Key Trends in Modern Partner Marketing

What Marketing During COVID-19 Reminds Us That We Should Already Be Doing

Crises - like the current COVID-19 pandemic -- only serve to amplify the importance of the strategies we already knew were vital to successfully connecting with buyers in today’s world. While we chase conversational bots, AI driven marketing, ABM, video-based sales, and other strategies du jour, we are distracted from the basics necessary to reach, connect, and engage with potential & current customers.

Don’t be paralyzed by the environment or distracted. Come join our fireside chat and hear how one team has leaned into the current environment by focusing on the fundamentals and meeting buyers where they are right now. Join this hour-long panel discussion to get actionable advice, with specific examples, for how to create winning approaches that:

Amp up employee engagement to keep your employees focused, productive, happy, and thriving through this uncertain environment
Create emotional connections with your audiences by engaging your crisis response mode, staying true to your brand, & messaging empathically and authentically to connect your products or services to your buyer’s pain
Harness the digital only customer journey to make data driven decisions, pivot to agile marketing, and complete/optimize your remote buying experience

Speakers:
Jaime Punishill, CMO, Lionbridge
Brendan Walsh, Global Technical Search SME, Lionbridge
Brian Randall, Director NA Strategic Accounts, Lionbridge
Karen Dawson, VP of Brand Marketing, Lionbridge

Every stage of the buying journey to Put prospects on the Path to Purchase! A better approach to Digital Marketing is enabling strategic help through value creation through digital marketing. In this webinar, we will discuss how to design and develop through channel digital marketing strategy to amplify your growth and scale.

Join this webinar to learn from our case studies and solutions to enable strategic value creation with integrated digital marketing solutions.

The goal of Demand Gen is to build and nurture key prospect and customer relationships, and the first step in achieving this is having a solid Tech Stack. Once you get the systems in place that support additional investment, you will begin to see results. The upside is that your sales team will get quality leads.

This webinar will cover:
Tech Stack creation
Understanding the buyer and watering holes
Providing the right content along the buyer’s journey
Peter Drucker famously said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Good marketers make sure reporting and analytics are built from the ground up on a solid foundation that supports sales teams and eventually the business.

User experience is swiftly overtaking price as the most important competitive differentiator. That means wowing your customers at every point of interaction and engagement. And lately, new approaches fueled by AI and significant data produced by cross-platform experiences are putting UX under a new kind of microscope and helping to drive positive results. When harnessed correctly, AI really just means ultimate personalization. And this can reward you with loyalty, affinity, and word of mouth.

User experience design (UX) isn’t a guessing game anymore. Artificial intelligence is your superpower, and machine learning your secret weapon. AI helps you personalize the customer journey at every step dynamically, crafting unique, individual experiences that learn along the way, making them more relevant, more engaging, and more delightful.

To learn more about why AI should be the foundation of all your user experience design, and where to start, don’t miss this VB Live event!

Register here for free.

Attend this webinar and learn about:
* How AI supercharges the relevancy, elegance, and engagement of modern design.
* The ways well-known brands are creating intuitive apps with powerful UX supported by AI
* The relationship between effective design and a strong ROI
* Real-world successes and failures in AI-driven design

Speakers:
* Steph Hay, VP, Conversational AI Design & Integrated Experiences, Capital One
* David Parmenter, Director of Engineering & Data, Adobe Document Cloud

While companies have been ditching traditional marketing methods in their race to capture the online-savvy millennials, no one is on their phone 24/7, and delivering brand messages out in the world is still vital to capturing mindshare.

Those first-gen marketing methods, including outdoor, tv, direct mail, and more, are still valuable and essential to building a stronger bottom line, especially when integrated as a vital part of an overarching marketing campaign, firing on all cylinders. That’s easier than ever, because traditional doesn’t mean old-school and analog anymore, and innovations in marketing technology don’t only apply to your online channels. You can apply your martech capabilities not just for tracking, measurement, and attribution, but to keep tabs on omnichannel competitor strategies, design the most effective campaign copy in every arena, create the most impactful rollouts between all your channels and more.

To find out how to integrate offline marketing channels with your online efforts, how marketing technology can bring those traditional methods into the twenty-first century, and more, don’t miss this VB Live event!

Registration is free.

Attend this webinar and learn:
* How to use martech to digitize offline channels
* How to integrate traditional marketing efforts into their newer tech-driven marketing stack
* The importance of combining online and offline marketing
* How to track offline conversions

Speakers:
* Evan Jones, CMO, Fender
* Mark Coffey, SVP of Strategic Partnerships, GasBuddy
* Myllisa Patterson, Senior Director, Event Cloud Marketing, Cvent
* Shannon Ryan, Head of Marketing, CI&T
* Dilan Yuksel, VentureBeat

Sponsored by Cvent

The landscape of voice and chatbot-to-customer interactions is blowing up. Whether it’s a trusted AI assistant like Alexa or Google Home, or an integrated voice or chatbot tool within a brand interface like Kayak’s customer service experience, customers are increasingly willing to engage with brands via voice chat.

AI assistants are getting smarter, and becoming capable of helping consumers sort through the avalanche of choices available in every decision, from buying phone plans to toothbrushes. And your marketing efforts will have to shift priorities in a major way to capture the attention of these newly connected customers as assistants get smarter and customers learn they can rely on their results.

To hear about actual voice chat use cases, the differences between integrated bots and AI assistants, and how to leverage voice and bots for amaze-and-delight experiences right now, don’t miss this VB Live event!

Register here for free.

Attend this webinar and learn:
* How bots and voice are uniquely positioned to help customers make purchasing decisions
* How brands can address the advantages of integrated bots and an AI trusted assistant like Alexa
* The best ways to leverage voice and bots to optimize the customer experience
* What's next for voice and bots

Speakers:

* Bharath Kadaba, Chief Innovation Officer, Intuit
* Ryan Lester, Director, Customer Engagement Technologies, LogMein
* Matthias Keller, Chief Scientist & SVP Technology, Kayak
* Russ Tar, VP EMEA, Artificial Solutions
* Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

Sponsored by Bold360 by LogMeIn

Forrester found that only 11 percent of companies are able to deliver a customer experience (CX) that sets them apart from their competition. Without a CX that elevates the brand, companies are at risk of being left behind while customers choose to spend their purchase dollars or business investments elsewhere.

There are four key ways to ensure that your CX is flawless and your market share keeps growing. It starts from the inside out, with a unified vision of CX; a strategy to solve problems fast while offering self-help; continuous, ongoing iteration and improvement of best practices, and a consistent, personalized experience in every way.

To learn more about why CX has to be the core of your company and how to launch the strategy that ensures your company maintains competitive advantage, don’t miss this VB Live event!

Register here for free.

Webinar attendees will learn:
* How to build trust with increasingly savvy consumers
* Why brand reputation is your most important calling card -- and how to protect it
* The key qualities customers look for in a trusted brand
* The secrets of the modern customer-focused organization

Speakers:
* Louise Thorpe, Chief Privacy Officer, American Express
* Andrew Leede, Product Owner, Blinker
* Ting Ting Luo, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Docusign
* Stewart Rogers, Analyst-at-Large, VentureBeat
* Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

Sponsored by Docusign

Your instincts are good — but AI can make them flawless. With AI, every time a customer engages with your brand, you’re making that moment really count.

Add AI powered predictive analytics to ensure the right message at the right time, targeting is accurate and high-value, and customer support is proactive. Automate chat-based customer service, and give your agents more info off the top. Level up the shopping experience by offering the right products at the right time — and add contextual conversation to narrow their choices down.

Customers want this kind of service and attention. And if you can’t deliver, they’re going to find the company that can. So don’t miss this VB Live event, where you’ll learn more about being relevant to your customers, making their engagement meaningful, and more!

Register now for free!

Attend this webinar and learn:
* How AI levels up personalization and customer engagement
* How to use AI-fueled data analytics to create tactical marketing plans.
* How to create personalized moments without being creepy
* How to increase real and effective relevance to customers across channels

Speakers:
* Grant Langston, CEO, Eharmony
* Dave Gerhardt, VP Marketing, Drift
* Brian Witlin, CEO, Yummly
* Moira Dorsey, Founder, Dorsey Experience

Sponsored by Drift

Enterprise preparation for AI has centered almost exclusively on data prep and data science talent. While without data there would be no AI, enterprises that fail to ready the broader organization, chiefly people, process, and principles, don’t just stunt their capacity for good AI, they risk sunk investment, jeopardize employee trust, brand backlash, or worse.

Ensuring sustainable deployment starts with assessing enterprise data strategy, aligning myriad stakeholders, technological feasibility assessment, and a coordinated approach to ethics.

Join VentureBeat and industry analyst and founding partner of Kaleido Insights, Jessica Groopman for discussion on the five fundamentals of AI readiness at our upcoming VB Live event!

Attend this webinar and learn:
* What you need to do to prepare for AI-- beyond the data science team
* Real-world examples and research findings
* Top 5 best practices for strategic AI implementation

Speakers:
* Nathan Decker, Director of eCommerce, evo
* Ken Natori, President, Natori Company
* Jessica Groopman, Industry analyst and founding partner of Kaleido Insights
* Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

Reportedly, 44% of Americans would rather scrub a toilet than call customer support. And heeding that cry for help back in 2016 or so, companies across the land stepped up to the plate, taking customer service from the phone to texting and messaging with AI-powered, NLP-reliant smart chatbots that could tell jokes, offer small talk, place taco orders, and more.

Where those messenger bots fell down, though, was in actually understanding customer intent and delivering on-point customer service. So companies were left with frustrated customers who’d still rather get a root canal than talk on the phone, but left with a broken messenger-based solution that only made the experience worse.

The answer: Make bots "dumber," to make customer service smarter. Simpler rules-based chatbots are easy to implement, easy to use, 99-percent effective web and mobile-based messenger apps that don't try to hold conversations — they just solve customer service issues, fast.

To learn more about why companies like Amazon are dumping the NLP bots and going all-in on a new generation of rules-based chatbots, don’t miss this VB Live event!

You’ll learn:
* The difference between NLP and rules-based bots and why it matters
* Why companies like Amazon are turning away from natural language processing-driven bots to rules-based bots
* How to deliver mobile and web-based customer service that works, using the right bots.
* How rules-based bots make the customer journey more effective

Speakers:
* Abinash Tripathy, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Helpshift
* Mitch Lee, Manager, Credit Karma and Co-Founder, Penny
* Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
* Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

Sponsored by Helpshift

The subscription model is booming --subscription commerce grew more than 100 percent each year between 2011 and 2016, and the growth continues. Savvy companies are reaping the rewards: high recurring revenue that’s predictable paired with a competitive and sustainable business model. The potential ROI for global expansion is wide open, but many who try to take their subscription model global overlook important issues that can make or break success in new markets.

Learn about the best practices to expand your subscription business into new countries including how to manage local payments, get the right partners on board, optimize authorization rates, tackle key challenges in potential markets, mitigate fraud, and more when you join this VB Live event!

Register for free now.

Webinar attendees will learn about:
* The opportunities provided by the explosive subscription model growth around the globe
* How to overcome regional challenges, including local payment methods, regulations, data security, and taxation
* How to identify knowledgeable partners to accelerate your global expansion
* How localized communications throughout the subscription lifecycle boost subscriber retention
* Common fraud issues to anticipate and how to mitigate them

Speakers:
* Patrick Unnold, VP Customer, Recurly
* Luke Salinas, SVP Strategy, Adyen
* Lily Varon, Analyst, Forrester
* Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

Sponsored by: Recurly and Adyen

Inbound marketing has surged in popularity in recent years, effectively generating 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound.Yet, many large enterprise organizations struggle to dedicate the resources needed to get started.

A properly-implemented inbound marketing strategy improves the impact of your overall marketing efforts by increasing audience engagement, driving traffic to all of your content, fostering stronger relationships, and ultimately, building your pipeline.

In this webinar, Shellie Hutchens, Director of Marketing at Mediacurrent will give you actionable advice to get a handle on this untapped resource.

Topics include:

• Overcoming challenges to inbound marketing implementation
• Considerations before implementation
• Proving measurable ROI
• Innovative ways to make sure your system works for your goals

ABM strategies require the coordination of a lot of moving parts.

In this session, Everstring’s Dayna Rothman shares a series of actionable ABM hacks to help you clarify your priorities and improve your processes and technology.

You will learn:

- How to leverage what you already have to create personalized content that resonates with accounts
- About the different levels of account-based content marketing so you can prioritize where and how to spend your time
- How to use different types of marketing technology to bring your account-based content to the next level

It's no secret that brands today are investing more money than ever in marketing technologies to gain better insight into customer preferences and behavior. We rely heavily on these systems to collect data and deliver the best experience for engaging and converting visitors. However, when this data isn’t shared between your vendors, you may be overlooking a big opportunity to maximize return on your investments.

This webinar will explore 3 ways to power intelligent marketing campaigns by leveraging real-time data you already have, as well as examine a more practical take on how to extract value from connecting data across your entire technology stack, allowing more timely, relevant, and meaningful interactions with the customer.

Video is a very persuasive medium; it’s engaging and leads can use it to make their way through the entire funnel at their own pace – all you have to do is set up the content journey. At the bottom of the funnel, video can help you seal the deal when it comes to closing and can even help you post-purchase when you want to reinforce that you were the right choice.

In this webinar, we will share tips on how real-world B2B marketers can use video to turn late stage prospects into buyers. We'll also cover:

• 8 different video types to support the BoFu
• How to map your content to different stages of the funnel
• What information your potential buyers are looking for
• How to connect your video marketing campaigns to ROI

Beginning a video marketing campaign can be daunting, in this webinar we will discuss what to expect when hiring a video production company, where to look for inspiration within your business, and how to leverage one video shoot into multiple pieces of content.

In recent years, spending on B2B marketing and sales technology has seen explosive growth. But sales closing rates and quota attainment have remained flat at best. What’s going on? Today’s companies are more data-driven than ever before, but in this new world of big data and increased business velocity something is clearly undermining the benefits that should come from sales and marketing investments in people, technology and process improvement.

Traditional digital advertising channels are delivering declining results, forcing marketers to look for new alternatives that deliver better ROI. Influencer marketing has emerged as a powerful new addition to the marketing mix.

This study takes an in-depth look at the current state of influencer marketing and provides insight into how to run programs successfully. Both influencers and brands were surveyed to identify where they are aligned in their approach to influencer marketing and where there are gaps between the two. Topic areas covered include:

- Budget allocation
- Preferred social platforms
- Key challenges faced
- Measuring success
- Top performing tactics
- Why influencer marketing works

About the speaker:
Brian Solis is principal analyst at Altimeter Group (a Prophet company). Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders, speakers, and published authors in new technology, digital marketing and culture shifts.

Adaptive businesses have found success in creating a digital footprint by publishing original content. Savvy digital marketing tactics offer branding and audience growth. Come learn:

- Why content is at the forefront of digital strategy
- How to evangelize the importance of content marketing for your brand, product, service, or sector
- Tips and tricks of the trade
- Making a case for content marketing resources and measuring your efforts