Assuming HBR is right and the oil price remains unsteady as the new operating norm, companies will need to monitor their investment and budget closely and proactively pivot. Knowing which activities contribute to positive marketing ROI and which deliver minimal value is a necessity to remain competitive. Hiring managers should be looking for ways to help the company operate with agility which means your Marketing Leadership needs to have the skills to know when something is working and why. Some other factors to consider when hiring your next Senior Marketer...
Sales funnels need our help! They are working hard to keep our customer relationships strong, to improve conversions and deliver revenue, but they can't do it alone.
As businesses grow and sales cycles become more complex, it's important cross-functional teams actively work together to help achieve mutual long-term goals. Collaborative companies stress the benefit of teamwork for support. Why not collaboratively support our sales funnel? When sales, product management and marketing work together massive benefits are created that fuel sales growth by unifying goals and giving rise to a customer-centric organization.
The 3 W’s of Gated Content
To gate or not to gate that is the question. There’s a time and a place for gated content, and knowing when and where can be challenging.
Take a step back and look at your customer’s buying journey. Placing high-quality content in the palm of their hands is not about if your content should be gated but more about your end goal for the piece. Gated content can be a vital asset to nurturing a customer. Knowing the ins and outs of it gives you a more holistic view for deploying an optimized content marketing strategy tailored to your audience.
What elevates one piece of content to become 'excellent' vs. another that is just plain old vanilla 'good'?
Some people would argue that it's based on audience feedback. Some would say the content has to have met or included best practices - technical merit and delivery of the mechanics. And still others would say return on the investment, (in other words did the piece of content deliver the desired results), is the only thing that matters. What are your thoughts?
In a recent blog post by one of my partners, Blake Eckert, related to the 2018 marketing trends to watch, he mentioned content marketing is still among the top 3 priorities cited by B2B organizations. Did you know that 45% of marketing budgets are spent on content? Not advertising, not tradeshows. But rather generating valuable content for their target audiences. To put this in perspective, that represents several billion dollars in annual spend.
Traditional B2B marketing has focused heavily on corporate communications and product marketing. So many organizations are still trying to understand what it means to focus on content marketing.
