Thursday, October 30, 2014

Predict Your Marketing Plan Fate (Sans Crystal Ball)

It's that scary time of year when many marketers finalize plans for 2015 success, and Halloween celebrates a very different kid of future insight via black magic, spirit guides, tarot cards and the like. Now Marketo brings together those two disparate seasonal themes with "What's in the Cards," an infographic of the three factors most predictive of a marketing plan's fate, based on interviews with 400 marketers. Planning Secret No. 1: "Write Your Marketing Destiny," meaning generate a documented plan of action, clearly stating strategy and tactics, with stakeholder buy-in and individual accountability. You'll be joining 66% of marketers interviewed, who use a shared planning document to dodge the most deadly marketing failures, including constantly changing directions and priorities, lack of coordination within the marketing team, and lack of coordination between marketing and other teams. No. 2: "Add a Mix of Techniques and Channels," ranging from e-mail, social and pay-per-click to offline events. Get the right mix by analyzing audience preferences and behavior and then, of course, testing and measuring. No. 3: "The Right Calendar Makes You a Mind-Reader." Two-thirds of marketers interviewed stressed the importance of a marketing calendar, ranging from high-tech online tracking to simple whiteboard. Top calendar requirements cited were easy movement of activities, tracking of tentative vs. confirmed activities, filtering by attributes (channel, product, audience, segment) and a view of the metrics per program. Share Marketo's infographic Halloween treat with marketing team members by going to http://blog.marketo.com/2014/10/infographic-whats-in-the-cards-decide-your-marketings-fate.html

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

B2B Content Marketers Doubt Their Effectiveness

The Content Marketing Institute's latest survey of business-to-business marketers found 86% using content marketing, but only 38% believing they are actually effective at it. One reason respondents may doubt their success is poor tracking of content marketing ROI; just 5% consider their ROI tracking "very successful," while the majority (33%) rate ROI measurement efforts as merely "neutral." Another 10% rate tracking as "not at all successful," and 15% do no tracking. For those engaged in content-marketing results measurement, website traffic was the most common metric, followed by sales lead quality and conversion rates. As far as the type of B2B content marketing done, the most popular content (92%) was for social media (other than blogs), followed by e-newsletters (83%) and website articles (81%). What were the most important goals of content marketing? Brand awareness, lead generation and engagement led the list in the survey. The study also pegged 28% as the average amount of total marketing budget spent on B2B content marketing. Unsurprisingly, there was a correlation between perceived effectiveness and spending; those rating themselves as most effective allocated 37% of the marketing budget to B2B content, while the least effective cut their spend to 16% or less of the total budget. For more data from the survey, check out the marketingland.com report at http://marketingland.com/study-21-marketers-tracking-content-marketing-results-102263