David Crane
Marketing Automation Missed Its Mark – And Why That’s a Good Thing
Only a few years ago, most marketing automation vendors were sprinting to expand their cloud offerings. It was an intense race: most major vendors wanted to be the first all-in-one, customer data platform to automate the entire customer experience — from initial prospect identification...
The Value of Top-Funnel Automation for Sales Pipeline
Fixing top-funnel (TOFU) marketing issues (and automating TOFU processes) is now a major initiative among many demand marketers. Considering CRM’s effect on the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) and marketing automation’s results with the middle, focusing on centralizing, standardizing and automating top-funnel demand gen efforts...
Why Demand Marketers Are Developing Customizable Data Ecosystems
Last September we published an article that discussed why, over the last few years, marketers and the MarTech industry have gradually come to favor customizable marketing technology stacks. The article explains how marketers are no longer seeking all-inclusive, out-of-box marketing systems to simplify their jobs;...
Schizophrenia in B2B Demand Marketing: Why Making Progress Can Be So Hard
Demand marketing is a succinct term. Properly defined, it gets a lot of information across quickly and easily (saving us content marketers from character limits…not to mention the occasional onset of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome). But such simplicity can be problematic. It allows us to...
Optimizing $68 Billion in Media: MarTech for Media and Data Providers
$68 billion will be invested in digital media this year. That’s more than three times what’s being spent on the marketing technology used to processes the data generated by such media investment. As we’re all aware, much of this media spend goes to waste....
25 Demand Orchestration Terms All B2B Marketers Should Know
B2B marketing is evolving quickly from simply generating demand to orchestrating it. Key to this transformation, yet often overlooked by all of us demand practitioners, are the terms that guide and enable measurement of our progress. Definitions are important. They enable colleagues across departments...
What’s Missing From Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy?
Many marketers still only understand the ABM basics: figure out the common characteristics of your most profitable accounts, create a list of similar companies, and then do you your best to engage decision-makers on that account list, usually through sales team efforts. Today’s most...
Top-of-Funnel Marketing: The Next Big MarTech Category?
“As more marketers adopt ABM strategies, they’re finding that top-funnel marketing is the weak link in the chain, and that it too must be optimized with tech to generate full ROI from their ABM investments.” In a TechCrunch article published last month, Ajay...
Why B2B Marketers Struggle to Execute Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has become a “must have” line item for 2016. And this enthusiasm isn’t just a fleeting trend. More than just a highly targeted engagement tactic, a full-fledged ABM program supports the post-sale customer lifecycle, using marketing's toolkit to contribute to the...
Analyze Paid Acquisition Marketing to Improve Demand Orchestration
Orchestrating the diverse platforms, engagement sources and data types that drive demand generation campaigns is one of the most important – and most difficult – jobs in demand marketing. Those same eclectic systems must be marshaled to collect the analytical insights necessary for optimizing...
How to Get Big Payoffs Using a Paid Acquisition Marketing Strategy
Little-recognized fact: Each year, some of the most forward-thinking, technology-driven marketing organizations spend 10x to 20x more on top-funnel leads – via acquisition tactics and services such as lead generation, content syndication, events, webinars, media, third-party social engagement, etc. – than on their marketing...
4 Reasons Why Demand Marketing Orchestration Will Be Huge in 2016
When I was a kid and all my friends were hell-bent on becoming professional football or baseball players, I diverted from the pack. My friends were all sheep, focused on relatively easy sports that mostly depended on one’s ability to throw and catch a...
Should All B2B Demand Marketing Be Account-Based?
I recently participated in a B2B marketing tweet chat. Inevitably, one of the questions focused on 2016 B2B marketing predictions. And almost as inevitably as the question itself, many participants responded with something like “ABM will explode this year.” One tweet actually went so...
How Much Will Poor Data Integrity Cost You in 2016?
While everyone knows marketing data integrity is incredibly important, our industry-wide efforts to address the issue aren’t keeping pace with the proliferation of bad data. In fact, a recent Ascend2 Research survey (November 2015) found that “Improving data quality” was overwhelmingly the No. 1...
Creating Demand Generation Playbooks to Nurture Prospects [Interview]
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to interview Lauren Brubaker, Director or Demand Generation at NetProspex. The fact that she works in a demand gen role for a company that helps demand gen marketers manage marketing data kills several birds with one stone…and I’m...
3 Surprising MarTech Stats and How They Affect You
I came across a great report yesterday – the Walker Sands “State of Marketing Technology 2016: Understanding The New Martech Buyer Journey.” The report comprises survey results from more than 300 marketers involved with marketing technology purchasing decisions. While most of the findings were...
Call It A Comeback: Outbound Takes On Inbound Marketing
“It’s a bit naïve to think that all your potential customers will come knocking at your door.” The problem: Due to the emphasis on inbound marketing that has pervaded the discipline over the last several years, technological innovation has focused on bringing efficiency and new...
What’s Holding You Back From Marketing Automation Success? [Interview]
As we work to understand the opportunities and challenges facing marketing automation users today, it’s important to pick the brains of experts who have honed their core competency in implementing marketing automation strategies. It's for this reason I sat down to interview John Muehling. John...
3 Things B2C Marketers Can Learn From B2B Demand Gen
I know…the title seems a bit condescending to B2C marketers, but I assure you it wasn’t meant that way. There’s many reasons why it’s only “3 Things…” rather than “15 Things…” One of those reasons is that, historically, B2C has been way ahead of B2B...
Can Marketing Be a True Revenue Forecasting Machine? [Interview]
I had a great conversation the other week with Justin Gray, CEO & Chief Marketing Evangelist of LeadMD – a marketing consulting firm that helps Marketo and Salesforce customers increase the effectiveness of their tech investments and marketing operations. This conversation led to a topic that...