Flywheel Goes Full Circle
In the early days of Jim Harbaugh’s coaching tenure with the San Francisco 49ers, Jim's mantra was "how can I be one percent better today?” As CEO of a venture-backed startup company, I often ask myself the same question: How can we be one percent better at making...
read moreShow Marketing’s Value by Moving from Tactical to Strategic Reporting
It’s essential for marketers to be able to provide strategic reporting that demonstrates their impact on revenue. Many marketers focus exclusively on tactical reporting, such as email performance metrics. Tactical reporting is necessary too since activities that...
read moreTop 3 Tips for Turning Customers into Brand Ambassadors
A simple truth drives the influencer marketing trend: people tend to believe what their peers or someone they admire says about a product or service more than they trust ad content from a brand. That’s true for consumers who are thinking about...
read moreMarketing spend: Time to invest in people
In an earlier post, we talked about how CMOs plan to spend more on martech, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2018-2019, and whether the hefty rise in technology investment will lead to greater ROI. It’s an important question because B2B marketers are...
read moreHow Successful B2B Marketing & Sales Teams Use Analytics to Drive Revenue
Even with the best intentions, people can misread and misinterpret data. It’s easy to mistake correlation for causation. To demonstrate just how easy that is, one Harvard student searched the U.S. Census database, finding a strong correlation between random...
read moreMartech spending is up, but what about ROI?
In Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2018-2019, the outlook for martech is rosy, with spending on technology rising from 22 to 29 percent of the total marketing budget. But spending on labor and agency support dropped from 27 to 24 percent and 25 to 23 percent, respectively....
read moreBe the Engine that Drives the Revenue Train: 5 Tips on Marketing Plans for 2019
As 2018 comes to a close, marketing teams are focused on executing year-end campaigns to achieve a strong finish for Q4. At the same time, they’re looking toward 2019 and making plans to ensure their campaigns deliver value quickly in the new year. Before they can...
read moreDigital Source Tracker Takes the Mystery Out of the First Steps of the Buyer Journey
How did today’s known lead become a prospect? Did they click a digital ad on a site like LinkedIn, then check out pages on your company website? Which pages attracted their notice? Did they read a white paper, an executive briefing, or some other piece of digital...
read moreThe Marketer’s Guide to Not Getting Fired Out of a Cannon
When a B2B startup tries to grow revenue, what marketing metrics matter? There are two camps of opinion. One camp says, “It depends” on the startup’s maturity, sales cycle, industry, and many additional factors. The other camp says, “Nonsense, it’s all the same!...
read moreWas it as good for you as it was for me?
Suppose that your best friend set you up on a date. After the date, your best friend asks, “How did it go?” Since you’re a quantitative marketer, you put a hidden camera in your jacket so that afterward you could evaluate the engagement level of the date...
read moreAre Marketing Analytics Broken?
Imagine that you hire a marketing intern, and on day one of the job, they make an odd request: “I want to know everything there is to know about this company’s customers. What can you tell me?” How are you supposed to answer? The scope of the question defies any...
read moreA Declaration of Interdependence: How Martech is Consolidating Yet Decentralizing
One of the most predictable patterns in a free market is consolidation. It signifies that a market has become valuable and competitive. However, consolidation can be unpredictable for the companies involved and customers who depend on their products and services....
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