Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
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 marketing is, finding people who are good at it is not easy.
If you are looking to turn your existing team in to a group of inbound marketers, it may even more challenging. Years of push marketing nous does not give way easily. Most of them will have to unlearn their outbound marketing practices (assuming they were good at outbound to begin with).
Whether you are hiring a new team or evaluating your current team, you are looking for personality or character traits rather than job experience. Think of it like hiring a recent college new grad where you there is no job history to rely on, and you need to evaluate the person. 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.
Despite the power (not to mention the stress relief) of understanding the buyer journey, I routinely run into marketers who merely pay this concept lip service. From my experience, nonbelievers fall into two camps: those who find it too daunting and those people don’t buy into the sequential, linear path of the journey.
Because I feel so strongly about the value of the journey and wanted to find a way to convert these wayward marketers, I decided to create a simplified approach that I call “next-step marketing.” It’s a technique you can use to remove congestion in your buyer journey by focusing on a single desired next step for progressing the buyer. Read on.
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 name a two.
While I caution marketers not to fall in love with the latest marketing shiny object, to do the hard work, and to resist the temptation of technical shortcuts to good marketing, there are a few things I wish I would have covered in more detail in my book.
Here are my top five techniques I find myself using more frequently these days than when I was scratching out the manuscript. 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 personal, down to named individuals. Read more.
Did you like some of my other stuff better? Let me know. Have a great 2018!
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