Intermediate/ Excerpt...

There are five reasons why I believe a massive wave of marketing apps is coming:

-- >  The cacophony of content has become deafening — it’s asymptotically impossible to break through the noise with one more white paper, infographic, webinar, or ebook.

-- >  The burden on prospects to absorb all that passive content has become too heavy.

-- >  Fill-out-a-form-to-get-an-asset lead generation tactics have become stale — and due to way too much shlock on the other side of submit buttons, prospects are increasingly skeptical of taking the bait.

-- >  The value of data from expressed behavioral characteristics of prospects — to feed internal analytics and external personalization — strongly incentivizes marketers to pursue genuine engagement over artificial conversion.

-- >  The shift in the buyer’s journey, away from dialogues with salespeople to more self-service research and evaluation in digital channels, now puts the onus on marketing to provide more consultative and useful interactions. There’s a widening gap here today.

We can address these challenges by advancing from an oversimplified content-oriented worldview to a richer service-oriented worldview with marketing apps.

__________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

Intermediate/ Digest...

Marketing technology vendor Ion Interactive announced this morning that it is pivoting from providing general marketing tools to helping marketers create interactive experiences the company calls “marketing apps.”

These marketing apps could be calculators or quizzes, contests or configurators, and they’re delivered online.

“When you’re marketing into a B2B space, typically conversion rates hover around 5-10 percent,” he said. “This client’s 10-page interactive quiz got a 21 percent conversion rate … and that was at the very end of the funnel, people who filled out a content form. 50 percent of people actually engaged with the entire form.”

Other companies doing similar things include SnapApp and Wishpond, Brinker says, as well as companies like Offerpop that offer interactive contests and content via social and web channels. The key is engagement and interactivity in a topic that a prospect cares about, that also helps educate the prospect about what they need to do.

____________________________________________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).