Marketing Trends

Ushering a company through a rebrand is a daunting enough task. Now try walking that tight-rope when your company is pivoting from a non-profit impact-driven organization to a for-profit company focused on making sure its clients receive accurate data to power their A.I. Sounds challenging, right? A.I. has become something of a buzzword in marketing circles, the technology has merits if you understand what it needs to make it successful.

“There is an idea that without that data artificial intelligence wouldn't exist. There's synthetic data creation, and there's now models that can train off of very little data. But at the highest level, A.I. just doesn't exist without training data. And quite honestly, trading data at this point, doesn't exist without a massive human workforce. And that workforce is often overlooked.”

Those are the words of Heather Gadonniex, the VP of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at Sama. She is a marketing and data expert with a mission to deliver actionable data to power marketers’ ambitious A.I. goals. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Heather discusses why marketers need to know where their data is coming from in order to know how to properly use their datasets. She also shares stories on how she helped Sama pivot from a non-profit organization into the world of for-profit business, the challenges of their rebrand and the importance of impact.

Main Takeaways:

• What Matters: There are a few core things that really matter in any business: personnel, culture, revenue and impact. Those four pillars all require different departments being in alignment with each other. Without any kind of alignment between your product teams, marketing teams, or sales stakeholders, you don’t have the ability to grow, scale or make the most impact that an organization can have in the marketplace because you’re not all focused on the same goals.
• Data 101: A.I. will continue to be one of the most important tools moving forward, but marketers must understand not just how to enable those insights to power your business, but where that third party data is coming from. Is the data set that the company is providing trained on your data or is it coming from another data set? The answer to those questions will impact the predictions you receive from your tech stack.
• How to Train Your Data: There’s this notion that A.I. and machine learning are going to replace marketing jobs in the future. However, that is simply not the case. What is often overlooked with new marketing technologies is the training data that goes into these tech stacks. At the highest levels, A.I. doesn’t exist without training data, which does not exist without a physical workforce behind it.

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Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

There’s nothing more frustrating than putting hours of time and money into a project only to watch it lay dormant. And yet, we see this happening constantly with brand landing pages and websites — the online face of the company — left neglected and forgotten for long stretches. So how can marketers break the mold and turn their websites into a long-lasting and user-friendly experience? That’s a question that Anne Stefanyk says her clients come to her with daily.

“The website has become a marketing decision more so than an IT decision. 80% of our clients tend to be Director of Marketing or CMOs. And what happens is they come to us and they say, ‘We need a real specialist to make sure that our website works. We need to be making sure that not only are we getting leads, but we're getting qualified leads, and we're moving them through the sales funnel as fast as possible.’”

Anne is the CEO and Founder of Kanopi Studios, a web agency designed around helping marketers create beautiful websites through adaptive execution and on this episode of Marketing Trends, Anne discusses specific growth strategies for how marketers can turn their websites into ROI machines. Plus she explains why search engines and search functions continue to be an undervalued asset and she details common mistakes she sees on most websites the marketers listening might want to check for.

Main Takeaways:

• Continuous Improvement: You will never find a savvy marketer who will tell you that you can build a website and simply leave it static. Instead, they are continuously monitoring and maintaining their overall website experiences to make sure that it is meeting user expectations, which change more frequently than ever before.
• The Three Cs: A successful website growth strategy starts with deploying the following strategy: Connect, Communicate, and then convert. One of the most common components of a failed website’s growth strategy is missing dialogue. Institute a conversational chat function that can learn and adapt to your users, but most importantly one that opens the experience up to more personalization efforts down the road.
• Through the Side Door: Marketers need to think of their website as a guided tour of their brand. Guests want to be shown around and they want you to make that process easy for them. Most times, guests won’t find your site through your homepage, but rather through search. SEO should be doing the work for you. Users that access your site through search are 200% more likely to convert on sales. Make sure you deploy a successful search strategy, but also you empower your site to have a search function as well.

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Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

On this episode of Marketing Trends, Amanda Kahlow, founder of 6sense and CEO of 1mind, explores the future of B2B sales and marketing through the lens of AI superhumans.

Amanda introduces us to a groundbreaking AI superhuman designed to think, empathize, engage with customers — better than your top-performing rep.

She also discusses how incremental changes can drive massive categorical transformation. So many of us once thought that getting into a stranger’s car for a ride to the airport or renting out your house to strangers was “creepy”, but overtime AirBnb and Uber became our new normal. We may see AI superhumans as an outlandish concept now, but in just a few years they could become an integral part of our daily lives.

Tune in for scrappy marketing strategies for startups, unique approaches to consolidating marketing tech stacks, and discover how AI can dramatically cut costs while improving efficiency. Plus, Amanda offers a deeply personal story of resilience, including her dual journey through IVF and adoption, and the unexpected lessons it brought to her leadership style.

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Key Moments:

00:00 Who Is 2x AI CEO Amanda Kahlow?

03:24 The Origin of 6sense

07:01 Innovative Marketing Strategies

09:06 Building 1mind & The Mission Behind AI Superhumans

20:30 Generative AI in Sales: Balancing Creativity and Accuracy

21:46 AI Evolution: From Deflection to Engagement

22:24 Personalizing Sales with AI: Mirroring and Customization

23:19 Scrappy Marketing Techniques for 2025

24:05 Eating Your Own Dog Food: Using Your Product Internally

26:12 Building Relationships and Leveraging Experience

29:01 Future-Proofing Marketing Skills with AI

31:06 Defining Your Personal Mission Statement

34:18 The Journey to Motherhood: IVF & Adoption

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

What’s worse than pissing people off with a bold marketing campaign? Boring them.

So why is everyone following the same playbooks, recycling “best practices”, and relying on cookie cutter AI to generate the same-sounding content?

If you want to truly stand out, you have to break the rules... or at least question them.

Stephanie sits down with Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong and author of Courageous Marketing, to talk about how marketers can push past fear, embrace bold strategies, and create campaigns that people actually remember.

Udi shares why "best practices" are often just boring practices, how startups have more freedom to take risks than they realize, and why some of Gong’s scrappiest marketing stunts generated the biggest buzz. Plus, we dive into how AI is changing the marketing landscape — and how to make sure it doesn’t turn your brand into just another generic voice in the noise.

Key Moments:

00:00: Who is Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong?

01:37 Why Many “Best Practices” Are Outdated

03:27 The Courage to Be Different

06:14 Choosing the Right Company and Leadership

13:59 Creating Buzz with Content Marketing

26:54 Hiring for Potential Over Experience

31:46 The Value of Diverse Backgrounds in Marketing

35:56 Handling Failure: A Marketing Campaign Gone Wrong

45:32 Writing a Book: Insights and Sneak Peeks

51:32 The Role of AI in Marketing

58:53 Lightning Round: Quickfire Questions and Answers

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Few processes hold as much promise as the idea of agile marketing. It has the potential to improve efficiency and effectiveness for marketing teams of all sizes. To find out more about this revolutionary system, we spoke with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.

Jascha is the CMO of Mozilla and has previously served as the CMO of BitTorrent and the founder of Growthverse. On this episode, he talks about agile marketing, open-source, his best advice for a CMO, and much more.

Links:

Full Links, Quotes, & Notes: http://bit.ly/2NZ5M5c

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kaykas/

Twitter: twitter.com/kaykas

Mozilla Website: mozilla.org/en-US/

3 Key Takeaways:

To get ahead in your career as a marketer, be clear about what you do and how you help others.

Agile marketing is all about determining priorities and working on those priorities more efficiently.

To be effective, CMOs can’t just understand marketing, they have to understand the underlying dynamics of the business.

Are you at Dreamforce 2019 this week? Come join us for a live episode this Tuesday, November 19th at 5:30 pm at the Pied Piper Bar in the Palace Hotel. Find more details and RSVP here: https://www2.pardot.com/event/1119/marketing-trends-live

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Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world’s #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast.

To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.