In this episode of the Explicit Content Podcast, Jeff Julien and Andy Crestodina talk Marketing Tech and help marketers understand why they should be excited for what these technologies will unlock for the modern marketer. As tech stacks get more complex and harder to implement, Andy and Jeff pull the curtain of mystery off of the subject and help you cut through all of the noise and help you prioritize what you need. What in marketing tech has you excited right now? Andy: Calendly is great. We’re all familiar and we use them a lot to help us manage our calendar, but things like Drift, chatbots and others can put a meeting on someone’s schedule straight from the website. Andy sees this like more of a revolution. There’s so much potential in being able to do this directly from the web and further bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams. Andy has been trying out the app X.Ai which is a virtual assistant that is actually virtual. It uses an Ai powered bot to help manage your calendar with people, letting you off the hook from the time suck of finding that perfect time. Getting on someone’s calendar directly from a business website can really effect the world of lead generation. Remember that the visitor’s true goal may be to have a conversation with us. The destination for them was never the contact form. Technology can bridge this gap for us all. Think about your energy companies or you mobile companies. They’ve understood this for a long time. They know what your need is and they make doing that extremely easy for me. Andy: 2 new conversion technologies without being too aggressive or doing the hard sale. The real goal is to lead to a conversation, not to fill out a contact. This is classic B2B demand generation. If you have a sales page on your site w/o a call to action, you just aren’t doing your job. Scroll to the bottom of your service page. Is there a face, a CTA, a verb? Or are you getting to a dead end and a footer. Don’t expect them to scroll back up to the top. This is just good digital and death to “contact for price”. Answer our questions. Your content must answer our visitor’s questions. When it comes to chatbots, it means instant interaction. Drift does this. Andy feels like it’s fun and easy to setup. It’s a great starter AI bot and it has an easy system to help you easily program the Ai to be smart. AI allows you to get directly to a calendar widget from the website. It short circuits all of those wasted moments and it psychologically makes the visitor feel like they’ve succeeded. They now know when they will get more questions answered. People don’t want to be an unqualified lead, so let’s help them tell us what they’re their to find. Drifts system can help lead our users to the things that they’re interested in figuring out. Better for them, better for you. The Video Player Everyone knows that they need a video player, but universal players like YouTube doesn’t give us much control to drive the action back to you. YouTube now doesn’t allow marketers to turn off the suggested videos. It’s the cheap solution and you’ll never generate leads from it. There’s nothing wrong with putting content that we made onto YouTube, just don’t think that it’s there for conversion. YouTube should always be an alternate version. You can now make videos that have data collectors on the front, on the back, in the middle and all over. Think about adding a Drift style Ai to inside of a video. As soon as you have their attention, we can get them to convert to a schedule phone call. This feels like the future of lead generation. Killer conversion tip: Make your CTA as specific as possible Minority Report got it so wrong. Nobody saw smart speakers coming except Star Trek. Jeff is 100% confident that in 10 years VR will be in most houses.