October 2012

Good content marketing is a part of customer experience

Today the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs, and Brighcove released a new 2013 B2B content marketing report with updated benchmarks, budgets, and trends for North America. It sheds light on the budgets, content tactics, and social distribution channels that B2B marketers are using to build brand awareness, acquire customers, and generate leads. But one of the things I found most interesting was this: Out of the 1,416 respondents, 56% do all their content creation in-house. Even …

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5 meta-trends underlying almost all of modern marketing

The fast-paced evolution of marketing is a sea of trends, from attribution models to the Zero Moment of Truth. So many trends, in fact, that it can be hard to keep track of them all. A meta-trend runs deeper, powering more specific trends, like a tidal force that drives waves to the shore. The following graphic illustrates five meta-trends that I believe underpin almost all of the marketing trends we see today — and new …

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IBM champions the chief marketing technologist

Virginia Sharma, VP of Marketing and Communications at IBM India/South Asia, recently posted a presentation on SlideShare titled The New Profession on a Smarter Planet: Chief Marketing Technologist. The chief marketing technologist from IBM India Smarter Marketing According to Virginia, the timeless responsibilities of marketers everywhere: Knowing the customer. Defining what to market and how to market it. Protecting the brand promise. …are evolving into three imperatives for a new profession: Understanding each customer as …

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Whatever it is, we’re calling it “marketing automation”

“Marketing automation” as the label for a major — if slightly amorphous — category of modern marketing software appears to be here to stay. Three recent points on the curve: The acquisition of Pardot by ExactTarget, labeled as a marketing automation deal. The IPO of Eloqua earlier this year, again labeled as a marketing automation offering. A recent IDC report that includes marketing automation as an explicit budget allocation. The latter is perhaps the most …

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A more realistic diagram of the B2B marketing funnel

Just have to share this terrific visualization posted in a blog article by Lori Wizdo of Forrester Research, Buyer Behavior Helps B2B Marketers Guide The Buyer’s Journey. “The buyer’s journey looks at lot more like this,” writes Lori, “than the linear models (e.g., the funnel) that we usually use as a graphical representation.” “This buyer dynamic changes the role of B2B marketing in a fundamental way. Marketing now owns a much bigger piece of the …

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62% of marketing departments do control their technology

I was a bit flabbergasted when I wrote yesterday’s post noting that, according to a recent ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketing report, 59% of marketers don’t specify what they want in the marketing technology purchase process. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the magnitude of that number. Could that many marketers in 2012 be that disconnected from the modern tools of their trade? I can imagine a lot of excuses — semi-legitimate reasons for why …

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Are 59% of marketers driving off a marketing technology cliff?

I accept that the relationship between marketing and IT is a complex one. Although my opinion is that marketing should specify, recommend, select, purchase, and operate its own marketing technology — I believe it is now an integral part of what marketing is in a digital world — I also acknowledge that other organizational structures can work too. If IT and marketing have a highly collaborative relationship, then keeping more of the technology management responsibilities …

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Will your next marketing manager be a bot?

Do you think computers and software could run marketing as well as humans? Or better? Skeptics and humanists — which describes my leanings on this subject, even though I’m a technologist by trade — may reflexively answer “no.” The complex organizational and psychological facets of marketing — a discipline renown for creativity and imagination — seems like it would defy the purely mechanical capabilities of computation. That’s true today. But if you doubt the potential …

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