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How to Interview and Hire the Right Content Marketing Manager for Your Company

When it comes to content marketing, I firmly believe that, other than “buy in” from management, the most important factor that will impact your ability to have incredible success comes down to the position of “content marketing manager.” Granted, this position has many names in the business world, especially because it didn’t really exist a [...]

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3 Ways to Be Your Customers’ BFF

Author: Amanda Nelson

The first step to marketing automation success, or really just marketing success, is understanding your customers. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of your customers, and having the empathy for your customers. I’m still surprised by how many marketers have never actually talked to a customer.

Understanding your customers allows you to create accurate personas, which helps you target your customers based on specific categories. Being able to do this makes writing and sending those emails easier. I’ve put together a few tips to help you understand your customer & communicate better:

1. Have the right customer data

In order to accurately understand and communicate with your customers, you need their correct contact information. This seems simple, but there is more to your data than you might realize. Start by reviewing the existing customer data in your database. It’s easy to look at your database and believe that it’s the right information. However, even a 1% mistake such as the wrong LinkedIn profile, can result in 99% effectiveness instead of 100%. Look at your data cleanliness holistically and don’t assume that your data is clean. You need to be certain of it. Be actively aware of the bad customer data that exists.

51% of marketers cannot ensure that their data is fresh. There is a distinct lack of awareness of how pervasive dirty data is—we often see only a shadow of what’s going on. Which means that it’s entirely likely that you have significant amounts of dirty data and you can’t see the core issues. To combat this, run some tests in Marketo to determine what might be wrong with your customer data. For example, create a Smart List of everyone with a common name, such as Tom or John, and see if there’s a large number of duplicates. If you have one mistake in your database, a good rule of thumb is to assume that there’s probably ten more that you can’t find. As you dig through the list of names, you’ll probably find some mistakes that are worth cleaning up and improving.

Think of your database as an evolving, living, breathing thing. It’s a flower that needs constant tending, and even if you take care of it, it will decay over time. Know how to prune it, clean it, and when to pull it out and put in new flowers (contacts).

2. Get on customer calls

Now that your existing data is clean, it’s time to start getting new and better data about your customers. Despite our efforts as marketers to target and develop personas for our ideal target customer, oftentimes we’ve never actually met a customer. Salespeople meet customers all the time. Salespeople know their customers, and their customers’ struggles.

Get on a customer call. Spend a day with a salesperson. Understand the words that they use and what they’re thinking about. You’ll probably find it’s very different from the words you use in marketing.

The actual challenges that customers face are going to be significantly more nuanced and perhaps more subtle than what you’re communicating about. With familiarity, you can use this first-hand information in combination with your data to communicate more effectively with your customers.

3. Write one email to one customer

We’re all told to understand our customers in order to effectively market to them, but do you truly know them the way you know your neighbor, a colleague or a good friend? One way to find out is to write an email to one customer. With your new insights about your customers from meeting them and ensuring your data about them is accurate, you need to think about the personalization and the details of your communication. Then, think about that communication as you multiply your efforts by 10,000.

Sending a message to a customer is the real purpose of marketing personalization. Personalization is not designed for you. Personalization is not designed to make it easier for you to segment your database. It’s not designed for you to run A/B tests. Personalization is designed for your customer, so they have a customized experience and interaction with you. You should personalize your communications it if it will help you build trust and maintain your relationship with them.

Knowing your customer is vital to building a relationship with them over time and then maintaining it. To be successful and effective, all marketers need to know their customer. With these tips, you’ll have the tools in your arsenal to effective reach and communicate with your customers today and going forward.

For more on how to clean your database and create a relevant, personal experience for your customers, check out the Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.

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3 Ways to Be Your Customers’ BFF was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Marketers Will Define Company Strategy

Author: Sanjay Dholakia

We’re living in a Marketing First world. If you haven’t yet experienced this shift for yourself—bear with me; it’s coming.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve dug deeply into the results of “The Rise of the Marketer,” a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, to highlight some of the study’s key insights. Last week, we explored the changing attitudes towards customer engagement. This week, I’d like to explore another finding from the survey—how marketers will play a larger role in company strategy. This is a huge development, and a dramatic shift in many organizations from how marketing was asked to contribute in the past.

Marketers Will Earn a Position on the Starting Line

In our survey, when asked if marketing would shape company strategies over the next three to five years, roughly 80% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it would.

As we heard in our previous conversation with visionary Seth Godin, marketers have historically been like runners in the final leg of the relay race. We take a product or service and determine how to help it reach the intended audience. But this approach is going to change. In fact, the race will be redesigned entirely, and it will no longer be a relay. Instead of being handed the baton, marketers will be in the race from the beginning, playing a greater role, and having more influence in setting strategy to determine which product, service, or market a company should even pursue.

Why is this happening? Because, the shopping and buying process has changed forever. Buyers have more information at their fingertips than ever before and they are using it to self-educate. They’re reaching out to companies later and later in their decision-making cycles. As a result, if a company hopes to engage and influence that shopper, they have to do it earlier. This new digital, social, mobile world, is the domain of the marketer. That means that marketing is the only function that has a chance to influence buyers before they have all but made their decisions—putting the marketer in the driver’s seat, or at the starting line—either way, it’s Marketing First.

Marketers everywhere should be excited about this. Across the board, marketing has the chance to play a bigger role in company strategy than ever before. Validating this fact, in our survey, “Strategy and Planning” was nearly tied for the top spot in terms of skills that marketers felt like they needed to develop in their organizations .

When you look more closely at the data, you can see this change emerging even further; marketing teams are doing far more, and they expect to expand their reach in the future. Here’s more from our survey:

• 75% of marketers believe they will be responsible for the end-to-end engagement and ownership over the customer’s lifetime—not just marketing, but support and continued engagement as well.


• More than 80% of marketers agree with the statement, “We need to change the structure and design of our marketing organization to meet the needs of our business over the next three to five years.”

When asked which areas of business areas marketing teams will drive in the next three to five years, the answers were also intriguing: The focus on advertising and branding will decrease compared to today. More than 70% of respondents indicated that marketers are currently focused in these areas. When asked if their focus would remain the same in the future, only about 40% believed they would even have a person focused there. Instead, marketers will put more energy, time, and effort into areas such as strategy, digital, and customer lifecycle engagement..

From Participating to Leading

In many ways, this is already happening. Marketers have been leading strategy for years in many organizations. And, it has been accelerating in recent years as marketers have become increasingly responsible for customer relationships, and, perhaps even more importantly, increasingly responsible for being the source of customer engagement data. The marketer knows the customer better than anyone else in this digital world. They are the keepers of customer data, which means they can spot trends before anyone else can—trends in customer behavior, needs, and interests. These are core components of a successful business strategy.

• Marketers Know Their Customers: Marketers share a deep intimacy with their customers that is simply unmatched by any other business function in a company. We understand what channels customers’ use, where they come from, and how their unique backgrounds contribute to their unique behaviors. This ability to resonate with customers is absolutely critical to business growth.


• Marketers Know How to Leverage Technology: It’s a digital-first world, and marketers have a stronger command of the most forward-thinking technology. We know and use the tools needed to better understand our audiences and reach them more effectively.


• Marketers Drive Revenue: With better technology and tools, marketers can effectively demonstrate our ability to drive revenue for our companies. With the data to prove our initiatives are driving revenue, we’ve earned a seat in the boardroom.

If you are the steward of the customer and you are driving revenue, you probably should have a strong hand in leading company strategy—don’t you think?

I, for one, am excited to see how this Marketing First world develops. How is this movement toward the next generation of marketing happening in your organizations? Do you have any insight or personal experiences to add? If so, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think.

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Marketers Will Define Company Strategy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Transforming your Old Website into an Inbound Lead Generating Machine [Video Interview Angela Hicks ]

In today’s interview I get a chance to talk to Angela Hicks who works for HubSpot as part of their academy team. We discuss how important it is for companies to transform their old websites into lead generating machines. Angela and I talk about how you can build a “Frankensystem” by bolting platforms together to [...]

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10 Web Design Mistakes that are Guaranteed to Create a Bad First Impression

Over the past year I’ve taught around 60 or so Content Marketing Workshops to business of all shapes and sizes around the world, and during this time I’ve consistently found one of the most meaningful “Aha” moments business owners and marketing teams can have occurs the instant they see other people—especially those that have never [...]

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4 Steps to Running a Successful Twitter Chat

Author: Shanna Cook

So you want to run a Twitter Chat—awesome! Before you jump in and get started, let’s dig into this question: what is a twitter chat, really?

Twitter chats are a scheduled gathering of people online to discuss a topic—really it could be anything. They are an easy, no-commitment way to meet people with similar backgrounds or interests online and exchange ideas in an organized question and answer structure. There is always a host that pushes the questions and advances the conversation, and sometimes there is a guest of honor who answers them.

Twitter chats are one of my favorite ways to personally engage with others online—meet new people who share a common interest, grow my own personal knowledge in a vertical, and help build my personal brand. I also don’t mind the fact that after participating in one, my follower count usually sees a little bump—it’s a total bonus—who doesn’t like more friends?

Both brands and personal accounts can experience the benefits from participating in—or hosting—a Twitter chat, but where do you start? What are the do’s and don’ts of running a twitter chat? Rest assured, tweeps, I’ve got your back with a step-by-step list:

1) Do Your Research: Partner Up!

To the outside world, it’s pretty easy to set up a Twitter chat. All you have to do is pick a date, time, topic, chat-specific hashtag, and promote it. But let me pull back the social media curtain for you and expose you to the prep work that goes on behind the scene.

There are some recurring chats that have a strong following and always focus on a similar topic or industry (running, fashion, advertising, etc.). Before you go to create a new one, be sure to do your research and see if the chat that you want to have is already happening. It’s ok to create a new one, but don’t host a duplicate chat at the same competing time. Instead, consider joining the other chat or seeing if there’s an opportunity to partner with the host and be their headliner guest. Joining forces will make the workload lighter and combining your audiences will help you expand your potential audience and reach.

2) Plan, and then, Plan Some More

Once you have done your research, it’s time to enter the planning stage. Start by considering the geographic location and unifying interests of your fan base and potential audience. We recently bumped up the timing of our Twitter chats with Advertising Week from 10AM PST to 8AM PST to make it easier for more of our European fans to join in.

Your topic likely won’t appeal to every single one of your thousands of followers, but you can choose a high level, specific theme that you think will resonate with them and be generally engaging. For example, Advertising Week hosts #AWchat every Tuesday morning and Marketo joins as the headliner guest once per month. Our past three topics have focused on content marketing, real-time marketing, and Super Bowl advertising, each of which generally appeals to a large variety of marketers but aren’t too restrictive, which allows us to do a deep dive within each topic.

Most Twitter chats last 1 hour. While this seems pretty long, they actually fly by especially once momentum picks up a few minutes into the chat. For the structure of your chat, I recommend that the hosts pose 6 questions over the course of the hour, as you need time to tweet that the chat is starting, introduce any guest of honor, post the question, reply to your favorite answers, and close out the chat by sending a thank you tweet (ideally with a call to action). It’s important to remember that your chat is a conversation, not a 1-way street, so it’s essential to find the right balance with the number of questions. Try not to push out more questions than you can actually answer and engage with and be careful not to post too few that you let the conversation drop.

If you have a guest of honor for the chat, be sure to share the questions with them ahead of time so they can draft their answers. Guests help draw in a larger audience by combining forces (or fans) on social media. This creates an awesome positive ripple effect which is the stuff of a Social Media Manager’s dream. Providing the questions ahead of time to the guest (and only the guest) allows her to pre-write her responses, so she has more time to engage with the people who join the chat.

3) Promote Your Chat!

You’d never throw a party and then not invite anyone. My favorite way to promote a twitter chat is to write a blog post on the partner’s website (assuming they have a blog option), because it 1) helps feed their content machine, 2) exposes your company to their audience, and 3) drives their audience to your social accounts. Check out my most recent Twitter chat promotional post on the Advertising Week Social Club blog. Bet you didn’t realize it was a Twitter chat promo until you got to the end when you saw the call-to-action paragraph!

Additionally, make creative promotional assets to post on Twitter that introduce your fans to the topic and your guest. Be sure to promote your post on the right channels and always include the hashtag for your chat. Your Facebook fans might not also be your fans on Twitter, so promote your chat to the right audiences on the right platform.

4) Have Fun—It’s an Online Party!

You’ve done your research, picked a partner, developed a topic and questions; and promoted it with the hashtag. Now it’s time to start the party! If you’re hosting your chat with a partner, be sure to jump on the phone with them for the hour. It’s amazing how easy it can be to miss a tweet, especially in the larger chats, so having them on the line as an extra set of eyes is essential. Remember that you always, always, always, need to tweet with the chat hashtag. Otherwise, your incredibly insightful or sassy reply will be lost in the vast Twitterverse.

If you’re the host, be sure to post every question with “Q1, Q2, Q3…” and if you are a participant, then always reply with “A1, A2, A3…” It’ll help provide a consistent flow in your feed as the chat happens and helps people follow and read through all of the questions and answers in order, both during the event and after the chat is over.

Phew! You’ve made it through your first Twitter chat! #PatYourselfOnTheBack! What are your favorite Twitter chats for marketers? Have you ever hosted a chat? Share your experiences below in the comments.

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4 Steps to Running a Successful Twitter Chat was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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[Ebook] Build Trust With An Engagement Marketing Content Strategy: Spotlight on Financial Services

Author: Shyna Zhang

When’s the last time that you visited your local bank teller? Met in-person with a financial advisor? It’s probably been a while, and you wouldn’t be alone—more and more consumers are electing to engage with financial services organizations on their terms. Chances are, you’ve turned to your network of friends to ask for recommendations on where to turn to get a car or house loan. Like many consumers today, you probably conducted your own research, read reviews, and asked colleagues for their advice about that next investment you’re looking to make.

Because of the competitive environment this new, self-directed customer creates, Financial Services organizations are increasingly focused on building personalized and meaningful relationships with individuals to win their trust. To do this, many are turning to engagement marketing, specifically deployed through content, to help them accelerate the buyer lifecycle and build trust. An engagement marketing strategy focuses on reaching out and communicating with people as individuals, based on who they are, and wherever they are in their journey to purchase. Implementing this strategy requires understanding your customer personas, how they move through the purchase funnel, and the most effective ways to engage them at each stage of their journey.

To do this effectively, you need targeted content marketing.

Just like you, customers today research their options and seek answers to their questions online without ever directly contacting a brand. When it comes to finances, people and businesses look for actionable advice, and they do it independently—whether it is on a brands’ website or a news outlet. As a result, brands need to anticipate their customer needs and prepare to accompany them on their journey, providing relevant marketing materials to inform the customer and build trust.

Following the content pillar approach can help ensure your messages attract the right potential customers while also offering you the benefit of scalability:

1. Map Your Buyer Personas: Enterprise companies target an average of six different audiences with their content marketing. By understanding your audiences—how they differ and what unique challenges they face—you can more deeply engage prospects on topics that align with the value proposition of your business.

2. Breakdown Silos: Marketers need to prioritize the customer, ensure they deliver consistent messaging, and coordinate goals across channels. Creating a high quality, customer-centric asset that can be broken down and shared across channels allows financial services professionals to address common collaboration and coordination issues. Because the derivative materials come from the same foundation, a content pillar approach allows financial services marketers to retain a cohesive voice across teams and channels.

3. Create Success through Efficiency, Scalability, and Distribution: Marketers need to be able to track projects, give stakeholders visibility into progress, and construct repeatable processes for the ideation, creation, distribution, and analysis of customer-focused content. This requires integration and consolidation across teams and technologies. Streamlining processes can start before or in-line with the deployment of a tool to help you automate and centralize your content project management.

Do you use the content pillar approach? How have you worked to create customer trust for your brand? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below.

Interesting in learning more? Click here to download our latest ebook—Build Trust with an Engagement Marketing Content Strategy: Spotlight on Financial Services by Kapost and Marketo.

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[Ebook] Build Trust With An Engagement Marketing Content Strategy: Spotlight on Financial Services was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Learning Inbound Marketing as You Work ~ Interview with Mark Kilens from HubSpot

Learning Inbound Marketing with Mark Kilens In todays interview we get to talk with Mark Kilens from HubSpot about education, HubSpot, Inbound, and learning as you work. Mark shares with us why HubSpot has a major focus on education. How it ties back to their three pillars of delighting their customers. We talk about how [...]

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