I was at the Marketing Analytics Summit a while back, and I remember talking to a lot of people who felt that:
The eternal struggle for B2B marketers seems to be connecting marketing actions to business results. But this can’t be a reason to give up on marketing analytics.
Content marketing can be entertaining, helpful, or informative, or perhaps it can solve your audience’s problem. One good test of content marketing is whether it helps your audience even if they never buy your product or service. Here’s what content marketing needs to be to develop customer commitment.
As content marketing has been practiced today, it resembles custom publishing. Companies tell stories that romanticize their brand, distributing those stories through various channels and amplifying them through social media. Content marketing has come to be more akin to advertising.
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Personalization: why do it? No, this isn’t a suggestion that you shouldn’t. It’s just important to think about why you are doing it in the first place. Personalization needs to benefit the customer experience and drive your business.
If you are like most marketers, you’ve probably been salivating over personalizing your website for years. It has always seemed like a good idea, but you aren’t retail. You aren’t Amazon. Personalization has never seemed possible. If this sounds like your business, you may want to investigate behavior-based personalization.
Toward the end of each quarter, my mind returns to the business goals we set at the start. Some of those OKRs were related to organizational capabilities but the ones that are top of mind relate to pipeline progression and sales. This quarter. Next quarter. You probably have your own metrics that you’re tracking. So what do you do if things aren’t going right?
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Analytics matter: this is the unavoidable fact of digital marketing, even for those digital marketers that fear it. But are you even measuring the right things? Do you know how to make meaningful improvements?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Arthur C Clarke
It seems like artificial intelligence (AI) has been on everyone’s minds lately. It definitely has been on ours, as Tim Peter and I spoke on AI on our podcast. AI has been particularly hyped up, with plenty of big ideas emerging about what it can do for website owners. But I’m fearing, that like blockchain, we’re heading for Gartner’s fabled Trough of Disillusionment if we’re not there already. AI can’t solve all your business problems, though there are those that are well suited with the tools that are available today. But like any solution you have to have a valuable problem and the right approach to applying the solution.
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Not enough marketers take advantage of the other kind of search — the one on your own website. Few companies budget for it, while budgeting for content without a second thought. We’ve talked about the cost of value before. But when they search, can visitors even find the content they need on your site?
Here’s a scenario for you: imagine you have an amazing salesperson who develops a deep connection with customers, beginning with their very first interaction. Even better, these prospects share their deepest concerns, telling your salesperson everything you’d want to know about how to help them — and how you can sell them what they need.