Here we cut the world of B2B marketing into digestible nuggets of inspiration, highlighting courageous individuals and ideas approximately two times a month. Want to contribute content to our blog?
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Drinking Your Own Marketing Champagne
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February 7, 2019
Ad agencies are notoriously poor at applying their craft to their own brands, but martech companies don’t have that problem. Marketo and Hubspot are masters of inbound marketing, in which brands draw potential customers to them with tactics such as content marketing and search optimization. Salesforce is really good at using Salesforce to sell itself. And Demandbase, a leader in...

Click, baby, click!
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February 6, 2019
Maybe this scenario has happened to you. You get a report of a spike in clicks for your widgets—and a chain reaction of events kicks in to capitalize on the momentum. Your blog post just got 100,000 views, so you commission a bunch more posts on the same topic. Or perhaps your newsletter sales pitch generated more clicks than ever....

An Antidote to FOFB
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January 31, 2019
While Gens Y & Z are famously prone to FOMO, my unscientific survey of hundreds of CMOs suggests many suffer from FOFB, “fear of falling behind.” This fear manifests itself in positive ways like intense curiosity, networking with peers and continuous learning. On the flip side, it can also lead to embracing robotic technologies (i.e. bots, programmatic, AI, phone trees,...

Why Jeff Bezos Banned This Tool at Amazon
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January 30, 2019
If you ever have occasion to work or present at Amazon, you’d better leave your PowerPoint slides at home. According to a directive from Jeff Bezos, PowerPoint is now a thing of the past at Amazon. Why? Well, for the world’s richest man, time really is money ($4 million an hour at last count!). And Bezos is convinced that meetings...

Augmented Reality Aided and Abetted 19 Crimes
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January 23, 2019
AI. Machine Learning. Augmented Reality. Today’s CMO has to be both artist and technician to keep up with all the new tools that are coming down the line. Unfortunately, this marriage of technology with creativity often feels forced. If it’s not done properly, the tech/marketing combo can seem disjointed from the overall brand story. Not so with Australian winemaker, 19...

7 Interview Questions for Your Next Marketing Hire
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January 22, 2019
Leadership, whether you’re the CEO, chief marketing officer or chief financial officer, can typically be boiled down to three fundamental tasks: Set the vision, build the team and allocate the resources. Arguably, all three are equally important, yet in this CMO-centric column, we’ve focused more on the first and third, closely examining the strategic and budgetary choices that modern marketers...

Show Don’t Tell
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January 16, 2019
There are two brand videos below. Each is only a few minutes long. Both use emotion to tell a story. But I think you will find that one of the two clearly stands out as a better story – and consequently a better brand story overall – for that company. (Warning: Spoiler Alert) Of course, it’s subjective but I’m guessing...

Yes, TV Advertising Is Still Effective
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January 14, 2019
When Jonathan Beamer took over as CMO of Monster nine months ago, he found a brand that, despite “ten years of neglect” from both a product and marketing perspective, “was still one of the strongest in the job search category.” He credits this residual strength to Monster’s original insight, “that people desperately want fulfilling work,” which remains as true today...

The Key to Your Brand’s Success: Highlight Its Problems
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January 10, 2019
The other day, I was speaking with storytelling guru and “father of modern branding,” David Aaker. One of the best ways to create a “signature story” for your brand, he said, is to magnify the problem that your product or service addresses. As David’s advice was kicking around my cranium, I came across the story of cloud backup and data...