Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

Marketingspeak: What is ‘Ducking’?

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With the rise of content marketing, more and more terms from broadcasting and publishing are finding their way into marketing conversations. We just launched a podcast at my current company, and during the production we found ourselves unequipped to give direction to our freelance audio engineer. Podcasts have a jargon all their own. Which is how we came to learn a new term, ducking. Ducking, in audio recording, is a technique that assures that the host's or guest's voice can be heard clearly … [Read more...]

How to Set the Pace for Your Marketing Team

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Marketing. A never-ending river of tasks. How do you make sure you get enough done without drowning your team? Or, to mix metaphors, burning them out. I’d like to introduce you, as a marketing leader, to the idea of pace, or what some people call tempo. I often hear these two terms bandied about while I’m watching Premier League soccer early on weekend mornings in my office (my way of procrastinating before I get down to writing). The idea is that the dominant team sets the tempo and thereby … [Read more...]

The Five Benefits of Curiosity in Marketing

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If you are reading this post, my guess is that you are a curious person. The kind of person who is inquisitive by nature. A life learner. I’ve written before about the traits that make up a good marketer. Curiosity was top of the list. And I’m not the only marketer who values the quality. Here’s what Seth Godin had to say: “If you are not curious, you are not going to learn.” I think learning is the point. It’s not just asking a lot of questions. That just makes you nosey. It’s seeking a … [Read more...]

Ten Marketing Terms You Need to Know

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Marketing lingo has broad and varied origins. The provenance of the terms on the list below spans astronomy, the Industrial Age, television and Yiddish. So, you’d be forgiven for not knowing them all. Then there are newer terms that have been created to describe concepts that have only just been developed. The explosion of martech makes it hard to keep up. Below are ten terms that I think are essential if you are a modern marketer: five old, and five new. Old Boilerplate A boilerplate … [Read more...]

The “Helper” Play: How to Take on a Large Incumbent in a Big Market

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I gave a talk a few months back at Products that Count, hosted at Airbnb in San Francisco. My talk was about adapting your marketing strategy based on the maturity of the market. The talk was well received, but it was my description of “the helper play” that drew the most attention. I don’t know who initially conceived the helper play, but I came to know if from a successful company in the cybersecurity market, Palo Alto Networks. The startup wanted in on the large firewall market. But in … [Read more...]

CMO Tip: Use Magazines to Define and Maintain Your Style

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Approachable. Friendly. Trustworthy. Fun without being snarky. Ever see direction like this in a style guide? I have. I’ve even written some of those words. The problem is that they are open to interpretation, and therefore not consistently effective. So, how can you communicate what you want to a wide and changing group of employees and vendors? Here’s an idea. Use one or two magazines to help build your style guide. Magazines are widely available, and more importantly, they are tangible. … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: What is a ‘Lower Third’?

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Originally from the television industry, but now applicable to all kinds of video, a "lower third" is the graphic overlay that is typically used to identify the speaker. It can be used to convey any kind of information to the viewer. The graphic appears at the bottom, to be the least obtrusive, and in what is known as the safe area - an area viewable by all television screens. There is no hard and fast rule that it must be one third of the screen, and it can be either a horizontal bar with … [Read more...]

When to Go Outbound, aka ‘The Inbound Trap’

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When I ran marketing for the high-growth SaaS business Incapsula, I relied heavily on inbound marketing techniques to fuel our demand generation engine. Things went swimmingly in the beginning, but then I noticed the velocity of marketing-generated leads began to slow and dip below the growth expectations for the business. What happened? I had fallen into what I call “the inbound trap.” Let me explain. Inbound marketing uses techniques that bring buyers to you. At its core is creating content … [Read more...]

Two Formulas to Measure Content Marketing

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For all of the words written about the power of content marketing, too few discuss how it should be measured. Last year I wrote a two-part piece about what I called the  economics of content marketing, in which I shared two formulas to measure its impact. The two formulas measure content consumption and profitability. Consumption Compelling people to consume – read, watch, listen to – your content is the name of the game. Here is a really simple for measuring consumption: Consumption = … [Read more...]