Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

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...]

Hiring for Inbound, Pretargeting, Next-Step Marketing: My Most Popular Posts of 2017

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Another year of blogging in the books. I've covered quite a lot over these last twelve months, from hiring to demand generation to new advertising techniques. Here are the most popular. How to Hire Great Inbound Marketers: Six Key Personality Traits Inbound marketing requires certain skills – skills you may not have in your department. As it becomes an ever-larger part of the marketing mix, finding people who are good at inbound is going to become more important. But as buzzy as inbound … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: First, Second and Third Party Data

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Marketers have more data about potential customers than ever before. Some is in their own database and some is in big advertising platforms like Google AdWords. Most marketers use a combination, and hence the need to distinguish the various sources. First party data is the information collected by you about your prospects and customers. It is typically collected from your website or marketing automation system using cookies. It may also be supplemented by research done by your SDR team or via … [Read more...]

Five Things I Wish I’d Include in The Professional Marketer

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Surely just one minute after I hit the publish button and graduate this manuscript to a book, some new technology will emerge that promises to change the future of marketing. That's what I wrote in the afterword to The Professional Marketer. And while it may not have been one minute, it’s amazing what’s happened in marketing since 2014. Over half a billion people have Instagram accounts. Starting in 2016, more people accessed the web via smartphones than desktop or laptop computers. Just to … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: What is Pretargeting?

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It wasn't too long ago that marketers were learning about retargeting. Now there's a new sibling in the advertising family named 'pretargeting'. So what's the diff? Pretargeting is an online advertising technique where marketers target individual buyers based on profile, past behavior or both. It's pre- and not re- because your ads get shown before your targets have ever been to your website. To my mind, pretargeting is a refinement of the age old advertising demographic; it is much more … [Read more...]

Next-Step Marketing

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I’m a big fan of the buyer journey. It’s one of the most powerful marketing tools available. I’m also a big funnel geek and spend a lot of time counting leads and tweaking conversion rates. The buyer journey and the funnel are essentially the same idea – mapping the process a prospective buyer takes before becoming a customer. Understand how sales happen, and you can scale your business. Otherwise, you are merely hoping, which is not a strategy. Despite the power (not to mention the stress … [Read more...]

How to Hire Great Inbound Marketers: Six Key Personality Traits

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Note: I originally published this post on LinkedIn. Inbound marketing requires certain skills – skills you may not have in your department. As it becomes an ever-larger part of the marketing mix, finding people who are good at inbound is going to become more important. But as buzzy as inbound marketing is, finding people who are good at it is not easy. How can that be? After all, it’s not like inbound was invented yesterday. The term ‘inbound marketing’ was coined by Hubspot’s Brian … [Read more...]

How to Fund a Channel Partner Program

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Though channel partners can buy products at discounted rates, vendors still need to invest to help them generate demand. There are three basic models for funding channel partner programs: market development funds, contra-revenue funds, and co-op funds. These are distinctive models, but businesspeople commonly confuse them. Therefore, you should be careful to specify to the partner exactly what kind of funding your company offers. Market development funds (MDF) are distributed to partners in … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: Why Are PR People Called ‘Flacks’?

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PR people have a hard job. Clients are never happy. Their story should have gotten more coverage. It was the agency's fault for not pushing hard enough. The agency can't easily tell their client that their story was a dud. Reporters see agencies as a necessary evil. PR staffers bring them stories, but can also be pushy. And truth be told, most reporters prefer finding their own stories. So it's no wonder PR pros have earned the pejorative 'flack,' as in "Tell that PR flack to stop … [Read more...]