Portfolio marketing deserves to have a seat at the strategic table alongside other executives
Results of a recent SiriusDecisions survey show that organizations that give portfolio marketing a strategic role to lead go-to-market strategy outperform their peers significantly
Portfolio marketers should own the alignment of product, sales and marketing for go-to-market efforts
Portfolio marketing leaders (and their teams) need to have a strategic seat at the table to do their jobs effectively, but they’re not always invited to that table! We repeatedly hear the following comments from many of our clients:
“It’s difficult for us to show portfolio marketing’s value because we are considered so ‘upstream’ from the activities that get measured.”
“We aren’t invited to participate in the go-to-market strategy discussions.”
“Our product leader owns our launch process, not us.”
Do any of these comments sound familiar to you?
Portfolio marketing leaders need to work alongside the leaders of sales, product and the wider marketing organization to align efforts. It’s time for change– and we are here to help portfolio marketing get their seat at the strategic table!
SiriusDecisions conducted a survey exclusive to portfolio marketers to analyze what successful organizations are doing – and we unveiled the in-depth survey results at the 2019 SiriusDecisions Summit.
Here are some of the results, which show organizations that give portfolio marketing a strategic role to leads the go-to-market efforts outperform their peers significantly. We defined “high-performing organizations” as those where 90 percent or more of their offerings were meeting revenue targets. Survey highlights include:
Portfolio marketing drives the creation of defined target market segments. Eighty-six percent of high performers indicate the majority of offerings (76-100 percent) have well-defined target market segments. In comparison, only 14 percent of low-performing organizations have defined target market segments.
Portfolio marketers are responsible for market opportunity identification. Fifty-four percent of high performing organizations make portfolio marketing responsible for identifying market opportunities – compared with just 21 percent for the low performers.
As the experts on buyers, portfolio marketing owns the creation of buyer personas. Almost two-thirds of high performing organizations (64 percent) indicate the majority of offerings (76-100 percent) have defined target buyer personas. Only 21 percent of low performers have defined buyer personas.
Portfolio marketing owns the messaging that informs go-to-market activities. Ninety-three percent of high-performing organizations have portfolio marketing own messaging development and consistently leverage the messaging developed by portfolio marketers.
High-performing organizations are two times more likely to have a well-defined process for launching new offerings. Best-in-class organizations have defined activities and deliverables across product, marketing and sales with decision gates to achieve alignment and faster time to market. More than half of high performers have portfolio marketing lead the go-to-market launch process.
These survey results support the idea that portfolio marketing needs to be a strategic function. Portfolio marketers need to own the alignment of product, sales and marketing to build out an aligned go-to-market strategy and achieve successful results. Do this and you’ll be in the category of our high performers, where more than 90 percent of offerings meet revenue targets. Keep doing the “same old, same old,” and you’ll find yourself hanging out with the low performers. The bottom line is that high-performing portfolio marketers don’t distract themselves with tactics and activities that aren’t core to portfolio marketing.
Katie is a strategic business leader with more than 20 years of experience working in sales and marketing to create and align go-to-market strategies for b-to-b organizations.
In the first post in our series on demand generation, we talked about what demand gen is—as opposed to what people think it is—and then looked at the five aspects of a successful campaign.
Now, we’re going to cover one of those areas in detail: audience segmentation.
Knowing how to effectively manage and segment your audience and direct the right resources to the right people at the right time is the principle by which all marketing campaigns live and die. And demand generation campaigns are no exception.
At this stage, your primary goal should be to get your message in front of as many qualified people as possible, which means you’re likely casting a wider net than with a demand capture campaign. But that doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore personalization.
Considering specific parameters, like job title, industry, and location, and knowing the criteria for your ideal customer profile are vital to your success.
Why is audience segmentation important?
As marketers, we’re competing in an environment where prospects are exposed to more content through more channels than ever before. Their phones and computers never stop pinging, which means we all need to find a way to stand out among the noise.
And this applies to everyone. It doesn’t matter how niche your audience is. There will always be other businesses—as well as friends, family members, and the latest Netflix shows—competing for space in their heads.
This is part of the reason organic reach is no longer as effective as it once was. It’s also why good segmentation and genuine personalization offer such a strong advantage. They can be the difference between mediocre content and outstanding content that actually breaks through and speaks to your audience.
Data is king
Properly targeted content is now a must-have, not a nice-to-have. But getting personalization right requires one thing above all else: a firm grasp of your data.
Without good, current data, every part of your demand generation campaign will be a virtual stab in the dark.
But if your data is up to date, you can create content that is truly relevant and personalized. And that means the chances of it resonating with your audience are far higher.
With marketers increasingly under pressure to show ROI on every dollar spent, anything that can increase those chances is well worth the investment.
Five tips for effective audience segmentation
1. Define the best criteria
Of course, there’s no such thing as the “best” criteria. Only the criteria that’s best for you.
For many B2B companies, segmenting with parameters like title, industry, and role is the extent of their efforts. But that will only get you so far. You can go much deeper than that.
To make sure you’re targeting the right people at the right time, ask yourself some key questions:
Is your offering relevant to them?
How will it help them do their jobs better?
What are they under pressure to achieve?
How can you help them achieve it?
Are they at the right stage of the buying cycle?
Do you need to educate them further?
Once you have answers, you may find that your strategy changes. Why target the busy executive who won’t have time to read your content when you can target the person tasked with researching technology and reporting to them?
2. Know your platforms
Today, marketing means interacting with prospects on lots of platforms and through lots of channels—each with different rules and parameters.
When planning a marketing campaign, evaluate which channels will most effectively reach the right audience segment with the right messaging.
For instance, because executives receive so many emails, they’re less likely to read messages from unknown sources. But they often find useful reports and information while scrolling through their social media feed before a meeting.
To deliver the most impactful campaigns, make sure your team knows these platforms inside out and understands the best way spread your content on them.
3. Treat data as your marketing lifeblood
We’ve already touched on the importance of having detailed, relevant, up-to-date data.
But information changes quickly. In fact, according to research by MarketingSherpa, databases naturally degrade by about 22.5% each year.
So, pay close attention to your data hygiene. It can increase your marketing effectiveness exponentially.
This may require a paradigm shift in your organization. Many companies operate today with the same basic data strategy they used when CRMs first launched. That certainly won’t provide you with a competitive advantage so you may need to lead a data overhaul.
4. Don’t stop at demand gen
You should continue your targeting well past the demand generation stage. And don’t worry—it gets easier over time.
Once a prospect begins to engage with your content, you will get an increasingly clearer picture of what they’re interested in (as long as you’re tracking your data effectively).
Use this information to continue to fuel your lead nurturing efforts by personalizing and tailoring content and messaging for your prospects throughout the funnel.
5. Learn from successes—and failures
When demand generation campaigns fail, it’s usually because their strategies were based on bad data or because their outcomes weren’t properly measured.
So, measure everything. Make sure you know what worked and what didn’t. And use repeatable processes to ensure your segmentation gets more successful every time.
In 2011 Jim Lecinski, who was Vice President, US Sales & Service for Google, wrote the book Winning The Zero Moment Of Truth. The book dealt with the “moment where marketing happens, where information happens, and where consumers make choices that affect the success and failure of nearly every brand in the world.”
While it was ‘only’ 8 years ago, we all know 8 years is a lifetime in the digital age. In fact it is multiple lifetimes.
Today, Jim is a professor of marketing at the world-renowned Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern as well as Notre Dame. He also serves as an advisor for the consulting firm Bain and Narrative Science, a software company.
I caught up with Jim not long ago. I wanted to pick his brain on a whole host of topics including the now-infamous ZMOT.
What are some (of the many I’m sure) things that come to mind when you think about Then v. Now and the zero moment of truth?
Well, over time it’s become clear that the notion of ZMOT which we first identified eight years ago has proven accurate, and it continues to be even more important than ever today. Academic research have shown the criticality of winning that moment of the consumer journey.
Jim Lecinski
And now with the emergence of mobile, that pre-shopping evaluation behavior has exploded across all categories not just high stakes high involvement categories like investments or travel. For example Google has recently reported that ZMOT searches for “best olive oil,” “best shower curtain,” “best umbrella,” and “best toothbrush” all have doubled between 2015 and 2017. So marketers need to continue to be focused on winning ZMOT today.
What’s your latest project you’re working on?
I am working on a book project with Raj Venkatesan, a professor at University of Virginia’s Darden School titled AI Moments of Truth in which we propose a strategic roadmap for Marketers to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to Marketing.
Marketers are increasingly hearing about the importance and potential for what AI & ML might do to transform Marketing. The problem is, the AI and marketing books and solutions CMOs and their teams typically encounter are focused either on the basic capabilities of AI and machine learning technology or on the high level impact of AI on humanity, with nothing much in between.
This book proposes a solution that places the customer at the center of the discussion, a solution designed to help marketing managers leverage AI to do their jobs better, i.e., deliver the amazing, highly personalized customer experiences that will set their brands apart and help them win.
In short we show how AI can “super-charge” each Moment of Truth in your customer journey, and we provide an “AI Canvas for Marketers” as your playbook or strategic roadmap.
Segueing into your current life, if you will, as a professor if I may. What are some of the key lessons you try to impart to future marketers on a high level that is meaning some lessons will vary based on what particular field of marketing a given student pursues?
BusinessStudent.com
I teach Marketing Strategy and Brand Management at Northwestern and Notre Dame. In my courses we stress that the role of marketing is to drive profitable incremental growth.
That’s what it’s all about, that’s why marketers exist. And it’s important not to confuse “means and ends.” Things like “engagement,” “views,” “likes,” etc. can be important means, but don’t lose sight of the ends: profit, revenue and share growth.
To do that modern marketers need to be “whole-brained” which is to say they need to be fluent in data analysis and creative insights. It’s the effective combination of those things together that enable great marketers to drive profit growth. That’s what we try to impart on the students – that strategic approach and the tools to make it happen.
Additionally do you think there are some Marketing 101 lessons that were applicable say 25 years ago that still apply today?
No doubt. The interesting thing about marketing is that it is an “additive” profession. Marketing concepts we all learned and practiced years ago like how to write a good brand positioning statement and the 4Ps still matter as do classic techniques and methods like Conjoint Analysis. AND additionally now there are also newer theories (like Christensen’s “jobs to be done”) and techniques like R and Sentiment Analysis that we all need to know too.
This is what makes marketing challenging – it’s the totality of the decisions marketers have to make and the ever-evolving nature of consumers, competition and technology that marketers need to know.
Now let’s take a look at brands in general but I also want you to wear your consumer hat. What are some things brands do that drives you crazy today?
It drives me crazy when brands that have significant friction in the customer journey. I’ve been sharing this story about a recent brand experience I had: I stopped into a big box store right near my house because I needed a small $10 item. I walked the store and couldn’t find it, so tried to find someone to ask, finally I did. He looked on their computer, and said they had one set in the store.
maxholmes.finance
He then couldn’t find it (and it’s now 30 minutes elapsed) so he suggests he can order it for me and have it shipped to the store in 3-6 days for a fee of $3.99. I say are you kidding, I can order it myself from Amazon right now on my phone and have them at my door tomorrow free. He replied, “I know that’s why I order from Amazon too even though I work here.”
This story illustrates immense friction in my buyer journey. Know your customer, and ruthlessly work to eliminate friction at every step–or someone else will!
Then looking down the road, finish this sentence: The brands that will be successful 10, 20 years from now will be the brands that _______________________________.
…will be the brands that know their customers best, and can quickly and continuously provide an ever-improving brand experience based on that customer knowledge. Unpacking this, that will mean a continued focus on customer-intimacy and deriving superior customer-insights AND the ability to quickly and decisively act to deliver what customers want. Increasingly this means real-time personalized experiences.
To do that, marketers will need to increasingly turn to machines to assist them. For example, take Google Search, how can you decide the optimal bid, budget, creative, landing page, time of day, day of the week and geography for every single relevant query? With a spreadsheet? In a weekly meeting? Machine learning offers marketers the potential to solve this.
That in my opinion is a key to being successful in the future…and thus why I’ve been thinking a lot about this looming “AI Moment of Truth” marketers are facing.
Google has given the green light to a series of new mobile advertising formats, unveiling image-focused buys for brands.
New arrivals include a ‘gallery’ format for mobile, enabling advertisers to reach users with multiple images and the introduction of ads within the discover feed built into many Android home screens for the first time.
This latter innovation will see ads depicted in the same style as regular stories with a lead image, headline and subject field – differentiated solely by a small ‘ad’ badge.
Each new format is designed to provide greater visibility for advertisers with Google predicting 25% more interactions as a result but at the expense of disrupting some people using core Google services such as search.
Google has been experimenting with ways to improve the visual clout of its advertising for the past year, driven by the knowledge that a more aesthetic approach will command greater levels of engagement.
These changes will be limited solely to mobile service, not desktop, with gallery ads expected to become widely available ‘later this year’.
On the other side of the coin Google has been cracking down on ‘bad ads‘, renoving 2.3bn over 2018 alone.
Do you know what ‘on-SERP SEO’ means in the marketing universe? You’re not alone, but you are missing an opportunity.
Can you believe it’s almost 2020? When I began my marketing career over a decade ago in 2009, I could hardly imagine what I’d be doing today as a marketing leader at an enterprise organization …
… especially with technology. But each year, new and disruptive technological innovations are forcing marketers like me to evolve our best practices. Digital marketing, once the only game in town, has given way to multichannel marketing; and today, we are rapidly approaching the omnichannel marketing age.
And that can be overwhelming: As the rate of marketing innovation continues to accelerate, most organizations are having a hard time keeping up. But the good news is that new ways of doing things bring new opportunities. Here are four major marketing trends I see developing among organizations for 2020 and beyond:
1. Optimizing for on-SERP SEO
Ever hear of zero-click results? You’ve probably seen them. A zero-click result is a search result in which Google automatically provides the answer to the search query in the form of an automated snippet.
For example, if you type in ,“What is the temperature in San Francisco?” Google will automatically provide you a result it generates on its own. You’d actually have to scroll down to see the Adwords results and organic search results.
Google auto-populates search results for much broader queries, as well. Everything from “What is a cryptocurrency?” to “How do I create a marketing funnel?” has a snippet that may prevent a searcher from scrolling down to see more results.
Why is this significant? Because 61.8 percent of search results in Google are now zero-search results, according to data from Jumpshot. As a result, more and more keywords are becoming less profitable.
While the automatic snippet sometimes comes from a website that ranks somewhere on page 1 of the search engine results page (SERP), companies are unsure how to optimize their content so that Google chooses them over anyone vying for the same spot. Needless to say, this is a concerning development for any business that markets or advertisers on Google.
Opportunity:The brand that figures out on-SERP SEO first will have a huge competitive edge.
2. Advertising on smart speakers (and optimizing for voice search)
Another major development in recent years has been the proliferation of smart speakers. In 2018, around 56 million smart speakers were sold to consumers, according to Social Report.
Yet despite the growing number of households asking Alexa, Siri and Google Home questions, smart speaker marketing and advertising opportunities have been scarce. But this seems to be changing.
In 2017, for example, Google Home users noticed that a universal ad for Disney’s Beauty and The Beast began playing shortly after scheduled morning announcements, called flash briefings. These types of ads were rare and infrequent at the time, but are now growing in popularity.
In 2019, we’re seeing better, less invasive, examples of branded advertising on smart speakers. One of the most customer-friendly ways to advertise on smart speakers is to make what’s called a “branded skill.” For example, if you tell Alexa “Ask Patrón for a cocktail recipe,” Alexa will respond with a diverse selection of possibilities, courtesy of the premium tequila maker. This strategy works:. Patrón gets more than 6,000 queries a month for its Alexa skill, according to Digiday.
Opportunity: Try the “branded skill” approach for your branded advertising, for a more customer-friendly tone.
3. Optimizing for voice search
Granted, most brands may not be ready to explore smart speaker advertising just yet. But in the meantime, they should explore optimizing their content for voice search.
Needless to say, it probably makes a lot of sense for all businesses to start optimizing their content for voice search, not just big enterprises. There’s a lot of advice from marketing experts on how to do this, and it seems that the consensus is that making content more conversational does the trick.
Opportunity: With most search happening on smartphones, optimize for voice search.
4. More chatbots and, yes, even more content!
Finally, as I’ve explained before, written content isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Not only is it predicted to be the marketing activity that will make the largest commercial impact three years running (according to Smart Insights), but written content is also the main throughput of chatbots, which are expected to see increased usage in 2020 and beyond.
According to a recent study by Juniper Networks, as AI-powered chatbots grow in popularity and sophistication, retailers can expect to cut costs by $439 billion annually and increase sales by $112 billion, by 2023. With numbers like that, it’s not too hard to see why large organizations will continue investing in newer and more helpful chatbots.
But chatbots aren’t useful just for big business. Any business that has a website with traffic can benefit from a simple chatbot that answers the most common visitor questions and helps convert visitors into warm leads.
Opportunity: Chatbots will help you cut costs.
Marketing is changing, and marketers must change with it
When I first got my feet wet in the marketing world, I couldn’t have imagined that I’d be helping run digital marketing transformation programs. But that’s what it takes to stay competitive in the world of 21st-century marketing.
It’s almost 2020; have you looked into any new and innovative ways to spend your marketing dollars? Or how to double down on the marketing channels that work best for your business?
Because if you haven’t, I guarantee your competitors have.
While the practice of content marketing has been around for decades, it’s only started to come into its own as a recognized and respected form of marketing in the last decade. As the practice has proliferated globally, so has the introduction of dedicated, content-centric staff within corporate marketing organizations. Among the most common new titles we see these days is the Content Marketing Manager.
According to Google Trends, the term “content marketing manager” was rarely searched until around 2013. Interest in this new role rose steadily over the following two years and has remained steady since 2015.
But what exactly is a content marketing manager? Do you need one? To understand these questions, you first need to have a clear picture of what content marketing managers do on a day-to-day basis.
A Content Marketing Manager’s Role
A content marketing manager is ultimately responsible for managing a company’s content marketing operation, and the overall success of content marketing initiatives. They guide content marketing strategy, facilitate ongoing content planning, manage day-to-day content creation, editing and promotion, and report on the results of each content marketing initiative.
Skills & Experience
In a recent study, researchers scoured more than 300 “content marketing manager” job listings from Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn to examine the qualifications requested by companies. This infographic by Sarah Robles sums up their findings nicely.
Here are the eight strategic initiatives that most content marketing manager will be responsible for developing.
1. Research and Competitor Analysis
The content manager’s main aim is to successfully carry out the business’ content marketing strategy by publishing and promoting content that achieves the goals set out in the strategy. It’s impossible to create an effective content marketing strategy and plan without initial research. This research helps the content manager and creators to understand their target audience better and decide what types of content to create and which topics to cover.
This research might involve:
Analyzing competitors’ content, messaging and distribution tactics
Identifying target audiences and their key demographics, interests, and online behavior
Surveying current customers to understand and validate strategic and tactical decisions (template below)
Facilitating internal stakeholder interviews to identify business objectives and subject matter experts
Keyword research
Research to define appropriate subjects and topics
Looking into content tools and software that can help them to create and promote content
2. Preparing Content Marketing Plans
After an initial research phase, the content marketing manager can start working on one or several content marketing plans. Depending on the size of the company and scope of their offering, multiple content marketing plans will often be needed to define strategy and tactical execution for individual brands, business units or channels. For example:
A bank may have one content marketing plan for their consumer offerings, and another for their commercial offerings
A software company may have an external content marketing plan aimed at generating new business, and a separate content marketing plan designed to retain and up-sell existing customers.
Each content marketing plan should be informed by the overall content marketing strategy (which is usually created with the help of the wider marketing team) and should define the exact goals for each initiative and identify how the content manager will achieve these goals with content.
Content marketing plans should include (at a minimum):
Specific, measurable goals with a timeline in which to meet them
A general budget with estimates for staff, creative resources and paid promotion
The types of content that will be created (ex: blog posts, ebooks, white papers, infographics, etc.)
The topics that will be covered (and why)
The channels that will be used to distribute the content
A plan for paid promotion of the content
An execution plan outlining the publishing frequency, production workflow (creation, reviews and approvals) and ongoing maintenance of the content
Your content marketing manager may also create individual content marketing plans for specific campaigns, an overall plan for a set time period (such as the next quarter or year), or a combination of the two.
3. Creating an Editorial Calendar
Once a content marketing plan has been flushed out, content marketing managers can now plot deadlines for creation, publication, and promotion on a content calendar so the whole marketing team can see at a glance what content is planned for the coming weeks and months.
Having a visual editorial calendar helps your content manager align content publication and promotion with key dates that are important to your business and other marketing campaigns. It’s also important to build slack time into the schedule to allow for any delays in content production and to allow for last-minute, real-time marketing opportunities.
4. Content Creation
After the content plan has been created and approved by all relevant stakeholders, it’s time for the main responsibility of the content manager – actually creating the content.
This being said, not all content managers will physically produce and publish each piece of content. Many content marketing managers will be dictating production workflows and overseeing a team of creatives. However, it’s vital that your content manager has excellent writing and editing skills as they’ll hold the ultimate responsibility for what is finally published.
As well as researching and writing content, content marketing managers may need to source photographs and illustrations to accompany written content, format content, and add meta information.
5. SEO
It’s not enough for online content to read well and be free of spelling and grammar errors. Content marketing managers must also have search engine optimization skills to make sure that web searchers can find their content and that it appears on the first page of Google and other search engines.
If you have an entire digital marketing team at your disposal, you may have already employed an SEO specialist. Alternatively, you may be outsourcing your SEO needs to a specialist agency. Despite this, it’s still important that your content marketing manager understands at least the basics of SEO in order to carry out an effective content marketing plan.
6. Editing and Ensuring Adherence to a Style Guide
When a content marketing manager has a team of writers to manage, their editing and proofreading skills are essential. They also have to be able to give constructive feedback.
It’s vital to maintain a consistent brand voice in your content and this can be challenging when there are several writers working on your content. A style guide is essential for this reason. Your content marketing manager should create this style guide, which might include information about brand personality, writing styles, punctuation and grammar preferences, SEO best practices, and guidelines to aid in selecting images.
As well as making sure that each piece of content is proofread and edited before publication (if not personally, then by a dedicated editor), your content manager must also ensure that all content adheres to this style guide.
7. Publishing and Promoting Content
After each piece of content is produced and approved, it’s the job of the content marketing manager to ensure it gets published and promoted to the right people in the right place at the right time. They might do this manually themselves or leverage technical staff to load content into a web CMS, email marketing or social media automation tool.
Once published, a pre-defined promotional strategy should be executed, often including automated social media posts or other tactics that fire at times selected for the best engagement. This type of content automation is an effective way to speed up your content production without having to grow your team.
Your content marketing manager must also integrate your content strategy with the rest of your marketing campaigns and identify other channels for online and offline promotion.
8. Content Performance Monitoring and Analysis
Your content marketing manager’s job doesn’t end once they’ve published a piece of content. One of the most important parts of this role is continual monitoring and analysis of published content so they can see what’s working and what isn’t working. These insights will inform future marketing plans and provide intelligence for your overall marketing strategy.
Content analytics software can help to make this task a straightforward one, but it’s important that your content manager still takes the time to interpret the data, make suggestions and draw actionable conclusions based on it.
You’ll also need to monitor engagement with your content, reply to comments and questions, and note suggestions for future content. All this comes under the umbrella of the content marketing manager’s responsibilities, although they may outsource some or all of these tasks.
Do You Need a Content Marketing Manager?
Certainly, many of the tasks outlined above can be outsourced or delegated to other team members, freelancers, or agency partners, so it can be tempting to think that you don’t need to fill this role at all.
However, this line of thinking is unwise. The job of your content marketing manager is to ensure your content marketing strategy succeeds. If you don’t have a passionate, talented person in this role, it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of simply churning out content.
Content marketing managers tie together all the individual parts of your content strategy – writing, SEO, promotion, analysis, and optimization – with a clearly defined content workflow.
Hiring someone to manage your content marketing strategy might be a big investment, but you may not get a return without it.
Influencer marketing is expected to be a $6.5 billion dollar industry in 2019. This is up from $1.7 billion in 2016.
Influence marketing is helping brands of all sizes big and small engage their dream customers, ignite communities, increase brand awareness and nurture powerful relationships. If you haven’t heard about influence marketing you must have been hiding under a rock.
As with anything in marketing, there are some marketers doing it right and are others who ruin it for the rest of us. Some are burning more bridges than they are building. Many are doing it without truly understanding the extent to which they are damaging relationships.
There are also agencies who claim to help brands big and small build relationships with an influencer marketing program. However, they wound up falling to spammy tactics and end up hurting the brand reputation without the brand marketer even knowing.
Every brand touch is an impression of your brand. If an agency or a member of your team is spamming the contact boxes of top industry or even micro-influencers with copy / paste spam messages begging for free tweets, I can guarantee they are hurting your brand more than helping you.
Influencer marketing is not about getting free tweets, Instagram story shoutouts and coverage.
Influencer marketing is not the same as earned media. Earned media = media you actually do something to earn. Many brands trick themselves into believing that they can skip valuing the influencers time investment in community as they lump it into “earned media.”
Agencies and Brand Need to Stop the Unethical Spam Tactics
Brand leaders need to get real, acknowledge spamming contact forms for free tweets, shoutouts and product reviews is not marketing!
Agencies that are falling to these lazy tactics in representation of the brand they represent need to quit damaging the brand reputation and trust of the clients who are trusting them. These brands are paying agencies to help them build relationships, not damage them through a series of spam and begging tactics. This is not earned media, paid media or influencer marketing, it’s spammed reputation damage.
You will get out of influencer marketing what you put into it
You will get out of influencer marketing what you put into it. If you invest time as a human in building relationships the payoff can be big. However, many brands fall to the spammy tactics and then blame it on the fact that influencer marketing isn’t working. The truth is the person running the program never took the time to learn the strategies and tactics that really work. They often skip researching influencers and send a generic blanket email or contact form desperately begging for free amplification.
Instead, brand and social marketing leaders wanting to test the waters with influencer marketing must always also think… “what is in it for the influencer?” How can I bring them mass value in working with our brand. The most successful influencer programs are when there is a partnership, when the brand and the influencer have common ground, beliefs, interests and a base to build a relationship. This is much of why micro-influencer marketing can be so successful for even brands with small budgets.
I developed episode 121 of the Social Zoom Factor podcast with a goal to help marketers brand new to influence marketing as well as seasoned veterans get the most out of their influence marketing programs.
The goal of this episode is to save you wasted time and help ensure you are establishing trust and a brand of integrity as you build, launch and execute your influencer marketing program.
I share with you tips in this podcast from my experience in working with brands of all sizes from startups to Fortune 100 brands helping them develop and execute influence marketing programs as well as from being an influencer myself. We get contacted by at minimum 10-20 brands per week wanting us to be an influencer for their brand.
In this 30 Minute Episode You Will Learn:
Why and how brands are confusing spam with influence marketing
How to choose the right influencers and avoid choosing the wrong influencers
Importance of doing your research on influencers before reaching out to them
The importance of the influencer being able to drive real action to help you achieve your business goals
Why trust matters with influencers
Building your team to succeed with influence marketing
How to create value for the influencer as a top priority
Importance of connecting the influencer with other people at your in person events
Importance of respecting the influencer as a human being, not as a number to help you simply amplify your message
How to decide if you should compensate influencers for their time
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CEO / Founder Marketing Nutz, full service social media, digital marketing, experiential brand, conversion optimization agency. Ranked by Forbes as Top 10 Social Media Women and 10 Social Media Power Influencer. Keynote speaker, author, strategist, consultant, coach, & trainer. Helps businesses of all sizes integrate social media into the DNA of their business, connect with target audiences to nurture authentic customer relationships. 15+ years experience working with Fortune 500, Franchised corporations with 4000+ local franchises to entrepreneurs and startups.
There are many reasons to begin selling your brand’s products on Amazon, from the millions of active customers on the Amazon worldwide marketplace to the extremely high conversion rates many businesses experience. If you have a new brand, you can start selling on Amazon quickly without the need for a stand-alone website.
Amazon offers two Selling Plans to get you started. The Individual Selling Plan carries a fee of $0.99 per item sold (plus other fees, which vary by category), and the Professional Selling Plan has a subscription fee of $39.99 per month plus other selling fees.
Those other fees include referral fees (usually taken as a percentage of revenue from products sold, which varies based on the product category and may carry a minimum fee of $1), and for sellers who let Amazon handle product warehousing and shipping for them, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fees. These include such fees as order picking and packing, shipping cost, packing boxes or envelopes, inner “cushion” packaging, and monthly storage fees.
Not all selling categories are open to Individual Sellers (e.g., fine jewelry, personal computers, and professional services). In addition, the use of feeds, spreadsheets, and other tools to load inventory are only available to Professional Sellers.
If you plan on selling more than 40 items a month, want to sell your products in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico (rather than simply one of the three), or offer special promotions and a gift wrap option for your products, then go with the Professional Selling Plan.
Once you’ve decided on a Selling Plan, it’s time to open your Amazon selling account. To open an Amazon selling account (of either type), simply register for the account of your choice by clicking on the “Sell as a Professional” or “Sell as an Individual” button on the Amazon Services site (https://services.amazon.com/selling/benefits.htm).
After you sign up, you’ll be asked to complete a two-step login verification process. Once that concludes, you’ll officially have an Amazon Seller Central account. Now let’s walk through the basics of what you can expect with that account.
Amazon seller central
Amazon Seller Central is where you’ll spend much of your time as a seller; it’s also where you’ll find the tools you need to manage your inventory on the Amazon marketplace. This is where you’ll create listings, manage orders, correspond with buyers, get feedback from Amazon about your performance, run reports, set up Sponsored Products campaigns, and more.
Once you’re in Seller Central, you might want to use the Settings menu/User Permissions to add more users from your company if you have other employees who will be working on your Amazon account. By adding users, you can give them access to Seller Central and customize their permissions so they’ll have the appropriate system rights for their role at your company.
If you’d like to learn more about Seller Central and selling on Amazon in general, and you prefer a more formal learning process, open an additional tab in your browser and go to the Amazon Seller University: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/learn. Seller University (a curriculum of instructional videos designed to help you master the Amazon marketplace), available to users within Seller Central, will help teach you the details of selling on Amazon, tools and policies for sellers, and the products and services that can help you grow. These instructional videos and PDF learning documents are very thorough. I highly recommend you and the other members of your team dive in and explore!
Amazon brand registry
There’s one final step that’s key to controlling your brand’s content on Amazon, and I strongly recommend any brand owner with a registered trademark enable it in the “getting started” section of Seller Central: signing up for the Amazon Brand Registry program.
According to Amazon, Brand Registry helps protect your brand’s intellectual property and create an accurate and trusted experience for customers on Amazon. With Amazon Brand Registry, you can have your trademarked brand’s Amazon product detail page content locked down so only one marketplace seller (i.e., you or someone who works for you) can alter it.
If you don’t register your brand, you can still submit updated or enhanced product content (including images); you’ll just have to contact Seller Support for each individual product and have Amazon make the changes for you.
In addition, Amazon says your enrollment in the program gives you access to text and image search tools, predictive automation from your reports of possible intellectual property rights violations, and increased authority (and therefore control) over product listings with your brand name. Finally, Amazon Brand Registry can give you access to Enhanced Brand Content, Amazon Stores, and Sponsored Brands, which all allow you to share your brand’s unique story and educate consumers about your products.
If you don’t take control, resellers (authorized, unauthorized, or both) will set up product listings for your products, and they, not you, will determine how your brand promises are communicated to Amazon customers. A reseller will never represent your brand exactly as you would. And because Amazon product page listings often get highly ranked on Google, it’s common for many of those listings to show up higher on the Google search results page than a brand’s own organic listings.
Once you’ve locked down your trademarked brands through the Brand Registry program, you can remain responsible for content maintenance or align with a reseller to create and maintain thorough and accurate product listings for your brand.
Feature Image Credit: Yu Chun Christopher Wong | S3studio | Getty Images
Traditionally, sales and marketing — both important in their own right — have operated as separate silos. Sales is a direct process, requiring one-to-one interaction with customers, whether it’s using email, the phone, in-person meetings or social media. Marketing, on the other hand, drives leads through brand or product awareness with potential customers as a group and is a more holistic process.
Something as simple as developing a capabilities presentation demonstrates how sales (direct) and marketing (holistic) can be at odds. Marketers may create a presentation that ensures the message is on target and consistent across customers, but the sales team may deliver it directly to specific customers. Here comes the push-pull relationship.
This may seem like a simple example, but it is indicative of the dynamics behind the sales and marketing relationship. Both entities, while seemingly at odds, have much to gain by learning to work together in a cooperative way. After all, both want to increase quality leads, reduce sales cycles to close more leads, and generate more revenue.
While the sales process has not changed significantly over time, marketing methods and channels have evolved dramatically over the last decade. Today’s marketer relies on content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), organic traffic and influencer marketing.
Another significant shift is in the buying process, which has undergone a major transformation. Customers often spend more time educating themselves before purchasing and are looking for more information. Indeed, according to Forrester, “Today’s business buyers are increasingly self-directed: 60% prefer not to interact with a sales rep as the primary source of information; 68% prefer to research on their own, online; and 62% say they can now develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list — based solely on digital content.”
This change in the purchase process puts more power in the hands of the buyer, and more weight on marketers to guide the buyer through the buying journey.
Sales and marketing have also historically had different processes, different software — customer relationship managers (CRMs) versus marketing automation platforms (MAPs) — and different goals, resulting in a competitive, rather than collaborative, relationship. Even further, marketing has been responsible at the beginning of the customer life cycle, with sales involved later.
But customers don’t care about where marketing and sales begin and end — they expect one seamless experience. This means that the two departments need to foster a parallel relationship where both co-own the lead and the ongoing process to qualify that lead. There is one customer pipeline and it belongs to both marketing and sales.
How do sales and marketing make this push-pull relationship work successfully?
Learning how to communicate is a critical step. What often happens is that marketing will talk to sales, but sales won’t listen, and vice versa. You need to establish a regime for communicating, and the best way to do that is to find common ground and acknowledge what you are both trying to accomplish. Sometimes there are multiple issues at stake, and you have to untangle them one at a time. That may mean putting the other issues on hold until you reach an agreement on one. Then you’ve proven you can work things out, which sets you up to succeed at resolving the next topic.
It should be noted that working in tandem is ultimately best for the customer. If marketing and sales are synched up on messaging, it facilitates the customer’s understanding of the value you provide today and where you’re headed. It makes it easier for the customer to work with you.
It’s also important to understand how sales and marketing are going to work together — akin to establishing a sales and marketing service level agreement to state each department’s role and clear definitions on things like buyer personas and ideal leads. This starts with determining who they are going to target together and creating a coverage map. If marketing sends leads to follow up on and sales doesn’t act on them, then money has been wasted on leads. You have to create a model together that defines how to cross-sell and up-sell opportunities together, how to acquire new customers together and how to retain your current customers together.
Adding to these complexities is the fact that each department has its own budget. Sales has to meet one key performance indicator (KPI) while marketing has a different KPI, and conflict can arise as a result. Instead of fighting a marketing and sales war, cooler heads are needed to prevail, and that means coming together and establishing an agreement. Reaching an agreement requires a give and take by both parties.
In the end, it comes down to honest communication and arriving at a set of agreements that define how to work together.
Working more in collaboration can have immediate benefits, but I still find that most organizations have separate sales and marketing teams with their own leadership and targets. Changing the structure and mindset of those teams requires strong leadership at the top of the organization. Leaders need to set the vision and ensure that the reasons for change are understood by all.
In my next article, I’ll continue to address the “push-pull” aspect of the sales and marketing relationship and how leaders can bring about this much-needed alignment from the top down.
Feature Image Credit: Getty
By Kay Kienast
Chief Marketing Officer for True Influence, responsible for all company marketing including data, demand generation, SEO/SEM and PR.
With thousands of marketing technology vendors to choose from, most companies are using multiple products to meet customers where they are — whether they’re scrolling through Instagram, doing a Google search, checking their email or entering a store. As a result, marketing stacks today may consist of dozens of different technologies and potentially thousands of data streams.
This fractured landscape makes it difficult for companies to get a holistic view of their customer data and analyze marketing performance, but finding a solution is imperative. Visibility is critical to the success of today’s marketing teams — that’s what allows them to optimize strategies, course correct if needed and achieve campaign goals.
Companies have sprouted up to address this need. As the chief marketing officer (CMO) of one such platform that provides a single source of truth for integrating customer data, tracking marketing performance and analyzing return on investment, it is clear that these marketing intelligence tools are entering the mainstream. However, I have found that some marketers remain unclear about their long-term uses.
As customer expectations for personalized engagement evolve, CMOs need to understand how influential trends will affect the way they evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing and how marketing intelligence can help them stay one step ahead. Here are the five trends that I believe are shaking up the marketing industry.
1. Artificial intelligence is moving beyond the hype.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are now capable of doing the heavy lifting in processing massive amounts of data. For example, marketers can create continuous data source connections and automatically organize data in real time without specialized technical skills.
When asked “which activities marketing analysts spend the majority of their time on, data wrangling topped the list, along with data integration and formatting,” according to Gartner’s “2018 Marketing Analytics Survey.” Marketing intelligence tools can help leverage these AI capabilities specifically for marketing use cases, without marketers having to build tools from scratch or adapt general enterprise solutions for their needs.
These tools enable marketers to integrate all of their data, have visibility into it in real time and take action to pivot journeys or campaigns as they’re happening. I believe AI will soon get even better at not only surfacing insights but also at providing smarter recommendations and empowering marketers to take action on them.
2. Marketing analytics is becoming democratized.
Barriers to entry are dissolving when it comes to marketers accessing data insights. The technology solutions emerging today are leaning into marketers’ skill sets, allowing them to focus on analytics without requiring the technical know-how to create complex models.
Marketers can use marketing intelligence to acquire a deeper level of insight by connecting the dots across all customer engagements, including email marketing, paid advertising, web traffic and more, rather than being limited to data from a single channel. With these tools, you can gather recommendations about how to structure programs and spend budgets based on historical data from your own company and industry benchmarks.
3. Martech and adtech continue to converge.
As marketers have sought ways to create a seamless experience throughout the customer journey, marketing and advertising technologies have begun to merge. This trend has been happening for quite some time, but analytics has remained a challenge. Marketing intelligence tools are bringing all of that information from across the customer journey — from paid advertising to email and e-commerce — together in one place.
Regardless of whether an ad platform is part of a larger enterprise marketing technology solution or is a standalone vendor, brands can leverage marketing intelligence to bring everything together in one place to analyze performance, from first-party data about known customers to anonymous data and from the granular to the aggregate.
4. Brands and agencies are banding together.
Traditionally, brands allocated a budget for agencies to spend on advertising, and the brand would take it from there. These days, I find that brands want more transparency into where their ad spending is going and a better grasp of how it’s performing. Brands and agencies are often taking joint ownership of data and working together to drive customer engagement not only through advertising but also throughout the entire sales cycle.
As agencies and brands become strategic partners, they are also converging on the technologies they use. Marketing intelligence can help provide a single source of truth for both agencies and brands in order to collaborate on a standardized platform.
5. Customers are demanding personalization.
Companies that sell products directly to customers are known as business-to-consumer (B2C), while those that sell to other companies are known as business-to-business (B2B). Many companies are both. For example, Ticketmaster sells tickets for live events directly to customers and also has business relationships with venues, entertainment agencies and sponsors.
(Full disclosure: Ticketmaster is a client of Datorama.)
In the past, business buyers didn’t require the same level of personalized engagement as consumers in the market for shoes, chairs and TVs. Now, B2B marketers are expected to step up their personalization strategies. That means reaching beyond traditional demand generation sources, like a company’s website, to channels like LinkedIn and Instagram.
In light of this shift, I believe it’s more important than ever for B2B brands to employ marketing intelligence in the same way as B2C companies do. These companies can gain a unified view of their data, connect every part of the sales funnel and enable highly personalized marketing campaigns.
The Next Competitive Advantage
Marketing leaders who feel overwhelmed by the challenge of unifying disparate data streams are in good company — this is the same quandary many of the largest brands in the world are tackling. While it’s easy to succumb to analysis paralysis, companies that get ahead of the pack in achieving true visibility are often better poised to win.
CMOs already invest nearly a third of their budgets on marketing technology. Now it’s time for marketers to make sure they’re able to make sense of all the data they collect.
