Topgolf is on a mission to make the sport of golf a lot more accessible. Traditional barriers to entry—a country club membership, a set of clubs, a rigid dress code—are crumbling fast, and the sport’s gamified version is front and center in that effort.

“If you think about entering golf through the traditional lens, it can be a very intimidating introduction to the game,” said Topgolf CMO Geoff Cottrill. “And if you’re not good at golf, you have to really invest.” But the sport is in the midst of a major shift, he says. It’s becoming more accessible and diverse, and the way people are entering and experiencing the game is changing.

Topgolf itself is expanding rapidly, with plans to open 11 new venues a year for the next five years. That amounts to three to four million new Topgolf players per year, Cottrill estimates. “We’re trying to make the game of golf more accessible by removing the barriers, making it more fun, with music, food and just a good time,” he said.

We spoke with Cottrill about how the game of golf is changing; Topgolf’s new brand campaign and zany animated spot; the company’s plans for growth; his approach to influencer marketing; and more.

Chief Marketer: What’s the purpose behind your most recent campaign?

Geoff Cottrill, CMO at Topgolf: Our core conviction as a brand is believing in the unlimited power of play. We live in a world where the older you get, the less you’re encouraged to have fun, let go and play. About a year ago, we launched our first-ever global campaign with the tagline, “Come play around,” and a visual representation of what an experience at Topgolf’s like, the unique combination of golf and not golf. It helped us build new awareness in the marketplace. Then we went back and said, what’s the next phase look like? The first time we just showed people playing. This time we wanted to do it with a different representation, visually.

CM: What was the marketing goal with this second phase?

GC: For this version we wanted to amplify the spectacle and the joy that you feel when you play at Topgolf, the bigness of the venue, yet the intimacy of what happens in the actual bay itself. The goal was to make it playful, memorable, a little bit outlandish, animated. We’re building awareness in the marketplace. We’ve been around for 20-plus years, but we still have relatively low awareness. So we’ve got to step out and disrupt a little bit. You’re going to start to see a number of interesting things coming out over the next couple of months.

CM: Where did the animation idea come from?

GC: We decided to create a whole new world and set of characters that are based on real people, but fun and engaging. We’re introducing a group called the “Hand Head crew.” We shot a bunch of film with real people playing Topgolf and then went back in and put Hand Heads on them instead. And then used the expressions of hand emojis and hand signals—high fives, low fives, handshakes—to express the joy of how it feels to play golf. Instead of showing someone’s face, it amplifies and brings these things to life. Why hands? They’re expressive. We live in an emoji culture. It’s also a golf glove. You eat and play golf with your hands, and they’re a humongous part of the experience itself.

CM: Are you creating any extensions to the campaign, like merchandise?

GC: With our partners at Callaway we’re doing a whole set and series of golf gloves that match the heads. Then we’re doing Snapchat filters and we’ll do some stuff on Instagram as well, so you can turn yourself or your friends into Hand Heads. We’re doing a full-page in Vogue to be a little bit disruptive and have a sense of style.

CM: How are you distributing the campaign to consumers?

GC: We’ve got the :60, the :30 music-only, a :30 with voiceover and a whole bunch of :15s that talk about families, going out with friends and our half-price Tuesday platform. Then we’ll have a whole bunch of six- and seven-second pieces for social. We’ll do out-of-home. We’ll also do some print; we’ll be in Hypebeast, Golf Digest and Vogue, for a bit of a record-scratch moment. Then we may pop up and do some fun stuff during Fashion Week.

CM: What’s your pitch to people who’ve never played golf before, or to those who may be intimidated by traditional barriers of entry to the sport?

GC: Most of the people who come to Topgolf have never played golf before. And a lot of people that come to Topgolf will never go on to play golf. But golf is a sport that’s got a long history, a lot of great traditions, but also a lot of barriers to entry for people to be able to even attempt the game for the first time. We’re trying to make the game of golf more accessible by removing the barriers, making it more fun, with music, food and just a good time.

The game of golf needs to be and is becoming more diverse. And we’re one of the driving forces around that. And then as the game becomes more diverse, it becomes more fun for more people. We’re constantly inviting people in to play for the first time. A lot of people come for a first date. A lot of people come in through our leagues. A lot of people come in through a company corporate event. We want that experience to be one that you remember is fun and associated with laughter.

If you think about entering golf through the traditional lens, it can be a very intimidating introduction to the game. You go to the country club or the place to get lessons. Are you wearing the right clothes? Do you have the right shirt? Is your shirt tucked in? Do you have your clubs? If you’re not good at golf, you have to really invest.

This past year there was a shift: off-course golf—for the first time in history—is bigger than on-course golf. And more than 80 percent of off-course golf is represented through Topgolf. So, the way people are entering and experiencing the game is very different. And the result we projected out, in five-to-10 years, is going to be pretty profound on the game.

CM: What are your plans for expansion?

CG: We’re building 11 venues a year for at least the next five years. Every year, with those venues, we’re adding somewhere between three and four million new players, new golfers, new people coming into the sport. We’re growing internationally as well. We just opened a massive venue in China. We’re in Germany; we’ve got plans to go into Spain. We’re in Australia and Thailand.

CM: Have you targeted specific types of consumers?

GC: I don’t use the generational labels that most people use. Gen X, millennials… we don’t use those ways of thinking. We’ve done personas. We’ve got seven different personas that we’ve developed that all are entering the game of golf or looking for leisure and entertainment activities in different ways. We’ve gone deep with each of those seven and we know where they’re living, what media they’re using, what social media they’re using. It’s young people, it’s families, it’s people who play golf, but it’s also parents who play golf and have young kids that want to experience something new. We just announced a huge relationship with the Special Olympics. Topgolf will become a medaled sport in the Special Olympics. We’re already hosting practice competitions across the country.

CM: What other actions are you taking to make Topgolf more inclusive and diverse? And how does influencer marketing factor into that strategy?

CG: We’ve developed what we call “friends of the brand.” I don’t use the word influencer. I know marketers are so fascinated and enamored with that word. I think it’s ridiculous that we’ve gone so deep on that. Everyone has influence. Everyone you interact with and meet and do things with has influence. We went out and found 25 or 30 people from all walks of life who are somehow changing the game of golf and we’re working with them to do things that are important to them. Like Roger Steele, for example, a kid from Chicago. He’s breaking down some of the barriers, so we’re doing things with him.

We just did a big program with the Divine Nine, the original nine fraternities and sororities from historically Black colleges. We had a tournament on a Saturday in all of our venues across the country where people from those fraternities and sororities came and played against each other, with a leaderboard that was nationwide. We work with the folks at Eastside Golf, a couple kids who grew up on around the East Lake area of Atlanta—professional golfers dressed head-to-toe in Jordan who are literally changing the game of golf. It’s not about us doing stuff. It’s about us participating and helping these people that are changing the game of golf and providing a platform to help them do that. They’re the ones who are driving the change.

The post Brands on Fire: Topgolf CMO Geoff Cottrill on the Brand’s Awareness Play, New Creative and International Expansion appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Language-learning app Duolingo acquires approximately 80 percent of its users organically, through word-of-mouth marketing. But targeted paid acquisition helps to spur that growth, and partnerships and piggybacking on pop culture moments have proven useful tactics as well. In an executive Q&A, AdExchanger explores the brand’s media strategy, social investment, measurement approach, and more.

The post Duolingo Taps Organic Marketing Tactics, Media Strategy and Social Investment for Success appeared first on Chief Marketer.

According to a study conducted by Ovum and Intel, 5G will “propel annual revenue from immersive and new media applications from zero to $67 billion within a decade.” This will obviously be a boon for the entertainment industry, but it will also be a game changer for the B2B sector. Engaging and interactive content made possible by 5G will change the way B2B marketers collaborate, communicate and market their products and services.

Communicate with Colleagues and Customers Anywhere, Anytime

Telecommuting is quickly becoming the new normal. More than 65 percent of companies allow remote work and 16 percent are fully remote. It is increasingly important to keep the lines of communication open at all times with colleagues and customers, whether they are at the home office, traveling to meetings, or working from home.

Those who have regular conference calls with coworkers and clients know how difficult it can be to have a productive conversation without a video freezing, audio going in and out, or participants dropping off due to bad connections. 5G’s lightning-fast data transfer rate promises to make these disruptions a thing of the past, allowing teams to conduct high-quality video calls that can make participants feel as though everyone is in the same room—a rarity in today’s untethered world.

But the benefits of 5G extend far beyond daily conference calls. Companies will also be able to create engaging, eye-catching live presentations for clients that can replace or supplement in-person sales meetings. Organizations can leverage 5G’s capabilities to produce interactive and customized content that makes routine meetings and sales calls truly memorable experiences for potential customers.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• 10 CES Technology Takeaways for Marketers
• CMO Q&A: Qualcomm’s Penny Baldwin on Marketing 5G
• AT&T Business Speeds to the Future with 5G

Live Broadcasts Will Become Far More Engaging

Although the convenience of on-demand videos still appeals to many professionals, live online webinars and videos will continue to be a top-performing marketing category through the next decade.

Currently, smartphones and tablets—even those equipped with the fastest processors on the market—often have trouble transmitting or streaming live broadcasts of events, presentations, and panel discussions. The extremely low latency expected with 5G will substantially reduce lag time and allow audiences to tune in remotely to watch high-quality videos in real-time. And it will enable companies to produce customized content that appears or changes in response to viewers’ preferences or—if two-way cameras are involved—their physical reactions to what they’re watching.

On the other hand, presenters at large gatherings and events will enjoy faster connection speeds on their 5G-enabled devices, giving them the ability to quickly and continuously respond to viewers’ questions, comments, and reactions. Verizon, a leader in the 5G space, has already given its customers the ability to access its 5G Ultra Wideband network in several high-traffic public spaces including sports arenas and event spaces—places where, traditionally, crowds have made it difficult to obtain adequate signal. Event sponsors will benefit from the ability to monitor real-time viewer feedback, giving them a better idea of what holds an audience’s attention and what might make them lose interest.

Richer, More Interactive B2B Product Demos

Millennial workers are increasingly involved in B2B purchasing decisions. This generation has been found to conduct a majority of its research online before making a purchase or even speaking to a sales rep. It is important that digital touchpoints convey detailed, compelling information that helps instill confidence in customers’ purchasing decisions, even if they are simply browsing your website or discovering your brand through social media.

B2C retailers have already embraced the trend of enriching the online shopping experience by adding multimedia to their product pages. For example, Zappos, includes detailed videos of people demonstrating and wearing the shoes while explaining each pair’s features. B2B companies stand to benefit from similar strategies, especially now that customers will be able to stream high-quality videos with virtually no lag time. Videos that feature products being used by professionals out in the field can add context that makes the items far more appealing than if they were listed in the pages of a catalog.

Additionally, lightning-fast download speeds will give marketers the ability to create richer, more engaging product demonstrations, complete with high-quality images, interactive slides, and live Q&A sessions. These features, along with marketers’ ability to capture information about viewers in real time, can help companies present their products in the best possible light, regardless of where customers are in the sales funnel.

The transition from 4G to 5G will broaden B2B marketers’ opportunities to reach, communicate with, and educate prospects as well as nurture meaningful, ongoing relationships with their clients. Companies that capitalize on the ability to create and disseminate robust, eye-catching content to a wider audience will truly stand out among their competitors. And marketers that properly harness the ability continuously collect data and respond to customers’ preferences will be better equipped to provide the level of customer service necessary to compete within today’s experience economy.

Paul Heald is CEO and co-founder of BrightTALK

The post How Interactive Content for B2B Marketing Will Leap Forward with 5G  appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Heard these before? We’re living in the age of the customer, and it goes well beyond buzzwords.

Most of us have been told that it’s cheaper to keep a current customer than to find a new one. But did you know that a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can result in a 25 to 95 percent increase in profits?

Customer retention can be a small change with major impact. And yet, many CMOs don’t champion retention as a top priority even though it plays a large part in their long term success.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, leaders from Bain & Company stated, “the high cost of acquiring customers renders many customer relationships unprofitable during their early years. Only in later years, when the cost of serving loyal customers falls and the volume of their purchases rises, do relationships generate big returns. “

The length of the customer lifecycle is one of the reasons why marketers don’t always have customer retention top of mind. Unlike lead generation or customer acquisition, retention campaigns take longer to produce results. Segmenting and categorizing customers in order to personalize experiences is complicated work. And it takes time to uncover and satisfy unmet needs in the customer experience.

But a 25 to 95 percent increase in profits is certainly worth it. Additionally, more findings by Bain & Company indicate that a 10 percent rise in customer retention yields a 30 percent increase in the value of the company.
So, what can marketers do to boost retention?

1. Play a role in onboarding

Call it client education. Call it a welcome series. Call it whatever you want. Just don’t nab the sale and then dump your new customers. Develop welcome emails (a.k.a. customer onboarding) that shows customers how to maximize value from their purchase. Offer video tutorials, on-demand webinars or case studies, so they can become familiar with the product and see a path to success. Then point them to how to find help for themselves, including how to find the right person or resources at your company based on their question or need.

2. Be in constant contact

Talk to your customers and figure out what they value the most. Ask them how you can get better, what they like and don’t like, what’s going wrong, and how your service could fix the issue. Solicit feedback through surveys and outreach.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Upselling Can Help Stem Churn and Increase Retention: Study
• L’Oréal Masters the Codes to Fend of Digital Disruptors
• Vase Majority of Brands See Partnerships as Central to Growth

3. Segment your base

There’s a big difference between a customer who has been faithfully using your service for months and one who didn’t convert after a free 30-day trial. Segmenting your customers into different groups can help you target them correctly for different circumstances like conversion vs. recovery.

4. Build customer-first culture

Marketing teams can often fall into the trap of reacting to the whims of other departments⁠, and go into execution mode without really understanding the customer problem trying to be solved. CMOs can drive proactive initiatives by championing a more offensive approach and working closely with customer success⁠ to stress deeper customer relationships. When employees see the C-suite advocating for customers on a daily basis, a customer success culture will become a part of the company’s DNA.

5. Identify the right metric

Identify your North Star Metric or the metric that illustrates the value gained by customers (e.g. Airbnb tracks nights booked). And then identify how marketing efforts impact this number. This will probably feel odd if you’re accustomed to tracking clicks and conversions. That said, the more value a customer extracts from a product, the more likely they are to be retained, and every department—marketing included—has a part to play in optimizing for the NSM.

Smart CMOs balance acquisition with retention

It can feel like it’s in a marketer’s DNA to focus on customer acquisition, but it’s time for a major shift. Savvy CMOs recognize that customer retention is critical, because it measures not only how good they are at acquiring new customers, but how successful they are at satisfying existing customers.

Instead of looking beyond their customers to bring in new business, marketers should turn their attention to the customer base already within their grasp, and invest in keeping current customers happier longer, so they can generate more business than acquisition alone ever could.
April Rassa is a marketing executive at Brightback. Connect with her on Twitter: @arassa

The post Customer Retention: The Next Frontier for Today’s CMO appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Consider what one of my sales reps went through recently with an account. There were two weeks left in the quarter and he was behind. We waited in the lobby of one of our large auto insurance clients to meet about increasing the budget on their customer acquisition campaign or at least throwing more of the budget our way.

Secure this incremental spend and the rep made his goal for the quarter.

An assistant escorted us to a conference room with no windows. There were three people in the room. Rob, the CMO, was there along with his VP of digital advertising and a media planner. Pleasantries were exchanged.

We’d been doing business together for the past year. They used display for customer acquisition. Our cost per acquisition (CPA) was the lowest of any partner on their media plan, and the volume of business we did with them had steadily increased.

The meeting was going well.

“I’m going to put you guys in our Q2 plan for an additional $1M,” the media planner said.

My sales rep was visibly relieved. He was going to make his number.

“I have just one question,” said the CMO. “We’re trying to carefully manage our CPA so I assume that number will be unchanged with this additional budget?”

My sales rep’s body language changed again. He tensed up. He glanced at me, his eyes pleading for me not to say what he knew I was about to say. He needed this deal.

Acknowledging my sales rep’s distress with a glance, I leaned forward and looked Rob directly in the eye.

“Are you shifting the $1M from non-performing partners to us?” I asked.

“No, this is new spend that we’re putting into the market to increase the number of insurance applications we get in Q2,” Rob replied.

I glanced again at my rep; his entire expression begging me to tell Rob what he wanted to hear.

“Rob, your CPAs are only going up.”

My sales rep emitted an audible groan. The CMO was not thrilled.

This is not a unique situation. Many CMOs and agencies want to spend more, and acquire even more customers—while simultaneously expecting the cost of acquisition to stay flat, or even go down. Sadly, it doesn’t work this way.

Investing more in customer acquisition, while keeping media execution efficiency constant, guarantees that your cost to acquire each marginal customer is going to increase. The reason for this is that your media has to work harder to acquire the more marginal prospects. Your lowest CPA, on the other hand, is going to be associated with acquiring those customers who are already pre-disposed to buy from you. As you work to acquire more difficult-to-influence-prospects it costs more to influence them and convert them into customers.

You can conduct your own thought experiment to test the concept. Imagine you own an ice cream truck on the boardwalk of a beach on a hot summer day. The easy prospects flock to the truck when they hear the tinny melody. To get those beach goers that want ice cream a little less, you may have to wait around for a while until they get the urge to amble over. To get still more customers, you might send somebody to walk the beach wearing a sign-board and shouting, “Get your ice cream!”

What media and price promotions would be needed to get everybody on the beach to buy an ice cream? Even the most expensive promotion you could do—free ice cream for all—probably wouldn’t get everybody off of their beach blanket.

Auto insurance is no different. The easy prospects might be people who have other automobiles insured by the company, kids getting their first policy and using the same insurer used by their parents, friends of employees and other prospects with a connection to the company. As you move out from these easy targets, the cost to influence customers increases. Then, at some point, you’ve influenced all the easier prospects and now you have to do really hard things, such as convincing the son of an employee of your competitor to insure with you instead of the company that put them through college.

Unfortunately, most businesses need to influence the hard to influence prospects in order to grow. There usually aren’t enough “easy wins” to meet shareholder expectations. In mature markets, such as the market for toilet paper and many other CPG staples, the only growth available may come from the really hard to influence customers: convincing another brand’s loyal customer to switch.

So how does a CMO know the maximum CPA that their business can tolerate? When do you stop investing dollars in customer acquisition?

Conceptually, the answer for a company focused on profitability is simple, if not always easy to calculate in practice: the marginal cost of customer acquisition should equal the lifetime marginal contribution of the customer. Put another way, a CMO should be willing to spend in acquisition expense what the company is going to earn from having the customer. This is essentially breaking-even on customer acquisition expense at the margin. However, since this equation is only true at the margin, all of the easier customer acquisitions, the “easier wins,” are profitable and thus the enterprise is profitable.

Of course, there are situations where shareholders are focused on growth at any cost, and in these situations there is no limit to what a CMO should spend on customer acquisition. All talk of maximum CPAs is out the window and the challenge is how to deploy enough promotion dollars to get everybody off the beach. Think free ice cream.

This made Rob the CMO (remember him?) see the reality of the situation.

“You know, we probably need to think about segmenting our tactics by degree of difficulty on the prospects they are trying to influence,” he told his digital VP, before instructing his media planner to sign off on the deal. “Our search and retargeting should be held to the lowest CPA targets. While we can tolerate a really high CPA on our conquesting tactics.”

“Diminishing marginal returns,” he said. “Of course.”

Jay Habegger is CEO of programmatic agency owneriq.

Related Articles:

Taking Ownership of the Customer Journey to Improve B2B Sales

Redesigning Business to Optimize the Customer Experience

3 Tips for Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy

The post The CPA Equation: What Clients Don’t Always Understand appeared first on Chief Marketer.

“Financial institutions are very aggressively using the digital space, particularly in mobile,” says Margot Vaughan, group head, svp global customized marketing, MasterCard Advisors, the professional services arm of MasterCard Worldwide. The financial industry will should reach $6 billion this year—making it the number two overall spender in digital marketing behind retailers. That number is expected to rise to $10 billion by 2018, says Vaughan, who spoke on how to engage and keep customers through digital marketing at the DMA2014 conference in San Diego this week.

Vaughan also highlighted the optimal channels for financial institutions in the digital space, with optimizing organic search results through SEO best practices being a top priority for marketers. Financial industry marketers need to develop strong keyword strategies, optimize their webpage elements and content for search and leverage social media to keep their pages on search engines’ organic search radar.

“Organic search and perfecting it can take a while, and it requires testing to perfect,” Vaughan says.

In the paid search arena, she says the credit card market is fiercely competitive, with keywords for credit card-related terms driving Google AdWords prices driving skyward. When dealing with paid search, Vaughan says to remember that clicks are more important than searches, and that continuous tracking of KPIs should be performed to identify the most successful strategies.

In the credit space, driving consumers to card application pages is the real endgame, and Vaughan says there are several things marketers can do to improve submission rates.

First is making sure that prospects are led directly to an application page when clicking on a campaign.

“It is important that prospects are not taken through unnecessary steps or provided with distractions and opportunities to abandon the application process,” Vaughan says.

Keeping a campaign’s messaging consistent throughout all channels is also critical to success, with the message and value proposition on the application reinforced and matching the on the channel the prospect is coming from.

The ease of the application process should also be reinforced by keeping the application to a single page and utilizing collapsible fields, as well as up/down scrolling functions and drop-down menus to minimize length.

Incorporating secure messaging and icons can increase consumer confidence to apply, and using real-time error correction on the application is essential.

“This functionality has become a must-have, with issuers offering it on their applications to ensure a great user experience,” Vaughan says.

The post Engaging Financial Customers Through Digital appeared first on Chief Marketer.