MarketingSherpa Video Archive

Rapid-Fire Results: 21 quick ideas for improving your customer-first marketing

Daniel Burstein, Sr. Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, and Pamela Jesseau, Director of Audience Development & Partnerships, MECLABS


Our mission at MarketingSherpa Summit is to share real customer-first marketing success stories from the marketers and vendors who are in the trenches day-in-day-out executing real campaigns. We get hundreds of applications from people interested in speaking, and we choose the stories that best epitomize customer-first marketing and have transferable principles others can learn from. The final speaker count this year was 24. However, we realized that there was a wealth of customer-first wisdom off-stage as well.

 So, we held a quick-hitting, 30-minute session combining customer-first marketing tips from all of our assets —  audience members, sponsors, speakers and our hosts Daniel Burstein and Pamela Jesseau. We chose to share quick, digestible tips that had already been proven effective so the MarketingSherpa community could integrate them into their marketing efforts as soon as they returned to their cube or office (and you can do the same after watching the replay!). Because, while we all love reading about a wildly successful campaign, sometimes we just need a single spark of inspiration — that lightning bolt that powers all good marketing initiatives.

As you watch this video, you’ll get tips like how to economically build a content army from unlikely sources in your own company to using current events — even a winter storm — to increase sales in email marketing. Here is a small sampling:

1:34 Sarah Schaale, Sr. Brand Manager, Lumens/Ydesign Group:

We weren’t having a lot of luck with freelance writers or outside contractors to create content that we felt really reflected our brand, so we recruited internally ...  a group of what we call 'writerly' types ... and they are our content army.  

6:00 Shannon Kinser, Marketing Director, Sun Realty:

...anticipating a winter storm in the Northeast, which is where a lot of our demographic guests come from, we put together an email campaign that featured bright, sunny, warm scenery and homes that were on the oceanfront, and we had a really great response with that.

In addition, we have 13 more tips from the MarketingSherpa community. You can jump to the timestamps below to hear directly from marketers like yourself:

3:00 Joe McCambley, SVP of Content Marketing, POP

5:10 Catharine Hays, Executive Director, The Future of Advertising Program at The Wharton School

6:58 Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Solutions, MECLABS Institute

9:31 Peter Koizumi, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing, BMO Financial Group

10:37 Matt Hickman, Vice President, Yes Lifecycle Marketing

12:56 Annette Garaghty, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, WUSTHOF

14:24 Ryan Phelan, Vice President, Marketing Insights, Adestra

18:08 Gary Jury, Supervisor, Digital Intelligence, CAA of South Central Ontario

19:22 Matthew Indellicati, Associate Director of Strategy, M&C Saatchi Mobile

21:14 Andrea Shaikin, former Director, Customer Experience & Engagement, Mr. Lube Canada

22:07 Matt Sitler, Marketing Communications Manager, Paychex

23:00 Ari Sheinkin, VP of Marketing Analytics, IBM

27:29 Max Anderson, Video Producer, Nextiva

Related Resources:

Download the free Guide to Optimizing Your Webpages and Better Serving Your Customers

Advice on How to Make the Case for a Customer-centric Transformation

Customer-First Marketing Research: 4 key data points from research with 2,400 consumers

Marketing Chart: How important customer-first marketing is to consumers