In a surprising turn of events, there was recently a bit of noise around a distinctly non-controversial statement made about marketing on Twitter. A CMO’s job is to execute the CEO’s vision, just better — Jason ✨ ✨ Lemkin 🦄 (@jasonlk) January 25, 2019 But as is often the case on Twitter, even though that […]
Is marketing the press secretary or attorney general? Read More »
(This interview is a companion piece to the post, Let’s Steal From The Marketing Technology Supergraphic, all about the strategy, execution and history of ‘Brinker’s Beast’.) I’ve always admired Scott Brinker from afar (and sometimes, awkwardly, from a-near). He’s without doubt the smartest marketing technology analyst-blogger out there, with an unparalleled signal-to-noise ratio. He does
An interview with Scott Brinker, Martech Super-raphic Guy Read More »
The problem with the ‘customer journey’ We often refer to the ‘customer journey’. It’s a nice idea, but a problematic one. There’s a reason that Doug made it one of his Three Poisonous Metaphors. Normally when we talk about a customer journey, we’re not really talking about the customer. We call it their journey, but
Why the customer journey is a hero’s journey. Sort of. Read More »
As our recent A Stakeholder Through the Heart piece explains, we’ve been kind of obsessing about stakeholder management lately. It’s pretty simple: when everyone’s aligned around the same goals and same definition of what good looks like, there’s nothing you can’t do. And when your extended team is misaligned, there’s almost nothing you can do.
Let’s face it, none of us are creating content in a vacuum. We all have bosses to please, internal (and external) customers to serve, senior executives to… sacrifice lambs to. We all have stakeholders. People with a real stake in our success. Like sales people. And product managers. And brand ‘custodians’ (I’m picturing a janitor
Marketing is a delusional profession. We’re so used to pushing our Kool-Aid™ at people that we’ve lost our ability to see our own Kool-Aid™. (It’s the same reason that fish have no word for ‘water’). But delusions—and their weaker cousins illusions—can totally warp our marketing. They allow us to form a picture of our prospects
Five years ago, to the day, we published a slideshare called Crap: Why The Single Biggest Threat To Content Marketing Is Content Marketing. This one: Until that day, our content about content marketing had performed pretty well. Our blog was starting to hit some semblance of a stride. We were proud of getting a few
Five years of Crap content marketing: an anniversary Read More »
There are two kinds of content marketers in B2B: Plumbers and Persuaders: Plumbers are focused on the pipes, couplings and elbow joints of demand generation. They design increasingly complex nurture flows, set them up in their chosen marketing automation platforms and (I hope and trust) link them to their CRM systems so you can associate
If I’m ever asked about my ‘favourite marketing metrics’ (it happens when you live the B2B thug life), I usually start with a stock phrase, “Well, revenue is the mother of all metrics, but short of that, I like…” But, even as I say it, I know in my heart that it’s wrong. (Then why
Why Revenue is the wrong metric for B2B marketing Read More »
Due to a traumatic early experience (high school graduation speech—please never ask), I’ve always been a reluctant public speaker. That was fine for most of my career because no one ever asked me to speak in public. People had asked me to stop speaking but never invited me to start. When I did start to
7 things every content marketer can learn from TED Talks Read More »
