to consider in maximizing program effectiveness and controlling waste.
• Review best practices for determining and aligning program objectives.
• Learn how to more quickly recognize trends and opportunities in thru-partner marketing support.
• Gain a variety of tips, tricks, and trends to set you up for more targeted and successful joint marketing programs.
• Learn common mistakes channel leaders often make in MDF/Co-op program execution, and how to avoid them.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn valuable best practices that will immediately help you improve the performance of your program. This webinar is ideal for anyone in channel management, sales, marketing, or sales operations who is looking to improve program effectiveness.

You've recruited them, trained them, and helped them execute several sales but your channel partners still struggle when it comes to truly marketing your solutions. Whether lack of resources, know-how or bandwidth your partners need more marketing resources and assistance. In this 1-hour webinar with channel marketing maven Alexandra Krasne learn how to provide them with just that and walk away with:
- An in-depth overview of the types of marketing designations your partners fit into
- Programs you can implement today to make your partners better marketers
- Resources and strategies to truly drive business through your channel

About Alexandra:
Alex’s background as a journalist fuels her passion and creativity as a storyteller. It’s the secret weapon behind the successful content marketing campaigns, winning demand generation programs, and engaging social media efforts she has lead for startups, nonprofits, and Fortune 500 companies. Truly compelling stories transcend any medium and move audiences to buy, engage, and connect. Alex has successfully translated compelling stories to video, blogs, tweets, website copy – and helps Channel Maven clients do the same.
With more than a decade of experience as a technology journalist, Alex’s writing has appeared all over the web and in print, including: PC World, Wired, CNN, CIO, The Houston Chronicle, TechSoup, Silicon Angle, ComputerWorld, Micro Publishing News, ARN, and Linux Today.