Category: Marketing Effectiveness
-
Delivering outstanding customer experiences has become a primary strategic objective for both B2B and B2C marketers. In the 2017 Digital Trends report by Econsultancy (in association with Adobe), surveyed marketing, digital, and ecommerce professionals selected optimizing the customer experience as their single most important opportunity for 2017, and they identified customer experience as the primary…
-
Business buyers broadly agree that thought leadership content has a significant impact on their purchase decisions at every stage of the buying process. But they consistently rate the impact of their organization’s thought leadership content substantially lower. That is one of the more ironic findings of a recent study by Edelman and LinkedIn. How Thought Leadership…
-
There’s no safe middle ground with it comes to thought leadership. It’s a classic double-edged sword. Great thought leadership makes a positive impact on buyers at every stage of the buying process. Poor thought leadership, on the other hand, will result in lost business opportunities. These are some of the major findings of a recent…
-
In an earlier post, I explained why companies need different marketing content for customer acquisition vs. customer retention. Put simply, when the objective is customer acquisition, your content needs to weaken the grip of the status quo and convince your prospects to make a change. When the goal is customer retention, the exact opposite is…
-
A few weeks ago, I published a post that discussed how to weaken the grip of the status quo. When your objective is to acquire new customers, the status quo is often your toughest competitor because most potential buyers have an inherent preference for their existing methods and processes. In most cases, no sale can…
-
Business leaders of all kinds regard the identification and implementation of best practices as one of the most powerful management tools at their disposal. And why shouldn’t they? It seems immanently reasonable to identify the practices of high-performing companies and then emulate those practices. Marketing leaders are particularly enamored with best practices. After all, marketing…
-
In a recent article for dmnews.com, Mike Colombo, the CMO of Cloudwords, argued that many CMOs aren’t ready for a seat at the C-suite table. According to Mr. Colombo, many CMOs aren’t winning a seat at the “grown-up” table because they’re still relying on performance metrics that are inconsequential to company leaders. Recent research has…
-
When Theodore Levitt taught marketing at the Harvard Business School, he frequently reminded his students that “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” The point Professor Levitt was making is that people don’t usually buy a product or service because they want the product or service itself. What they…