If you haven’t had the chance to read through our notes from the Day 1 Keynote session yet, you can find them here to enjoy at your leisure. But now, it’s time for the deep dive into the breakout sessions of Day 1. There were so many great moments, here’s hoping the below is enough to whet your appetite!

How an experimental approach led to a 5x return on investment:  Breakout Session 1

The first breakout session of the day focused on a key component of any marketing strategy, experimentation.

The speaker took the attendees through his case study on the power of automation, personalized customer journeys, and building an experimental framework that allows for valuable learnings. This was an extremely practical session on a sound testing approach to social media lead generation.

A strong testing framework should contain the following elements:

  • Challenge – What are you attempting to achieve in the test?
  • Hypothesis – What is your predicted outcome?
  • Agenda – aka the brief, document everything so your team and client knows where you stand
  • Scale – Which campaigns or initiatives can you scale the test within?
  • Evaluate – Report and assess performance at every step of the campaign
  • Repeat – Learn from what worked, apply, and continue test further

Infrastructure down & dirty: architecting best practices:  Breakout Session 2

The second breakout session provided an advanced, in-depth look at the proper way to architect an ideal Marketo infrastructure that connects all operational programs in a symbiotic manner. The speaker walked the audience through his Marketo instance in a full demo displaying his company’s structure and best practices which include: numerical naming conventions, and the concept of S.C.R.I.M – creating campaigns that are Scalable, Clear Robust Intelligent, and Modular.

Exceed customer expectations with Marketo ContentAI & web personalization by Marketo product team:  Breakout Session 3

The third break out session, was a full demo of the newly announced Artificial Intelligence products from Marketo: ContentAI and Audience AI. We learned how to use Marketo’s ContentAI and Web Personalization capabilities to exceed customers’ expectations, how AI will increase efficiency of your team, and how it will be able to make every interaction more valuable by increasing conversions across email, web, and mobile.

  • ContentAI: Will dynamically tailor content on your website, or email to fit the profiles of the user it is being served to.
  • Audience AI: Uses Google’s data analytics and machine learning smarts to find suitable lookalike audiences within a customer’s database that can be used to expand the reach of marketing campaigns across email, web, Facebook ads, and more

Visualize and prove impact with Marketo performance insights: Breakout Session 4

The fourth and final breakout session of Day 1 focused on a demo of another new product update: Marketo Performance Insights. The new tool essentially marries CRM data with all engagement data from Marketo, and provides full visibility into which channels and campaigns are driving the strongest pipeline activity and revenue.

As mentioned previously, there are views on both the first touch attribution model, and multi-touch attribution models, once developed and implemented, this could be huge! If marketers are to truly unlock the power of their efforts, multi-touch attribution must be at the forefront.

MPI also included various segmentation features that allow users to sort by things such as ABM accounts. The dashboard requires no build, just simple field mapping, and provides easily exportable pdf or ppt formats that can be dropped into a presentation instantly

Day 1 really was a whirlwind of insight, inspiration, and excitement!

Check out our summary of day 2!