1. A marketing back office renaissance. That drop in marketing budgets is largely due in part, according to Gartner, to marketing leadership being too distracted by tactics and execution. For that reason, we predict a renaissance of the back office – meaning a greater focus and investment on the strategic arm of the marketing organization (basically everything that is happening behind the scenes within marketing.)

2. Alliance between the CMO and CFO. As budgets are tightened, marketing teams that succeed in 2018 will build a closer relationship between Marketing and Finance.

3. A new Chief of Staff to the CMO, Marketing Operations. These trends, along with the newfound pressure for marketing to run more like a business, have created a new VIP on the marketing team; Marketing Operations. For many organizations, MOPs has emerged as the most capable resource to step in and help the CMO in their quest, especially with responsibilities related to data cleanliness, marketing resource management, and marketing performance management.

Below are 50 ideas you can get started on today, broken into two parts, SaaS product adoption, and SaaS product awareness.

The heart, the soul, the truest pulse of marketing is vaporizing because our profession is turning into a glorified IT function. Marketing strategy is being derived from data scientists, SEO gurus, and statisticians doing A/B testing in a back room somewhere.

We are implementing strategies and tactics based on what statistically is supposed to work, instead of what customers really want.

The answer might reside in the answer to a simple question: What do our customers love?

Here’s the quick and dirty:  By creating one powerful, linkable, long-form article, your website can, in two weeks, receive a massive traffic spike, a high volume of social shares, and a steady influx of unique visitors.

Step 1. Figure Out What Your Target Audience Is Searching For

Step 2. Find Out Which Of Those Searches Is Most Valuable For You

Step 3. Write Down What Your Article Needs In Order To Rank

Step 4. Create An Outline For Your Article

Step 5. Reach Out To Niche Authorities For Quotes, Input, And Feedback

Step 6. Write Your Article

Step 7. Publish And Promote

Step 8. Reach Out To Your Influencers And Ask Again

Start with images

Establish a voice for your brand: Consistency goes beyond visuals. It also has to do with the type of persona your company takes on. The language you use on a daily basis will vary depending on your current customers and target market.

Evaluate your call to action: There are lots of ways you can present your CTA, and you can A/B test different options to see which one works the best.

Contact info: Your best bet is to provide different options, but they need to be consistent.

Meet the "Affluencers." Columnist Peter Minnium explains why marketers should be paying attention to a powerful target group who are heavy spenders, early adopters and major influencers.

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• Define The Change You Want To See
• Create A Spectrum of Allies
• Identify The Pillars of Power: While it is crucial to recruit a spectrum of allies, it is also important to identify the institutions that have the power to implement the change you seek. These “Pillars of Power,” can be the police, the media, the education system, government agencies and other organizations. As important as popular support is to a movement, without institutional support, little is likely to change.
• Seek To Attract, Rather To Overpower
• Build A Plan To Survive Victory"

1. Email Campaigns - with NO personalisation
2. Long (text-heavy) eBooks
3. Focusing on quality - not quantity in blogs
4. Overly complex lead scoring algorithms
5. Organic only Facebook strategies
6. Relying on a text-based SEO strategy

Here are a few actionable tips to help B2B marketing leaders improve their demand generation strategies for existing clients.

1) Refine your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. There is no question ABM is redefining B2B marketing. While some B2B marketers are using ABM to better target new business, most are still getting their heads around this B2B marketing trend. Marketers looking for more revenue should ensure they enhance their target account lists with offers for relevant products and services to existing clients.

2) Be smarter with analytics. While many marketing leaders have data and the analytics at their disposal, most aren’t leveraging them effectively. Marketing leaders need to get a better handle on their customer data, targeting key accounts and using better analysis to identify opportunities for growth. For example, marketing leaders need to look for opportunities to cross-sell more products to existing clients or look for upsell opportunities. By mining purchase patterns and content consumption history, marketers can unearth new insights that they can leverage for more business.

3) Better align sales, marketing and technology. Alignment between sales and marketing in B2B organizations can be an elusive goal. One of the biggest challenges for sales and marketing usually centers on lead quality. But, this is where technology can help, if used properly. Thanks to improved demand generation through ABM and multichannel marketing, marketing and sales can better define leads from the beginning – and improve lead quality and sales conversation. Applied to existing clients properly, this can be a path to more revenue thorugh better collaboration between sales professionals and marketers.

First, Here’s What Won’t Work For You:
SEO is a no-go. Yes, it’s important. But no, it won’t help you in the early going. Advertising, too, won’t help you. Yes, it works. Amazingly well if you do it right. Which you won’t. Because you don’t have enough capital.

1. Align Yourself with Others
2. Now Emphasize Those Early Wins
3. Simple, Conversion-Based Design

• "IP address identification
• Arrange your content by buyer role and buying journey
• Upgrade your lead qualification
• Embrace your data: Get close to your data. Inspect it. Assess its value. Fill in the gaps with data append or discovery. Don’t shy away or delegate. Make it your friend and your marketing asset.
• Adopt account-based marketing
• Expand your customer insight by adding consumer data to your business customer record"

The ideal scenario for a company is having maximum domain authority with little to no content surplus within its industry. The worst-case scenario for a company is having minimal domain authority and maximum content surplus within its industry. In this scenario marketers can’t just rely on inbound marketing, but must use earned and paid media, too. Thus, increasing the amount of time, energy, effort and budget required to gain the visibility necessary to be successful online.

In this scenario it’s much more likely that a company’s industry is in a state of content surplus. This is where the amount of content on the internet for the industry exceeds the average domain authority for said industry. It also means that there is more content on the internet than people looking for that content to solve their problems.

Industries come and go every day in this world. As a result, there will always be industries in a state of content deficit or surplus. We must have a strategy that taps into owned, earned and paid media – combining both inbound and outbound. Since most of inbound marketing content is considered top-funnel, helpful and “non-salesy,” our efforts should rely on those channels and methodologies that help drive visibility to said content.

• "Clarify the role of portfolio marketing in go-to-market execution. 
• Understand buying groups. Buying groups are formed to address an organization’s needs and are characterized by the different personas involved. It’s not enough for portfolio marketers to provide insight on just the primary buyer personas. 
• Leverage needs dimensions in messaging. High-performing marketers develop messaging that creates a strong emotional connection while highlighting business and personal value.
• Take a strategic approach to launch. Successful launches are carefully planned to align with existing campaigns and the organization’s goals and objectives for each audience segment.
• Close the sales knowledge gap.
• Establish portfolio marketing’s range of responsibilities."

Here’s how the Sales trick works. Sales complains about the quality of the MQLs. As a result, management moves SQLs into Marketing as a KPI. That means that Inside Sales reports to Marketing and the SDRs are moved over to that department.

Marketers should be focused on providing MOFU products (content) and BOFU products to support Inside and Outside Sales, all while filling the marketing funnel with leads to harvest for MQLs.

Let’s recap the reasons this trick is a bad idea:

Inside Sales is not a marketing discipline
Most marketing leaders are not qualified to train, mentor and manage SDRs and ISRs
Keeps marketers and Inside Sales from focusing on their respective disciplines
Moving KPIs up-funnel doesn’t solve problems, it creates them.

1 – Paid Acquisition (I want fast growth)
Paid acquisition tips:
Always add value.
Align your ad, targeting and website experience with your ideal customers
Target your ideal customers first then branch out
Work out your benchmarks (CPA, AOV, LTV)
Be organized and be prepared to do the boring work (rinse & repeat what works)
 
2 – Viral Acquisition (I want huge growth)
This strategy is by far the cheapest way to acquire emails, social followers and more. All you have to do is follow the below steps.
1 – choose a prize that your target audience would get excited about.
2 – build a contest (lots of tools which help you do this)
3 – launch the contest
4 – market the contest
5 – watch the viral growth happen.
 
3 – Join Venture Acquisition (I want guaranteed growth)
Some examples of this:
Joint email promotion.
Joint event and sponsorships (e.g. web summits)
Guest appearance on podcasts
Join contests (what we discussed above)
Joint product launch
 
4 – Content Marketing Acquisition (I want long-term growth)
The best types of content are:
Resource lists
Case studies
Best xxxxx (like this post)
In depth product reviews & comparisons
Personal story (I had this problem & this is how I solved it)

Businesses, as a collective whole, are getting too far away from their corporate customers. It is an outcome of our need to streamline production during the Industrial Age – each step has its’ own expert for maximum output.

The only problem with that is that people are not an output. This is the Achilles heel of many successful B2B enterprises today – being so efficient that the customer has been left out of the equation.

To clarify the metaphor, if Achilles had been in B2B enterprise today, it is likely that his strengths – systems, employees, technology, data and more – would make him strong and profitable. His only weakness would be knowing his customer intimately to build relationships and provide greater value. This one vulnerability would have the power to kill his company. 

The Modern Marketing Model (M3) now creates a new framework for applying this thinking within organisations. The Modern Marketing Model is a unifying force which fuses digital and classic marketing into one future-facing framework. This informs marketing’s remit, required competencies and organisational design. M3 defines marketing in the digital age.

New research launched last week by Marketo shows that marketers—both B2C and B2B—continue to be borderline delusional in terms of what customers actually expect, and how they are and are not delivering against those demands.

• 82% of marketers believe they have a deep understanding of customers. 56% of customers agree.
• Irrelevant content is the number one reason consumers don't engage more often with brands
• 48% of marketers think their engagement efforts are achieving organization strategic objectives

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How are leading marketers acting on new priorities? We partnered with eConsultancy and learned that top companies are employing three key trends, in which they:

• Use first-party data to forge stronger connection to consumers.
• Apply estimates or proxies to link real-time metrics with outcomes.
• Dedicate time and budget to strategic experimentation."

Demand generation CMO’s can no longer support the massive complexity and spend required to support today’s challenges.  CMO’s seek simplification and scale from technology while improving the efficacy of existing staff.  Leading CMO’s expect more staff augmentation for scarce skills.  The continued onslaught of regulation will lead to a greater reliance on technology solutions to achieve scale.   As technology improves, demand generation CMO’s can apply the creative aspects of the Brand CMO and improve engagement in campaigns that reflect the brand and deliver contextual relevancy.   CMO’s can expect this market to transform in the next 24 to 36 months.

The assumption of inbound marketing is that everything is measurable and trackable in a tidy funnel. But many things that are important in marketing are not measurable – and those that are trackable tend to incorporate bad or incomplete data.

Product marketers took an inbound marketing course, grew pretentious man buns, and rebranded themselves as “growth hackers”. They thought that they could analyse marketing data to determine the precise “buyer journey” and optimise every step along the way.

But human brains do not work that way. Straight lines do not exist in marketing. If you think that our minds process everything linearly and logically, just remember your dreams from last night. As DDB New Zealand stated in the New Zealand Herald earlier this year, the latest research shows that companies need to make brands famous with distinctive advertising and publicity, remember that irrational feelings are more important than logical thoughts, and focus on long-term strategy rather than short-term results.

New research indicates where to focus digital investments so that they will reap rewards in online and face-to-face channels.