Humans of Martech Inc.

Today, Census is announcing our vision to build the most complete solution for data quality and activation. We're calling it a Universal Data Platform (UDP). Why “universal”? UDP is unique because it addresses these 2 problems: 1️⃣ Getting high quality data is too slow because of a lack of collaboration: - Only data teams have the tools to clean and model data - This means that data teams are often bottlenecks for business requests - Data bottlenecks make businesses move slower and accomplish less 2️⃣ Companies need a turnkey way to share data reliably and securely ACROSS organizations: - Collaborating with partners and monetizing data is the future, but CSVs & S3 buckets are inefficient  - Data Clean Rooms can share PII for marketing, but syncing data in & out is slow and manual - SaaS platforms spend $$$ and months building integrations to ingest & export customer data ✅ The solution to these challenges is the Universal Data Platform: a collaborative workspace where everyone can transform and govern trusted data, then activate it to any internal team, any partner organization, any app, or AI. Why haven’t existing solutions succeeded in providing trusted and actionable data? ❗ Composable CDPs were a big step in the right direction, but they didn’t solve the fundamental problem that data should be clean, modeled, and standardized before it’s used. We’re going beyond CDP. Welcome to a new era of data collaboration 🚀 Learn more about the Universal Data Platform: https://lnkd.in/dTKaqHz5 Read more about our UDP vision from our CEO Boris Jabes: https://lnkd.in/d_v8VTGf

Is martech actually for engineers? Last year I came across an article that lived rent free in my head for a long time. It was written in 2019 by Casey Winters and it’s titled: The problems with martech and why martech is actually for engineers. He predicted that martech would decline as a category due to engineers who are increasingly handling tailored solutions in-house, and the success of vendors hinges primarily on serving those engineers, not marketers. 5 years later, I’ve asked 8 recent guests on Humans of Martech to share their thoughts and respond to Casey’s article. I combined all of their arguments in a roundup episode. The consensus is clear: When deciding between purchasing a third-party martech solution or developing an in-house tool, the smart move is nearly always to buy. Let your in-house engineers focus on product and data while leveraging the cutting-edge solutions and support already offered by specialized martech vendors. Unless you’re planning on building a martech company, leave the martech to the experts. Martech is for marketers and as such, has continued to explode as a category 🚀. Big thanks to: • Vishakha Gupta from People.ai and former Databricks, VMWare • Sara McNamara, former Salesforce and Slack • Jacqueline Freedman 🦋, former Grammarly and WeWork • Deborah Mayen from Logitech and former Encyclopaedia Britannica • Natalie Miles Fuerst from Chime and former Credit Karma • Ashleigh Johnson from Microsoft and former Trend Micro • Josh Hill Marketing Rockstar Guides creator and former Ring Central • ☕️Stephen S. from Tray.ai and former SaaScend and 2-time Dreamforce speaker

VP of Marketing Amrita Mathur takes us behind the scenes of ClickUp's marketing, data and ops org structure and their marketing tech stack including: • Census • Fullstory • Clearbit • Datadog • Wistia She gives us a preview of how they use Toplyne to identify usage within your existing customers to find white space and potential for expansion. They also leverage Pocus on the sales team to allow them to see what interesting moments and signals happen within target accounts to trigger GTM playbooks.

I’ve never thought of campaign ops through the lens of a buffet before - but I kind of love it. Thank you Vishakha for the analogy 🥗 5-star buffet = the food is already prepared, and you’re just picking what you need and putting it onto your plate. (i.e. Knak) 2-star buffet = the food is already prepared, and you’re putting it onto your plate … you just can’t find the dish you were really hoping for. And/or the dish is a bit old so you asked the kitchen to bring out a fresh one… but it took forever. (i.e. Master templates) What 5-star campaign ops look like = give marketers what they need (flexibility to self-serve) while not bogging down the back kitchen (MOPs) with one-off requests. Vish sums up Knak's role in this space nicely: keep marketers out of Marketo while allowing them to self-serve their own email creation - which removes the burden on MOPs. It really is a win-win situation. The Humans of Martech episode that I'm pulling inspo from is linked in the comments (great episode - and BTW she covers a lot more ground than just buffets 😂 )!

Automation ≠ simplification. Simplification should come before automation. It seems obvious when you think about it. But too many teams jump right into automation without first asking, wait a second, can we simplify this thing? Automating a clunky process can totally make things worse. By stripping away unnecessary steps and clarifying the workflow, you can then create a solid foundation for automation. This is one of the best ways to prevent building that dreaded Frankenstack—a tech monster stitched together from creepy mismatched legacy parts, always on the brink of horror and mass martech destruction. This is one of Vishakha Gupta’s marketing operations mantra. Tools are not problem-solvers on their own; people and processes are the real drivers of solutions. Automation isn’t always the answer. Vish is former Marketing Operations Manager at Databricks and Senior Marketing Analyst at VMware. And since we chatted on Humans of Martech, she recently joined People.ai as Senior Marketing Operations Manager. Aside from avoiding a frankenstack, our wide-ranging conversation also covered: • How Databricks’ empowers campaign ops with Knak • How to maximize efficiency with custom Asana intake forms • How to balance task execution and project management • How to orchestrate a symphony of email scheduling  • Why specialization could hinder your leadership potential Bonus: We unpack the intersection of Marketing Ops, LLM Ops and ML Ops and why marketers need basic AI knowledge to stay relevant. Listen and read the recap in the comments 👇

The best way to accurately plan for future hiring needs on your marketing team is by thinking of fuel, engine and foundations. Emily Kramer walked us through the framework she uses to guide startups. 1 - Planning and goal settings needs to come before hiring plans.  2 - You have to hire for fuel, engine and foundations. 1 - Doesn’t matter if it’s OKRs or goals or KPIs or big rocks. Whatever it is, you need a system. In marketing there’s infinite things to do. Just like a product team has infitine features they could build... but normally they couldn’t operate without a product strategy and a roadmap. Marketing also needs this approach. You need to have goals for the big projects and the big initiatives that you’re doing. Not just a pipline or an MQL target. And when you plan that out, you should think about what you would also love to prioritize but can't. Kind of like 'goals on hold' because of capacity constraints. Figure out what it would take to be able to get to those in terms of hiring. What’s possible with the team that you have today and what are the things you want to do but can’t get to... yet. This helps inform headcount planning but also tells other teams, like hey we really want to do all of those things you’re asking for but we can’t do that until we have another writer or another marketing ops person to setup our foundational systems. 2 - The fuel, engine and foundation analogy adds another element to this. Fuel is content and all the things you’re creating. Engine is demand gen and growth. Foundations are product marketing and marketing operations. The goal is to balance all of these elements. If you hire a fuel person, you’re probably going to need another engine person and at some point, please, please, you need to check on your foundation humans behind all of that tech :) Full interview with Emily here > https://lnkd.in/gmafptYN 

Busted myth: Our attention span isn't shorter than that of a goldfish... Not convinced? Think of the last time you binged an entire show on Netflix, blinking only when the 'are you still watching' screen popped up. From a biological and evolutionary perspective, our ability to concentrate hasn't diminished. We’re capable of sustained focus when the subject is engaging enough. Creating something that’s impossible to ignore is the career pursuit of many marketers. But it’s harder than ever. The competition for focus is wild, and at any moment, people can swipe up to something else. But one effective technique is contrast. Deviating from expected patterns. Breaking the rules. Creating memorable impact. Like when Krispy Kreme put up an ad saying “Doughnuts are bad for you” or when Stella Artois said “Reassuringly Expensive”. Contrast is one of the many themes from our conversation with Carmen Simon on Humans of Martech. She’s the acclaimed author of ‘Impossible to Ignore’ – a groundbreaking approach to creating memorable messages that are easy to process, hard to forget. She’s also recently published ‘Made You Look’ – a full-color image packed guide on developing persuasive content. She teaches brain science courses at Stanford Continuing Studies and she’s also Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions where she runs neuroscience research to help businesses increase their persuasive power. Aside from how to deviate from expected patterns to create memorable impact, we also covered: • How to improve your presentations with embodied cognition • How to leverage AI while still applying a human touch • How to prepare for the future of Neuromarketing • How to make data impactful through contrast Bonus: In a world where every ad aims to tug at our heartstrings, how can we avoid the novelty of emotion wearing off, and people tuning out? Listen, read and watch in the comments 👇

Calling all email marketers: Buffer is hiring! Join our growth marketing team and take ownership of our lifecycle and email marketing programs. We also offer: 💰 Competitive salary 🏝 Work remotely 🗓 4-Day workweeks 💪 Health insurance: 💻 Home office setup ⛺️ Minimum vacation 📚 Unlimited Free books 👓 'Growth mindset' fund 💵 Savings plan 📈 Profit sharing 🍼 Family leave 👪 Family support fund ⛱ Sabbaticals Apply below! https://lnkd.in/exAGqWDM #emailmarketing #email

I was on the latest Humans of Martech podcast! We discussed the future of BI and how AI is transforming marketing analytics. Big thanks to the Phil Gamache and Jon Taylor for having me!

Why are free trials down? What caused this spike in traffic? Is this dashboard broken? As marketers, we’ve all had to answer these questions. Welp, there goes my morning. What if there was a better way? What if you had a tool that could alert you when a key metric had a sudden spike or dip yesterday. Like a smart dashboard that didn’t just show you numbers when you were monitoring them but an alerting system that would send you a Slack message before anyone else had a chance to ask you about it. And even better, what if you could have a conversation with this system about your data. Generative BI.  One startup conquering this problem is Narrative BI, an augmented analytics platform for marketers that generates data insights in natural language. They also recently introduced LLM recommendations. Marketers can receive tailored recommendations without needing to ask specific questions. Unlike a dashboard that does a good job presenting data; Narrative BI also provides context, explains trends or anomalies, and suggests actionable next steps. This has the potential to drastically change how we interact with data, not just cut down the number of mornings you waste chasing data rabbit holes. We spoke with Michael Rumiantsau, the co-founder and CEO of Narrative BI. Aside from chatting about the future of BI and AI’s role in democratizing data for knowledge workers on Humans of Martech, we also covered: • ChatGPT’s Limitation with Data Analysis • Leveraging Proprietary Data with AI • The Attribution Dilemma in Marketing • Importance of Anomaly Detection for Marketers And some fun topics like: • Deciding When to Commit Fully to Your Startup Idea • Encouraging Entrepreneurial Spirit in Employees Listen, watch and read here > https://lnkd.in/g2H_Z3qF