Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

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...]