Post by Marketing Matters on Dec 25, 2015 1:37:20 GMT
Review Marketing-Sourced Pipeline:You should be doing this monthly, if not bi-weekly. But, if you haven’t done it at all, it’s a good thing to do at the end of the year. High spend budget items such as events, pay-per-click campaigns, and paid lead programs are all easily trackable through a well-aligned marketing automation and CRM pair. You should be able to see how many unique leads your paid efforts sourced, how many leads your paid campaigns influenced, and how much pipeline those campaigns drove. The added bonus of going through this activity is that you should see how much revenue you sourced, depending on the length of your sales cycle. Being able to articulate how much marketing is moving the needle on the business in the universal language of dollars (or pounds, yen, euros, etc.) is the single best way to get more money next year.
Document Processes:You could get hit by a bus next year. Or, more likely, your processes could be a lot more efficient. The exercise of documenting your processes is great because it becomes obvious where they could be better. These documents will also help you onboard new employees in the new year – remember, you need additional headcount to run your social strategy globally across products (not just tweet!) The nature of marketing requires collaboration between roles within the department, but it can also create unnecessary overlap if processes aren’t clearly defined. Creating efficiency across campaigns is the best way to do more with the resources you already have. Well-defined processes also help you clearly communicate the need for additional headcount.
Content Strategy:Do you have a content strategy? It’s one of the latest buzzwords in marketing, but marketers have been strategizing around content for a very long time. They simply may not have put it all together in one place. As a follow-up to the last point, it’s good to document your content strategy. Define everything from key topics pertaining to your business, content types (white paper vs. video), promotion channels (paid media vs. blog). Analyze whether or not your content works together with the content your salespeople use, Google keyword rankings, and your product team’s vision of how you fit in the market. The most important part of reviewing your content strategy at the end of the year is understanding its impact on revenue. Essentially, did your content help elevate the quality and quantity of leads?
Market Awareness and PR:It’s important to be realistic about your position in the market – good or bad. What did you do in the past year to maintain or improve your position and what new things can you do to continue to educate the market? Market awareness is a hard thing to measure, but it’s good to start tracking changes. Pay attention to indicators like analyst reports, number of outlets picking up your press releases, and volume of inbound media requests for interviews. Understanding how market awareness and PR fit into your content strategy also help you drive a higher volume of qualified leads.
Re-Align with Sales:If you don’t already have a handshake agreement with sales on the way leads are being passed to sales and back from sales to marketing, you should use the end of the year to make sure both departments sign off on the process. Creating the process is two-fold: First, you need to make sure your marketing automation platform is set up to pass data the right way to the CRM and vice versa. (Salesfusion is the best marketing automation platform to facilitate that communication for Dynamics, InforCRM, Salesforce, Sugar and Sage. Okay, shameless but honest plug, over.) Secondly, marketing and sales leaders need to shake hands on the volume and quality of leads created. As the marketing leader, you should be able to communicate the prospect experience before they are passed to sales and make sure it correlates with the sales process.
Sales Enablement:Arming salespeople with the right content could be the difference between a closed-won or a closed-lost opportunity. Meet with sales leaders and representatives to understand their needs (You should probably do this at the start of the new year. December is never a good time for sales to be in internal meetings.) Do they need completely new content or just tweaks to older content? Do they have a presentation that would be better utilized as a shareable PDF? As a product company that’s always innovating, we struggle sometimes with making sure our salespeople are armed with the freshest product content.
Build a Yearly Marketing Plan:This is the final and most important step to making the right new year’s resolution and being a good marketing leader. Now that you’ve gone through the exercises in points one through six, you need to determine how they fit into your overall marketing framework? Use the output of these exercises to build tangible goals in each area of marketing. In a revenue-marketing world, these goals should always have a clear path to revenue generation.
Your yearly marketing plan becomes your new years resolution. ‘Getting fit’ requires a real action plan to get there. As an example, ‘driving higher quality leads’ is no longer the new years resolution for a marketing team. Instead, it’s filling holes in our content library to better educate leads in our pre-sales nurture, with a clear action plan on what content is needed to do so. As a marketer, if you resolve to do anything this year, resolve to make an informed, achievable resolution!
Document Processes:You could get hit by a bus next year. Or, more likely, your processes could be a lot more efficient. The exercise of documenting your processes is great because it becomes obvious where they could be better. These documents will also help you onboard new employees in the new year – remember, you need additional headcount to run your social strategy globally across products (not just tweet!) The nature of marketing requires collaboration between roles within the department, but it can also create unnecessary overlap if processes aren’t clearly defined. Creating efficiency across campaigns is the best way to do more with the resources you already have. Well-defined processes also help you clearly communicate the need for additional headcount.
Content Strategy:Do you have a content strategy? It’s one of the latest buzzwords in marketing, but marketers have been strategizing around content for a very long time. They simply may not have put it all together in one place. As a follow-up to the last point, it’s good to document your content strategy. Define everything from key topics pertaining to your business, content types (white paper vs. video), promotion channels (paid media vs. blog). Analyze whether or not your content works together with the content your salespeople use, Google keyword rankings, and your product team’s vision of how you fit in the market. The most important part of reviewing your content strategy at the end of the year is understanding its impact on revenue. Essentially, did your content help elevate the quality and quantity of leads?
Market Awareness and PR:It’s important to be realistic about your position in the market – good or bad. What did you do in the past year to maintain or improve your position and what new things can you do to continue to educate the market? Market awareness is a hard thing to measure, but it’s good to start tracking changes. Pay attention to indicators like analyst reports, number of outlets picking up your press releases, and volume of inbound media requests for interviews. Understanding how market awareness and PR fit into your content strategy also help you drive a higher volume of qualified leads.
Re-Align with Sales:If you don’t already have a handshake agreement with sales on the way leads are being passed to sales and back from sales to marketing, you should use the end of the year to make sure both departments sign off on the process. Creating the process is two-fold: First, you need to make sure your marketing automation platform is set up to pass data the right way to the CRM and vice versa. (Salesfusion is the best marketing automation platform to facilitate that communication for Dynamics, InforCRM, Salesforce, Sugar and Sage. Okay, shameless but honest plug, over.) Secondly, marketing and sales leaders need to shake hands on the volume and quality of leads created. As the marketing leader, you should be able to communicate the prospect experience before they are passed to sales and make sure it correlates with the sales process.
Sales Enablement:Arming salespeople with the right content could be the difference between a closed-won or a closed-lost opportunity. Meet with sales leaders and representatives to understand their needs (You should probably do this at the start of the new year. December is never a good time for sales to be in internal meetings.) Do they need completely new content or just tweaks to older content? Do they have a presentation that would be better utilized as a shareable PDF? As a product company that’s always innovating, we struggle sometimes with making sure our salespeople are armed with the freshest product content.
Build a Yearly Marketing Plan:This is the final and most important step to making the right new year’s resolution and being a good marketing leader. Now that you’ve gone through the exercises in points one through six, you need to determine how they fit into your overall marketing framework? Use the output of these exercises to build tangible goals in each area of marketing. In a revenue-marketing world, these goals should always have a clear path to revenue generation.
Your yearly marketing plan becomes your new years resolution. ‘Getting fit’ requires a real action plan to get there. As an example, ‘driving higher quality leads’ is no longer the new years resolution for a marketing team. Instead, it’s filling holes in our content library to better educate leads in our pre-sales nurture, with a clear action plan on what content is needed to do so. As a marketer, if you resolve to do anything this year, resolve to make an informed, achievable resolution!
A New Year’s Resolution for Every Marketer:
salesfusion Blog
Don't forget to Follow More News From at salesfusion Blog
salesfusion Blog
Don't forget to Follow More News From at salesfusion Blog
Follow A New Blogger:Ideally, follow someone who writes outside the circle of the other bloggers that you already read.
Try A New Piece Of Software:We’re living in the Golden Age of Marketing Software — there are so many new products offering marketers so many new capabilities. Most of it is provided as software-as-a-service, often with free trials, so it’s easy to give something a whirl.
Go To A New Event:Great conferences can be inspiring. You hear new perspectives. You meet new people. You take a little time outside of the office to think in new surroundings. So pick an intriguing event that you haven’t been to before and go.
Try A Bold, New A/B Test:There are plenty of everyday A/B tests to be done out there: optimizations of headlines, calls-to-action, and choice of imagery. By all means, engage in those tests.
Regularly Read The Featured Presentations From SlideShare:SlideShare is one of the best sources of free professional education out there. Not only will you learn about new subjects, but you’ll also see lots of ideas for improving your own presentations.
Go To A New Meetup:Take an evening and go to a new meetup in your area. It’s a good way to network and exchange ideas with other nearby professionals.
Learn How To Code:No, really. I’m not saying that you should switch careers and become a software engineer, but learning how to code will help you collaborate better with professional coders, give you a better appreciation for the software you use, and help you improve your process design skills. (Already know how to code? Learn a new language, framework, or API.)
Read A New Non-Marketing Book:There’s always a list of must-read marketing books each year that you’re bound to either read or have summarized for you by someone else. But take time to read at least one non-fiction book outside the circle of marketing that may broaden your horizons in other directions.
Try Out A New Device:Device proliferation and diversification is one of the more interesting trends that marketers should stay on top of. So go out of your way to try new devices. If you’re an Apple person, try an Android phone or tablet (and vice-versa).
Engage In An Agile Marketing Pilot Project:If you haven’t already, gather a team together to apply the agile marketing methodology to your work for several months on a trial basis, to see what it’s like. (Objections? Here are three myths of agile marketing, debunked.) If you’re already doing agile marketing, push your team at your next retrospective to ask how you could take your game to the next level.
Try A New Piece Of Software:We’re living in the Golden Age of Marketing Software — there are so many new products offering marketers so many new capabilities. Most of it is provided as software-as-a-service, often with free trials, so it’s easy to give something a whirl.
Go To A New Event:Great conferences can be inspiring. You hear new perspectives. You meet new people. You take a little time outside of the office to think in new surroundings. So pick an intriguing event that you haven’t been to before and go.
Try A Bold, New A/B Test:There are plenty of everyday A/B tests to be done out there: optimizations of headlines, calls-to-action, and choice of imagery. By all means, engage in those tests.
Regularly Read The Featured Presentations From SlideShare:SlideShare is one of the best sources of free professional education out there. Not only will you learn about new subjects, but you’ll also see lots of ideas for improving your own presentations.
Go To A New Meetup:Take an evening and go to a new meetup in your area. It’s a good way to network and exchange ideas with other nearby professionals.
Learn How To Code:No, really. I’m not saying that you should switch careers and become a software engineer, but learning how to code will help you collaborate better with professional coders, give you a better appreciation for the software you use, and help you improve your process design skills. (Already know how to code? Learn a new language, framework, or API.)
Read A New Non-Marketing Book:There’s always a list of must-read marketing books each year that you’re bound to either read or have summarized for you by someone else. But take time to read at least one non-fiction book outside the circle of marketing that may broaden your horizons in other directions.
Try Out A New Device:Device proliferation and diversification is one of the more interesting trends that marketers should stay on top of. So go out of your way to try new devices. If you’re an Apple person, try an Android phone or tablet (and vice-versa).
Engage In An Agile Marketing Pilot Project:If you haven’t already, gather a team together to apply the agile marketing methodology to your work for several months on a trial basis, to see what it’s like. (Objections? Here are three myths of agile marketing, debunked.) If you’re already doing agile marketing, push your team at your next retrospective to ask how you could take your game to the next level.
10 New Year’s Resolutions For Marketers:
Scott Brinker/Marketing Land
Don't forget to Follow More Of Scott Brinker at Twitter
Scott Brinker/Marketing Land
Don't forget to Follow More Of Scott Brinker at Twitter
Focus on mobile:Smartphones and tablets are increasing in popularity by the day -- and we don't just mean in terms of sales. Consumers are using mobile devices more and more to conduct transactions, research brands, visit their favorite sites, and read and reply to emails.
So, if you're still under the impression that it's absolutely fine not to worry about optimizing your email campaigns and websites for mobile, it's time to modernize and make some headway in improving your mobile presence. This free mobile marketing guide should help you get started.
Make your website responsive:Making the look and functionality of your site the same on both desktops and mobile devices can go a long way in bringing in new visitors and leads and bettering your bottom line.
Ditch a lot of those outbound efforts:What you'll see from this modification to your marketing is tangible data in your marketing analytics that shows your efforts' effectiveness. It's a lot better than having to guess if those newspaper ads did the trick, wouldn't you say?
Revitalize your content strategy:Google's assertion that quality content will gradually have a bigger impact on SEO.
Because of this, it may be smart to evaluate a variety of types of content that could work for your inbound campaigns. You can determine what's best for your efforts in several ways -- chiefly, going over your analytics from the past several months and engaging in continual A/B testing.
Adjust your social and email strategies as needed:While new, flashy social sites are bound to pop up over the course of the New Year, you'll first want to ensure you master the platforms that have proven to bring substantial ROI for marketers worldwide before putting all of your eggs in a new-and-unproven social media basket.
Similarly, it may be wise to make one of your first priorities of the year to comb over your email marketing metrics to see what may need to be adapted or revised.
Take a look at your buyer personas, too:Truly understand your audience by conducting thorough research on them. Heck, you could even do some online surveys or focus groups to get a better, updated grasp on who they are and what they want (old school, perhaps, but still effective even in this day and age).
The bottom line is, you'll need to comprehend as much about your target demographic(s) as possible to know how to develop your content production, offers, and email and social strategies, among many other efforts.
Consider a homepage revamp:Although you may have already put in a great deal of time, effort, and resources to making a top-tier homepage, a change in buyer persona could mean it's time to give it a facelift.
Even if you haven't altered your persona, it may have been a while since the last time you made sufficient changes to your homepage to account for marketing new products or services, or even rebranding your company.
So, if you're still under the impression that it's absolutely fine not to worry about optimizing your email campaigns and websites for mobile, it's time to modernize and make some headway in improving your mobile presence. This free mobile marketing guide should help you get started.
Make your website responsive:Making the look and functionality of your site the same on both desktops and mobile devices can go a long way in bringing in new visitors and leads and bettering your bottom line.
Ditch a lot of those outbound efforts:What you'll see from this modification to your marketing is tangible data in your marketing analytics that shows your efforts' effectiveness. It's a lot better than having to guess if those newspaper ads did the trick, wouldn't you say?
Revitalize your content strategy:Google's assertion that quality content will gradually have a bigger impact on SEO.
Because of this, it may be smart to evaluate a variety of types of content that could work for your inbound campaigns. You can determine what's best for your efforts in several ways -- chiefly, going over your analytics from the past several months and engaging in continual A/B testing.
Adjust your social and email strategies as needed:While new, flashy social sites are bound to pop up over the course of the New Year, you'll first want to ensure you master the platforms that have proven to bring substantial ROI for marketers worldwide before putting all of your eggs in a new-and-unproven social media basket.
Similarly, it may be wise to make one of your first priorities of the year to comb over your email marketing metrics to see what may need to be adapted or revised.
Take a look at your buyer personas, too:Truly understand your audience by conducting thorough research on them. Heck, you could even do some online surveys or focus groups to get a better, updated grasp on who they are and what they want (old school, perhaps, but still effective even in this day and age).
The bottom line is, you'll need to comprehend as much about your target demographic(s) as possible to know how to develop your content production, offers, and email and social strategies, among many other efforts.
Consider a homepage revamp:Although you may have already put in a great deal of time, effort, and resources to making a top-tier homepage, a change in buyer persona could mean it's time to give it a facelift.
Even if you haven't altered your persona, it may have been a while since the last time you made sufficient changes to your homepage to account for marketing new products or services, or even rebranding your company.
7 Marketing Resolutions to Start the New Year Right:
Matthew Bushery/HubSpot
Don't forget to Follow More From Matthew Bushery at Twitter
Matthew Bushery/HubSpot
Don't forget to Follow More From Matthew Bushery at Twitter
These are some resolutions from a few different authors from different years. It's interesting to compare and contrast their advice and see how they relate and differ from one another.