Marketing Apps: my Pubcon take-away

I just attended the Ft Lauderdale Pubcon conference and heard Anna Talerico talk about marketing apps.

I had expected to hear about apps for phones and tablets but that's not at all what marketing apps are about. As she put it, there's nothing more tired, passee, and ineffective than offering a white paper to customers who have to first give you their email.  ( Editor's note - we have a whole business built on this apparently archaic technique.  Call me a dinosaur!)

She says that the current hot marketing technique is to take the content from your white papers and repackage it an interactive experience for your visitors.

  Examples of marketing apps (and I'm paraphrasing Anna here...)

Don't offer them a guide to vacations, provide them with a wizard or guide that asks the questions and recommends places to go.

Don't offer them a white paper about standardized tests for college admissions, create a wizard that helps them decide which test or tests they should take. And in the process, you can gather info on them including their email.

I have been thinking about this and was very amused when I received this marketing email today, a practically farcical example of "Do what I say, not what I do". It was sent to me by ClickZ. It turned out to be promoting Anna's white paper.
Marketing apps are interactive, browser-based digital experiences designed for user participation and engagement. They’re the types of things that people want to use to learn, have fun and explore. They’re engaging experiences that live within the browser, regardless of device. They’re desktop, mobile, tablet - any device, any time. As an added benefit, they can also provide your marketing team with highly valuable segmentation and sales enablement data. There are several ways you can engage with your customers through marketing apps:

• Content Wizard
• Conversion Path
• Quiz
• Calculator
• Configurator
• Game
• Contest
• Voting
• Survey

Download this whitepaper to learn more about each of these engagement forms and get inspired to take your marketing to a higher level. Learn how to provide more value to your customers and collect more online leads and sales as a result!
Btw, since I quoted them, here's the link to their download (complete with a lot of tracking code stuff). Marketing apps are interactive, browser-based digital experiences designed for user participation and engagement. They’re the types of things that people   to use to learn, have fun and explore. They’re engaging experiences that live within the browser, regardless of device. They’re desktop, mobile, tablet — any device, any time.