Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

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...]

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...]

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...]