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
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
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?
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
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
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
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’?
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...]
The Importance of Matching Demand Generation with Sales Capacity
When it comes to leads, most people assume more is better. That’s not always true. Sometimes you have more than your sales team can actually handle, in which case your leads go cold. The flip side—when you have more sales capacity than lead flow—is equally bad. This is why it’s so important to balance demand generation with sales capacity. Let’s take a closer look. Establishing Your Quarterly Demand Goals First off, you need to establish your desired lead flow. I like to model mine to be even … [Read more...]
Content Marketing Economics – Part II: Consumption and Profitability
In the first part of this post, we discussed the production and distribution of content. Here, we’ll going to dig into how people consume your content, the desired outcomes of that consumption, and whether what it costs you is generating a profitable return. How does consumption relate to production and distribution? It can be represented by this simple equation: Consumption = Production * Distribution The better the quality of the content – the production – multiplied by a larger or more … [Read more...]
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