Beyond Marketing

The changing shape of the buyer's journey has introduced a raft of new issues for sales leaders who are trying to manage sales pipelines and generate accurate revenue forecasts. Prospects are leveraging the internet and business social media to do their research - and engaging sales people later in the decision making process.

In fact, the latest research from the CEB suggests that the typical B2B buying-decision process is 57% complete before a salesperson is even actively involved. By that time, the prospect is a long way down the path of scoping their needs, establishing their priorities, defining their requirements, and short-listing potential solutions

With technical skills such as Java, C++, Python and more in high demand for “Big Data” analytics, it seems like softer business skills such as speaking, writing, planning, leadership, negotiation etc. are falling by the wayside. But the ability to communicate, relate and navigate throughout an organization—so called “softer skills”—are especially needed to propagate analysis and communicate the impact of data-driven decision-making.

In 2012, cloud computing blogger David Linthicum penned a short piece explaining “3 Winners and 3 Losers in the Move to Big Data”.  In the post Linthicum identified one “loser” as data warehouse and BI specialists, presumably because these folks were accustomed to using languages like old-school SQL and supporting “legacy BI” systems.

In the beginning, there were products and services, and some were good. Fewer became trusted brands, but those that did enjoyed unquestioned loyalty supported by a simple yet effective marketing engines built to reach people in mass quantity.

I get pushback from many entrepreneurs and business owners as well as CMOs in larger businesses about the idea of using inbound marketing because they see the investment in people to create content as a barrier.

There seem to be a lot of bullet points to cover when it comes to creating a viral video.

Our definition of a breakthrough is simple: an advance that gives people powerful new ways to use technology. It could be an intuitive design that provides a useful interface (see “Smart Watches”) or experimental devices that could allow people who have suffered brain damage to once again form memories (“Memory Implants”). Some could be key to sustainable economic growth (“Additive Manufacturing” and “Supergrids”), while others could change how we communicate (“Temporary Social Media”) or think about the unborn (“Prenatal DNA Sequencing”). Some are brilliant feats of engineering (“Baxter”). Others stem from attempts to rethink longstanding problems in their fields (“Deep Learning” and “Ultra-Efficient Solar Power”). As a whole, we intend this annual list not only to tell you which technologies you need to know about, but also to celebrate the creativity that produced them.

Listening is now more important than ever for a sales professional, but do we truly understand why it’s so important? The psychology behind asking questions; the right questions, is vital for the success of your approach.

You’ve heard the buzzword, and you probably think you’re doing data driven marketing as we speak. But the reality of the situation is that most marketers aren’t actually data driven.

Taking Peter Drucker’s “What gets measured, gets managed” at face value is dangerous. Mere measurement isn’t actually enough. Data driven marketers measure for the right reasons.

And so, with that in mind, here are six reasons you (might) fail at data driven marketing.

Learn how to think of your revenue mathematically with marketing automation, measure variables, and benchmark your measurements and drive them to improve.

As everyone in the marketing world knows, attribution is one of the hot topics for 2013. Our friends at RhinoFish Media, a PPC consulting firm, have written a

Why creating quality content to overcome the noise is the single greatest challenge facing Content Marketing.

Over the past few decades advertisers have been concerned with the reduction of performance interruption techniques. Audiences effectively filter messages out, with awareness and recall reduced. There is too much noise that people do not consume, or even notice.

Content Marketing is now at the same crossroads. Companies are either stuck producing the same content as always (just more of it), or focusing on producing content that rarely adds value. We have already seen cases of increased conversion from lowering the volume of sales content produced.

One thing we can count on is by the time you have finished reading this buying behavior may have been altered one again.  Changes in buyer behaviors continue unabated.  This is making it difficult for marketing and sales leaders to plan the right mix of strategies and tactics resulting in a winning formula.

Content marketing is about attracting the right target audience and getting them to take appropriate action as a result of engaging with your content. Content marketing metrics is about measuring the results.

In this two part post, I’ll cover the rise of influencer marketing as a promising practice for social businesses and how to win the race to seize its benefits.

This first post will detail why influence marketing will enjoy very strong increases in marketing investment from brands in the coming years as they will realize it is a key element of their digital communication strategy.

Influencer marketing is expected to be one of the fastest growing areas of social media in the coming years and a new area of focus for brands engaging in social media marketing.

Some say it is the new Eldorado. Should we be surprised?

Businesses of all sizes are embracing SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service, which is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. With this software delivery model, software and associated data are centrally hosted on the cloud. How does SaaS differ from other cloud models, including the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) models?

A visual experience with infographics, cartoons, and stats from Brian Solis' new book, What's the Future of Business

This deck sets out We Are Social's provocations for the future - the things that we believe will drive and shape our social and digital future over the months to come

The tunnel conventionally represented as conversion marketing funnel is a simple representation; understandable that take place in a sequenced process of buying cycle (phase by phase), programmatic and convergent (closing and purchase).
Individuals who cross the funnel, according to pre-established scenarios (nurturing and (re) targeting content), are gradually "stored" (the spirit of classification / segmentation) in boxes (prospects, leads, ...) according to their progressive journey.
From a logical thought, even a mnemonic one , we fell in the overused model as if it were carved in stone.
Prospect / client experience, is first and foremost human and so shaped by belief, doubt, abandonment, mere curiosity, moody, zapping, heterogeneous and paradoxical behaviors, serendipity, irrationality ... Many intangible and moving elements which can’t be captured into conversion funnel .
As marketing practitionner I realized like others, that this mechanism of the funnel was too well-oiled, too simple even if it is accepted as a representation, a convention, a model for action.
Models are reducers of uncertainty, of complexity, simplistic they are not reality but they reassure.
Simulated somehow reality is more difficult and the prospect , future hot Lead or potential customer is above all a human being within which must be embodied Marketing and its actors.
Listen, (dis) engagement, conversation, sharing, positive or negative buzz on social media ... provide us daily proof that our tools, our practices, our KPIs ... are not adapted to integrate this human dynamic, complex and abundant . It’s clear that the new playground for marketers is the Social Web, 'living' Web, whose raw material is the Human before being the bytes of information.

It’s the same every time, never changing. Day in and day out, it’s always the same.  Sound boring?  It’s not when it comes to consistency in delivering customer service – especially if it’s good customer service.  It should always be the same.  The customer should be able to count on it,

Customer loyalty is based on this concept. If you want to build intense customer loyalty, in addition to all of the customer service you deliver, you must also be predictably consistent.

Brand loyalty depends on three interrelated quality service experiences:

In a world where everything is connected, hybrids — people who are able to bridge multiple disciplines — wield tremendous power. They see the interrelationships between things that used to be isolated in silos, and they’re able to creatively combine them in innovative new ways.

For instance, I’ve long championed the hybrid role of marketing technologists — technical professionals who apply their talents in the pursuit of marketing. These aren’t just IT people working indirectly on behalf of marketing. They’re technical professionals who actually identify themselves as marketers. They’re genuinely passionate about marketing. And they’re enthusiastically seeking ways to leverage their technical knowledge in the pursuit of breakthrough marketing ideas.

Today measurement and analytics are as much a part of marketing as creative and strategy. Online channels deliver a wealth of quantitative information that can be used for ongoing optimization. In fact, the tactical execution of marketing measurement is now starting to elevate channel decisions, customer insights, and budget allocation to a tangible and justifiable conversation. We call this discipline Marketing Performance Management. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of Marketing Performance Management (MPM) in more detail and outline a maturity framework for organizations looking for a better way to leverage analytics and measurement in ongoing marketing execution.

In this post, I am going to explore the 3 algorithms that we know for sure Google is using to produce search results, and speculate about the 200+ other algorithms that we suspect they are using based on patent filings, reverse engineering, and the Ouija board.

In recent posts I’ve introduced the notion of Big Content as shorthand for incorporating unstructured content into the Big Data world in a systematic and strategic way. Big Data changes the way we think about content and how we manage it. One of the most important areas requiring a fresh look is metadata. Big Content expands the definition of metadata beyond the traditional tombstone information normally associated with documents (title, author, creation date, archive date, etc.). While these elements are necessary and remain foundational to both effective content management and Big Data, more is required. Big Content metadata encompasses any additional illuminating information that can be extracted from or applied to the source content to facilitate its integration and analysis with other information from across the enterprise. This expanded definition results in a three-tiered metadata architecture for Big Content.

Banner ads in the middle of our content are annoying. Native Ads not so much. Semantically relevant ads that augments the user experience actually work.