If you’ve ever worked at an agency, you know the value of client education. Results aren’t persuasive if reports seem like a jumble of acronyms. Trend lines aren’t impressive if they track metrics that appear distant from business goals.
The concept of “economic moats” came from a 1999 Fortune article by Warren Buffett:
The key to investing is [. . .] determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.
Economic moats remain tethered to investing: A bigger moat makes a stock a better bet. But the implications are broader, for companies large and small.
What answer is a searcher looking for? For sustainable, valuable search traffic, you’d better provide it.
You spend plenty of marketing dollars trying to get someone to your form. But how much goes to waste at that stage? According to data from Formisimo, roughly two-thirds of those who start filling out a form never complete it.
Why? If you’re not tracking form analytics, you don’t know. The data between a pageview and a form completion (or abandonment) is missing.
Choosing the right account-based marketing software can be a messy process.
On YouTube, a keyword-targeted pre-roll ad might show the same video to a CEO and an intern.
On Facebook, an ideal customer may log on to see photos of a new nephew, not to check out a 30-second demo of your SaaS product.
LinkedIn has the potential to resolve both shortcomings:
Apple created a monster. Every September, millions expect Tim Cook to change the world. Steve Jobs actually did a few times. But, increasingly, the Apple hype-fests are a marketing—not a product—showcase.
You invest in your employees—mentoring, conferences, training. Yet over time, unused knowledge fades. Employees take other jobs. How do you protect your investment?
U.S. companies spend billions on training each year. What about marketing departments? How much do they spend? What are they getting out of it? And what are they struggling to solve?
The classic graph for the product lifecycle is a sales curve that progresses through stages:
Each stage of the product lifecycle has implications for marketing. But an MBA-friendly curve rarely translates to reality. The goal of product lifecycle marketing is not to match the curve but to outline what may work best now and plan for the future.