Technology drives many of the trends that marketing professionals keep an eye on and employ. It’s a constantly changing landscape that demands creativity and flexibility.

The Business Record invited four Greater Des Moines marketing professionals to weigh in on what they see as needs and trends in the industry. Our panel included John Campbell, president, Blue Frog Dynamic Marketing; Melissa Inman, vice president of digital content strategy and operations at Meredith Corp.; Jana Rieker, senior business development manager, Trilix Marketing Group; and Jeff White, vice president of business development and strategy, Flynn Wright.

TECH CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Business Record: What is one challenge or trend that you see coming related to technology? And why are you keeping an eye on it?

Jeff White: I think it’s a challenge, a trend and an opportunity. And that is all the different social channels and entertainment channels that are out there. Watching how they monetize themselves for us as advertisers is interesting because that provides us more opportunity to reach our audiences. We do a lot of broadcast. We still do a lot of cable. We do a lot of mail for some of our clients, but the opportunity to target specific audience segments digitally is very appealing to us. So we play close attention to how those different channels evolve and how well they can target their audience members.

Melissa Inman: I guess from a digital content standpoint, there’s a couple different areas we’re really focused on. We’re watching and testing a lot within the voice space, so voice and audio devices. Looking at how users are interacting with their mobile devices to do more search-based activities and what we need to do to our content to optimize, to show up in those voice-activated searches more often. 

Also, in the video space, trying to figure out and master the distributed model and OTT [over the top] and what we need to do to be growing our footprint in the video space outside of our owned and operated properties and how we can best monetize that experience.

Jana Rieker: There are two areas that we are really focused on: the content itself and the content development, how much it’s changed and how we can get messages out there in a more unique way. … We’ve even tested things with virtual reality and the cost savings that can provide with trade shows and customer engagement and experiential marketing through that. A lot of our clients used virtual reality in lighting and being able to have an experience of being at a situation which can bring it to them rather than having them travel to experience the event.

John Campbell: We have a unique business, I think, compared to some of the others. We’re heavily involved in technology, being an inbound agency. We are really watching the convergence of sales and marketing together on marketing platforms. If you were a HubSpot agency, something like HubSpot, which has a CRM [customer relationship management] piece built into it. It’s actually built into the CMS [content management system], which is your website platform. How all these things interact together to give you a point-to-point solution from the first touch to revenue and how all that’s trackable is where we’re watching next.

VIDEO GROWTH

Business Record: What are some things that are coming in video that are trends or uses that are coming up more and more?

Melissa Inman: For us, video is a challenge. Long ago we took the 
approach that we would create video and we would house it on our sites and somehow magically everyone would come find our video. Right? And that’s a challenge, right? So, then [we were] trying to figure out what does it look like when you develop a video model where you’re putting the video where people are. Obviously that means more social platforms. Building things out for YouTube or looking for that next new thing that you can break into to develop an audience. 

Video for us at Meredith is both a way to deliver content and information that people are going to learn from. It’s also an audience acquisition tool because oftentimes they want to know more about the content that they just watched. So, they’re coming back.

John Campbell: For us, video is an education tool as much as anything else. If you look at some examples of where video has really played into building an audience or educating or anything, you look at Moz’s Whiteboard Friday [https://bit.ly/1km7kVn] — a perfect example of something that you can look at 10 minutes a day. 

STICK TO STORYTELLING

Business Record: What are some of the challenges you’ve seen with video? Obviously there’s production. It takes a little bit longer to create. What challenges have you seen in that space?

Jana Rieker: I’m going to brag on Des Moines a little bit. We have incredible talent here in Des Moines for video. It’s our fastest-growing area within Trilix. Part of understanding how to use video is storytelling. Right? There are great writers. There are great freelance videographers. Within our team we shoot for NCAA, so there’s talent here in Iowa that can shoot Final Four. That can go do hype video for some of the biggest brands that are out there. One of our videos just was up for an Emmy, and it’s a 90-second spot. 

It isn’t necessarily a challenge of what to do next. It’s how to stay relevant. There are a million ways to be able to tell a story. If you can just capture it in a 15- to 90-second spot. I think a lot of companies, they recognize that they need video. There’s tremendous resources in Des Moines to be able to get that.

Melissa Inman: I would piggyback on something that Jana said, too. It’s just about the storytelling. Too often what I’ve seen people do is let the technology trump the story. People go out and say, “360 video is the next big thing” and so everyone’s creating 360 videos, but they’ve lost sight of the message that they’re trying to communicate. Then it’s just a bunch of fancy bells and whistles without any substance.

Jeff White: We see more and more companies that never would’ve produced a 30-second TV spot, now they can. Because they couldn’t afford before to be on broadcast TV, for example. Maybe they could be on cable. Now they can utilize digital channels in some cases as if it’s broadcast, except in a targeted fashion.

A quick example is that we have a client that …is a cable company and they don’t operate within media markets, but they operate outside and around media markets. It would make no sense to advertise within the media market on television. But they can target their audience geographically digitally and it will work quite well.

NEEDED: SKILLED WORKERS

Business Record: One of the things we hear from business leaders is that they can’t find enough workers to fill our opening positions. Skilled workers, talented workers, educated workers, workers who are going to be committed and work hard. Are you finding that this is an issue for you? What are you doing to find talent?

Jana Rieker: One of the things that I advise, and I was speaking to somebody earlier too, it’s not necessarily about trying to fill the roles. It’s stop trying so hard to fill the role. See what’s out there and match it to your need. Maybe you don’t need to hire videographers. Maybe you need to partner with a firm that has that. Maybe you have talent within your organization that could do multiple roles and there’s cost savings within that as well. Rather than just doing one thing. Take a look at what the workforce has to offer. 

John Campbell: To build on what she said just a little bit, I know HubSpot specifically has an academic program that they’re trying to get into colleges and they rely on partners to assist them in making that happen. To teach inbound philosophy and strategy and things like that. I think some of the companies that are out there in the marketing world that are building these platforms understand there’s a lack of talent and that they need to do something about it.

When we bring people in that are recent college graduates, they can’t do what we do. That’s just the reality. The college programs are failing right now to teach the latest marketing technologies pretty bad. I’m engaged there.  

From our perspective, we don’t even try to find people to do it. They just don’t exist. So we hire culture first. We hire the person. We hire ethics. We hire on just whether or not the vibe’s right for our environment. That’s really important to our company. Then we train them. We train them on what we do. That’s the only way that we can hire. We have a unique, like I said early on, we’re really unique in what we do.

Jeff White: I agree with John. What is very critical is all of us as professionals engaging with schools and universities and talking with them about what we need and what we hope the graduates are coming out of the school with. It is very hard with a few years of experience to find developers, designers with a very specific talent set. To Jana’s point, I would recommend engaging with young people early and finding a cultural fit and just understanding that you may need to train them up with some of the skills that you require for certain positions.

On the flip side, account service, research, media — everybody thinks they’re a strategist, but strategy infers a specific definition, and that is being able to anticipate several different maneuvers or anticipate several different scenarios. And that’s probably the thing we look for most in people because then those individuals can be applied to several different areas, so account service, business development or whatever else. Those are the types of things we have ongoing conversations with schools like Iowa State University and Iowa and others that we have relationships with. But some of that stuff you can’t teach, but you can at least prepare individuals for it if they get out in the working world.

BRANDING AND FEELING

Business Record: You’ve all mentioned branding. How do you do it successfully? You know, that’s the golden question. What are some trends related to branding that are emerging or that you’re watching? 

Jana Rieker: Not long ago the number of impressions that you get from brands was like 3,000 impressions a day, and it’s over 20,000 now. We’re just bombarded with the number of messages that come our way. I think it’s not necessarily about trying to brand to everyone. You’ve still got to be very specific about who you’re trying to reach, without leaving out opportunity that you didn’t know was there. It used to be that 50 percent of marketing worked; we just don’t know what 50 percent it is. … The brand marketing is still critically important because it allows you to make sure that people know what your brand stands for, and not necessarily just that you want to sell them something. 

Melissa Inman: I was going to say that what the brand stands for kind of stands out to me, because I’m fortunate enough to work with a lot of brands that are very, very familiar to people, and that have been around for a very long time. But figuring out what those brands are in all of the different channels in which we now reach people is hard. So what the brand is in print where it maybe started isn’t the same as what it is on our website or what it is in Facebook or what it is on YouTube or what it is on Instagram. So making sure that we ultimately lather up to the core tenets of the brand, but figure out how we best express those in the different channels is a constant challenge for us. 

John Campbell: To me, brands are becoming more of an emotional thing. People want to do business with something they can feel, whether that is a company that they have a good feeling about or whatever. It’s that cultural feel that you have to express a brand. A lot of times, especially in our company or companies like ours, we’re heavily engaged with clients. You have to get along. It’s coordinating a relationship sort of situation, where when you’re talking about your company, you’re sharing your brand with them, and it’s a cultural thing, especially for the millennial generation. They want to know who they’re doing business with, and that brand is not black and white anymore. There’s a little bit of feel to it now, and that’s something we’re constantly trying to get out there. 

Jeff White: People define “brand” differently. I usually ask, is it a brand identity problem, a brand awareness problem, or a brand delivery problem? Those are all very different things. … Usually with some pretty simple research you can get to the bottom of that and solve the issue. n