Today, video is here to stay. And we wonder: Will the power of conversational marketing trump traditional sales in 2020? Then, a pricing workshop from the minds of our very own pricing pros. 

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Hollywood goes tech

Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas, Quibi—the subscription video-on-demand service chaired by Hollywood’s Jeffrey Katzenberg and Chief Exec Meg Whitman—made its debut.

Quibi comes out at $4.99 per month (with ads) and $7.99 commercial free, with plans of featuring original premium video content running 10 minutes or less per segment.

But these Quibi shows aren’t repackaged content for mobile. They’re interactive; and they leverage the unique capabilities of mobile phones.

During CES, Quibi previewed two action shows where the story was presented in cinematic style in landscape mode. But when rotated vertically, the phone reflected what the main character sees on their smartphone. 

Along with attracting a host of big Hollywood names to create content for the service—think Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Bill Murray, and Reese Witherspoon—Meg assures, “We’re not shrinking TV onto phones; we’re creating something new.”

The Quibi team plans to roll out 175 new original shows and 8,500 short episodes of content in their first year. They've also sold advertisement inventory worth $150 million to some big names like PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch, and Walmart.

And the Quibi crew is seeing revenue from two main sources: subscribers and advertising. They recognize mobile is everything, but we wonder: Is the market too saturated for another streaming service? We’ll soon find out.

(We're also all about their homepage, from where you can answer all your Quibi queries—sort of.)

Conversation > sales?

If you work in marketing or are familiar with marketing, you know this to be true: The landscape is changing and it’s changing fast. 

So how do marketing teams keep up with the times? Drift’s ebook—The Modern Marketer’s Playbook—details just that. Each chapter is packed with intel from top SaaS leaders like our friends Mike Volpe at Lola.com, Meagen Eisenberg of MongoDB, and Andrew Capland from Wistia. 

While this ebook offers diverse tactics from contributors, the one common theme centers around conversational marketing, using targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with customers in real-time. 

Because Gartner says conversational marketing will be a “recognized channel of B2B and B2C customer engagement and revenue by 2020, displacing a combination of marketing, sales, and service activities.” 

If you haven’t yet implemented conversational marketing, our pal Hiten Shah, Co-Founder of FYI and Product Habits, shared a framework in this book that will help you determine what’s working and what isn’t. It’s a fairly simple process: Break down your marketing channels, landing pages, and content along these two dimensions: traffic and conversion rates. Then categorize them into quadrants. 

Get your wheels turning with The Modern Marketer's Playbook and let us know: What’s your take on conversational marketing? Have you found certain channels to be more successful than others? Send me your thoughts to abby@recurnow.com and we’ll chat. 

And later, we talk with David Cancel, Drift’s Co-Founder and CEO, about the cruciality of getting close to your customer. 

Live training: perfect your pricing

And we wrap with an offer for the pricing pros (or semi-pros) out there. 

We have a live training tomorrow, Supercharging Your Revenue with Optimized Pricing, during which we'll unpack one of the trickiest topics in growth: (What else?) Pricing.

Our crew has collected the largest recurring revenue data set in the world from over 14k companies, and we’re sharing the insights on where and why most subscription businesses are struggling with pricing strategy. 

There are so many potential issues, from not understanding your customers to completely guessing on your worth, too many recurring revenuers are leaving money on the table and growth at a standstill.

Hang with us and our pricing guru Patrick Campbell to talk core principles for your pricing pages, frameworks for pricing optimization, simple tweaks, and the most common mistakes. 

We’ll have a Q&A too. We want your intel and inquiries.

Sign up here to save your seat.

David Cancel on getting close to your customer

"Whoever gets closer to the customer wins." This phrase first uttered by brilliant marketer and storyteller Bernadette Jiwa could not be truer today. If you think about some of the major shifts that have happened in the past couple of decades, we can see this notion pretty clearly with Airbnb taking down hotel chains, Ubers beating out cabs, Netflix getting physically closer than Blockbuster, and the list goes on.

Here, we talk to Drift's CEO David Cancel, about getting as close as possible to the customer, the broken system of purchasing software, and questioning if you can truly brute force change in a market.

And that’s a wrap for your January 14 subscription news.

If you have news to spread or an opinion to be heard, hit me up at abby@recurnow.com and let's collaborate.