Level Up: A Marketing Podcast

Ensuring your marketing strategy is innovative can feel overwhelming as it can take a massive amount of creativity and problem-solving. But innovations can be small and build on top of each other to craft truly innovative and unique customer experiences.

In this Level Up episode, our special guest Jenna Giles (Associate Principal Digital Designer) joins Laura Madden (Sr. Manager of Marketing Strategy and Services) and Jordan Kraus(Client Success Partner) to discuss how Lev and Huber Engineering worked together to use Huber Engineering's dynamic, innovative content to create hyper-personalized email campaigns.

Customers are constantly bombarded with ads and offerings every day, encouraging them to continually buy new products and services. But with so much noise in today's market, how can marketers and sales team increase their understanding of what encourages a customer to make a purchase?

In this Level Up episode, join Jordan Kraus (Client Success Partner) and Tyler Williams (Managing Sales Director) as they break down why people make subjective decisions and then find objective reasoning to support their purchases. As well, they provide some best-in-class tips on how marketing and sales teams can ensure they are meeting their customers where they are emotionally throughout their buyer's journey.

As technology has continued to rapidly evolve and enable high-quality experiences, we’ve seen the demand for dynamic customer experiences grow. Still, many marketing teams find themselves using outdated technology and processes that are hindering them from providing more personalized experiences.   

In this Level Up episode, Jordan Kraus (Client Success Partner) and Joe Kaltenthaler (Senior Manager of Lev's Data/Identity Practice) as they outline five practical tips that can help you stay informed on evolving customer expectations and optimize your marketing operations to empower experiences that exceed these expectations.  

Digital transformation: it’s a movement that businesses in every industry have been told they need to undergo. But what does it actually mean for you and your marketing team? 

In this episode of Level Up, the podcast for marketers by marketers created by Lev that distills best practices and strategies focused on helping marketers 1-up their strategy, Tyler and Joe discuss the common cliches and preconceptions of digital transformation. By breaking these cliches down, they pinpoint: 

1. What’s typically involved in a marker’s digital transformation 
2. How it’s effective in enhancing the customer experience 
3. How you can find a partner who adds value to every interaction throughout your digital transformation journey 

With changes in consumer preferences, constrained budgets, and a potentially rocky economy, marketers have a lot of challenges to consider and overcome. In this episode of Level Up, the podcast focused on helping marketers 1-UP their strategy and grow personally and professionally, Laura and Jordan discuss the marketing trends they believe are in and out in 2023.

Gain insight into how you can make more accurate decisions with first-party data, increase customer loyalty through building more authentic experiences, and find a knowledgeable, strategic partner who will work alongside you to solve your biggest challenges.

It’s time to level up with Lev's new podcast for marketers by marketers that distills best practices and strategies focused on helping you continue to grow personally and professionally.  

For those of you who’ve been subscribing to us since the very beginning of our In the Clouds podcast, you still can expect to gain strategic and technical best practices, how-to's, and real-life use cases and solutions that you can implement to 1-UP your marketing strategy and overcome any challenge in your way!

In our very first episode, learn more about our Level Up co-hosts, Laura Madden (Sr. Manager of Marketing Strategy & Services), Jordan Kraus (Client Success Partner), Joe Kalthenthaler (Sr. Manager of Lev’s MC Personalization and Intelligence), and Tyler Williams (Managing Director of Sales) as they discuss what led them to Lev, the most influential project they’ve worked on, and the best marketing-related advice they’ve ever received.

In this episode, hosts Bobby and Cole are joined by Bo Lowery -- Vice President of Marketing at Wild Birds Unlimited. Wild Birds Unlimited (WBU) is a 41 year old brand with more than 350 retail locations around the U.S. and Canada, with the goal of helping you find joy in your environment by inviting birds into the backyard. Bo has been with WBU for more than 20 years, and has been a part of their digital marketing transformation. In this podcast, you will learn where they started with email marketing (as the first enterprise customer of ExactTarget!), and how they have evolved their marketing strategy and used creativity and personalization to engage with their customers. (Also, be sure to listen for three bird fun facts shared by Bo!)

Lev expert and SVP, Strategy Ryan McCambridge joins Crystal Washington for a deep dive into the future of marketing. As a technology strategist, certified futurist, and author of “One Tech Action and The Social Media Why,” Crystal shares her unique perspective about what marketers might expect to see on the horizon in our ever changing world.

Topics of conversation include:

• The Future of Work
• The metaverse and taking a pragmatic approach, how gamers have been in the metaverse for years already.
• Crystal on web3 opportunities
• The trajectory with Web3, how long until it is part of everyday life?
• Artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning and the future of data
• Loyalty and how it is shifting the way data is collected
• Richer data, richer segmentation, and what an executive within a marketing organization should do to bring the organization forward

Kara Swisher, a contributing writer to the New York Times Opinion section and podcast host for Sway and Pivot, is described as Silicon Valley's "most powerful tech journalist.” Holly Enneking, Vice President of Marketing at Lev, leads a conversation with Kara about accountability -- both for Big Tech leaders and everyday digital marketers -- as well as being unapologetically yourself.

Conversation topics include:

• The Reckoning in tech, and how leaders can best manage their communication platforms and systems
• Preserving online privacy, data ickiness, and how we should be thinking about cyber attacks
• The Metaverse, vaporware, Twitter, and Elon Musk
• Representation and innovation in the tech industry
• Kara's thoughts on her career, on respecting audiences, and advice for female journalists

Bobby Jania, SVP, Marketing at Salesforce, is joined by Abbey Sullivan, VP, Client Success at Lev, to discuss the current state of marketing in today’s technology-driven landscape. From data-driven marketing, to the value of video, and the new work-from-anywhere remote culture, they cover everything marketers want to know about the current strategies, priorities, and challenges in the marketing landscape.

Topics included in this episode touch on:

• Innovation as a priority for marketers and where to start
• Adopting A.I. and improving customer experiences
• Having access to the right data and how it impacts the business
• Data privacy and being good stewards of customer data
• What's next for Bobby's team at Salesforce