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Friday, 2 October 2015
Thoughts on Sustainable Content, Marketing, and More: Weekly Forum Update
Additionally, we’ve got news from WebmasterWorld and Threadwatch about Google’s “First Click Free” policy, Microsoft’s partnership with Baidu, the 3-Pack Snack Pack, and more. Grab a mug of cocoa and dive in!
These are all fresh discussions, so if you want to join the conversation you should register an account ASAP!
Distributing Quality Content for Links
Getting backlinks depends, to a degree, on making sure that your content is being shown to the right audience. Everyone wants a quick solution when it comes to promotion, but the problem with quick-and-easy is that it isn’t always sustainable.
In order to maintain a presence in a community, you need to be a part of it. Once you become a part of it, you can share your content – which may result in links. As fathom writes in a related discussion,
“Your first attempt will be somewhat lackluster, but each time you do it your reputation will grow…Each time you start a new project reach a little bit higher in the niche segment.”
Check out the thread for more tips and discussion!
Google Changes “First Click Free” Policy For Google News and Search
Google’s First Click Free policy was designed as a compromise between users, Google, and publishers. It allowed users to gain access to articles, but it also honored the subscription programs of publishers since only five clicks per day were free to users.
However, that click limit will be decreasing to three in the near future. Join the users of WebmasterWorld to speculate why, and to talk about what this means for publishers with paid subscriptions!
A Rant About the Sustainable Content Factory
EGOL on Cre8asiteforums has a great thread about the state of content producers today. There are several factors to consider when you’re looking for a writer. You want someone who is a trained and competent writer, but you also want someone with a degree of expertise.
Getting one or both of those costs money. Getting neither could cost even more. How? Well, writes EGOL, it could cost you in time spent editing the work you receive.
“Both…the recent college grad and the intern are more costly for writing content for my website than if I would write the content myself, unless the person is going to be with me long term.”
Outsourcing your content often means getting it written by freelancers, interns, and people with either limited writing ability, technical knowledge, or both.
“Hiring a content production service is going to be the next huge negative return ‘investment’ that lots of website owners blow their money on,” says EGOL.
comScore’s search traffic ratings have been released, and once again Google is down and Bing is up. The changes are minor, but Google has been steadily loosing a trickle of traffic to Bing for almost a year now.
Does that mean that they’ve finally peaked? Mobile search numbers might indicate that they haven’t – they’re just moving in a new direction.
StatCounter indicates that they control a whopping “nearly 90% of mobile search in the US,” writes a user of Threadwatch.
Concerned About Google’s 3-Pack Snack Pack?
A Threadwatch reporter dug up an article from Search Engine Land assessing the impact of Google’s new Snack Pack. While “the change appeared to be dramatic” when it was first announced, the reality a month out is that
“it appears the drama may have been more in our minds than in our traffic.”
So, in a way, it might have been another Mobilegeddon situation of too much hype. Writes user Mr-X,
“Whatever hit you might have taken this time around to localized, organic CTR might have been compensated by a boost in Google My Business traffic,” paraphrasing the article.
Limited Free Access to News Sites Must Be Working!
On Cre8asiteforums, EGOL has another great thread about limited free access news sites – otherwise known as paid subscriptions with limits.
Visitors to these news sites get so many free articles before they are prompted to subscribe in order to read more. These free articles renew daily, weekly, or monthly depending on the site’s policy.
“The New York Times, Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, Wall Street Journal and even Slate now have some system of limiting, throttling or blocking a visitor’s access to at least some of their content unless they pay for a subscription,” writes EGOL.
It seems to be popular with both publishers AND users, writes user iamlost – users get to see the headlines and a blurb, while premium and in-depth content is provided as a premium service. Is this the way of the future?
As Kim Krause-Berg comments, even local papers are starting to adopt to this model.
Microsoft Partners With Baidu For Windows 10 in China
WebmasterWorld users speculate that this is a matter of priorities – Microsoft is more concerned with spreading Windows 10 than it is with making Bing a presence in China.
“Bing was never that good with Chinese search to begin with,” writes user bill. “Back in 2012, they even de-emphasized their Chinese language search to focus on the English language portion of the China market.”
So it sounds like Microsoft isn’t sacrificing that much – but they might be gaining a great deal. The partnership will make it “easy for Baidu customers to upgrade to Windows 10,” and Microsoft promises to provide “local browsing and search experiences [for a] custom experience for customers in China.”
The best of both worlds? Quite a savvy move! Join the folks of WebmasterWorld to share your opinion!
The post Thoughts on Sustainable Content, Marketing, and More: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
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Designing Fly Landing Pages – Part 3: Trust
First impressions are important – especially on landing pages.
After the first two parts on Focus and Messaging, your landing pages are, hopefully, more focused and carefully crafted to deliver the right message to your audience.
After all, you did read them right?
Landing pages are trust exercises. When people visit your landing page, you don’t have much time to convince them that they can trust you enough to give you their information. It’s important that you put your best foot forward to make a good first impression.
This time around we’re going to take a look at the role trust plays in landing pages and how we can leverage it to increase conversions.
Social Proof
People are more trusting when others approve of it.
We tend to place greater value on things that others have already approved of. Like it or not, we’re influenced by what others say. If you show that others endorse, support, or use your content on your landing page, this will help to add some social credibility.
Whether it’s through adding customer testimonials or by showing how many people shared your page on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, these methods can provide a massive boost to trust.
Testimonials
Real people endorsing your content shows that your content has made a positive impact on their lives. Including testimonials and a picture of the customer that wrote it can really increase conversions.
In a recent article, Fast Company reported that female shoppers no longer trust celebrity endorsements. While including endorsements can be an effective strategy of increasing trust, it’s important to analyze your intended audience to draft a message that appeals to them. Sprinkle a bit of segmentation and personalization and you’ll be able to offer different testimonials to different groups.
Wait… that sounds a bit familiar. Well, it should be! This was in Part 2: Messaging!
Social Media
Showing the number of people that have shared your content shows your visitors how the masses receive your landing page. If something has been shared a lot, I’d be more inclined to pay more attention since it’s got to contain something valuable to make it shareworthy.
Partner Co-branding
Trusted brands and people make your content more credible.
It really depends on the type of landing page you’re designing and what you’re offering your audience, but if you’re able to add a partner’s logo on there (with their consent, of course), this can do wonders to increase trust.
When partnering with other brands through webinars or the like, throw up their logo and a picture of the speakers. Not only do you increase recognition and trust through co-branding, seeing a person’s face will help to make your page more trustworthy. Double whammy!
In a webinar series we ran recently, we partnered with Lattice Engines, SnapApp, LookbookHQ, and Terminus to showcase the marketing tech stack over the course of 5 days. On the landing page for this, we laid out their partnered logos to promote brand recognition.
Resource Proof
Put the value proposition front and center.
If you’re providing a resource, give your audience a sneak peek at what they’re going to get when they enter in their information. It’s an easy way to increase trust by showing that your resource actually exists and that your landing page is not there to collect their information and send them spammy emails.
I sure hope not anyway…
In our landing page for Forrester Research’s latest report on The B2B CMO’s New Role In Sales Enablement, we made sure to include an image of the report that the visitor would get after filling out the form. Having that sense of expectation increases trust in the value that your landing page claims to offer.
And that’s it for Trust!
In two weeks, we’re going to continue and conclude this series with the aptly named “Continuity”, the series’ last part on designing fly landing pages. There we’ll take a look at the importance of maintaining and continuously improving your landing pages after the launch.
Thanks for reading and catch you later!
The post Designing Fly Landing Pages – Part 3: Trust appeared first on Vidyard.
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5 New (And Effective) Ways To Measure Event ROI
Events drive leads for sales and are a powerful networking tool that enables companies and brands to connect with their audiences and clients face to face. At least, that’s what we know. But as any marketer, sales rep and event organizer will tell you, qualifying those collected leads is anything but certain.
Why?
Because not all leads are created equal, and every individual at your event has their own unique journey to the final sale.
According to Statista, only 14% of B2B marketers’ budgets are being allocated for in-person trade shows in 2015. Because of this, event marketers are pressured to find the metrics that matter when it comes to proving value.
Traditionally most event organizers and sales reps have focused on the data that is generated before and after an event, which gives a good picture of who showed up, but not much else.
Here are 5 ways that event marketers can use the data that is being generated before, during, and after their events to create a richer experience for their attendees, while providing insights into the value of their show.
1. Social Listening
Using social media to track activity pre and post-event is nothing new, but keeping up with what your audiences are saying during your event could lead to valuable clues and insights to help optimize your event for the future. EventTrack revealed that nearly 77% of event marketers use social media as a key engagement strategy before an event. But that number drops to 61% after the event. It seems silly that most organizers would disappear on social after their event is over, and even sillier that we wouldn’t be prioritizing social media during events!
Try setting up a social listening dashboard to track your event’s unique hashtag. (And if you don’t have one of those, you’d better jump on that bandwagon!) Look for valuable clues such as sentiment, number of posts, images, etc. from your audience. Are they posting quotes from speakers who inspired them? Or are they complaining that the speaker went on too long? Are they posting a ton of photos about a specific exhibitor’s booth or product that they’re excited about? Those comments can go a long way to tailoring future events and finding the content that’s really connecting with your audience.
Using that social data will help you identify engaged attendees who really are invested in your event. Or use that social data to generate post-event content that you know your attendees loved by sending out notes from your most popular speakers, creating graphics based on trending quotes from your sessions, point audiences towards presentations that were used during keynotes, post photos of people having fun and enjoying themselves, or send out a newsletter highlighting all the great social activity that your event attracted to make attendees feel special.
Some tools you can use to set up an easy to use social listening dashboard:
- Hootsuite – Set up an alert for your event’s unique hashtag or name and collect all social mentions on your registered social accounts. The mobile app will allow for real-time responses and monitoring no matter where you are on the floor.
- Google Alerts – An “oldie but goodie” in terms of being able to have all mentions from around the web about your conference’s hashtag or name sent directly to your email account.
- Mention – A personal favorite of mine for setting up a dedicated dashboard to listen for any mention of your show. Mention pulls in everything from blogs, to forums, to social posts all in one dedicated location.
2. In-Event Surveys
Want to know what your audience thought about the speakers or exhibitors you’ve booked? Ask them while the content is still fresh in their mind! Sending out surveys during or the night of an event is a great way to gauge interest from your attendees and an excellent way to collect additional data that you can use when planning for your next one. How long did they spend at the session? Did they enjoy the topic? Is there anything else they wish the speaker would have covered? What topics are they most interested in?
Don’t forget to look at the metrics that come with your survey as well, such as open rate, bounce rate, time on page, etc. Those people who took the time to give you feedback might be qualified leads waiting to be added to your sales pipeline! And what a great excuse to follow up with them to thank them for their time, whether the response was good or bad!
Don’t forget to pool your exhibitors for their thoughts and feedback on the event. They are in the trenches talking to your attendees, and they can probably offer some unique insights as to how they thought the event’s marketing worked, what could be done better, attendee attitude, etc.
Some survey tools you can use during your event to maximize attendee response:
- Your Mobile App – If your conference has a dedicated mobile app that allows for surveying, this is an effective way to reach those who are already engaged and using your content to find their way around. Create surveys on the fly or work with your speakers to craft a questionnaire that will give valuable insights.
- Email – If you’re collecting attendee email addresses at your event (and you really should), then you already have a direct way to connect with them to gain insights. Not everyone will respond during the event, because hopefully they’re still engaged with the event itself, but you might be surprised who answers after the day is over.
- SurveyMonkey – A powerful and free survey tool to help you manage the email addresses, which allows organizers to “jazz up” their content a bit. Pro tip: Add your company’s branding to legitimize the messaging and increase response rate.
3. Targeted Messaging
If you’re tracking movement during your event using beacon or RFID technology, then you have a good idea of where people are gravitating on the floor. Most event organizers send out messaging via their conference app, or using emails to “remind” attendees of upcoming speakers, special offers, etc.
Use that digital data to help understand which messaging and attractions at your event really resonated with attendees or inspired them to attend. For example, you can correlate how many individuals were scanned going to the events that you messaged them about via your conference app or use the email analytics to understand who was reading your content and who wasn’t. Not only will you have a better understanding of what messaging really caught people’s attention, you can prove to speakers, exhibitors, and your boss, which partners you should be securing for future events who will really drive attendance and traffic.
4. Gamification
Gamification is a trend that’s worth looking into when it comes to live events. What better way to engage attendees and get them excited about exhibitors, speakers, and parties than by creating a fun game with swag to encourage them to discover?
Some examples of successful gamification methods would be:
- Scavenger hunts – just as much fun as when you were a kid, but now you’re competing for grown-up prizes, and there’s networking along the way.
- Photo quests – encourage attendees to find locations or people to snap photos of that they can post to their social channels; it gets them to use your event’s hashtag, while promoting how much fun they’re having (and again, there’s prizes).
- Social check-ins – getting people to check in at certain event locations can be difficult, but not when you incentivize them or make it part of a bigger game!
- Networking challenges – Who’s going to be the first to collect 100 business cards or gain 20 new followers on Twitter?
The data that these types of games collect will be invaluable to knowing whether or not your content was compelling, and will help you understand which of your attendees were really interacting with your event.
Getting exhibitors in on the game is another great way to collect data too. They will appreciate the increased networking opportunities, and you will be able to see how actively people participated and where they went. Those attendees who enthusiastically played along may qualify as sales leads for your organization or possible thought-leaders to partner with in the future to help promote upcoming events or content that you plan on releasing.
5. Mobile App Insights
Your event’s mobile app is a treasure trove of attendee activity that you can export and use to produce data-driven insights. Beyond the total number of downloads, ask your app provider for a full breakdown of who used the app and how to discover whether or not it was effective. Did your attendees use the messaging function? Or were they more focused on the app’s networking capabilities? You could even send out a survey to ask attendees what improvements you could make to your event’s app. Those metrics will drive a better understanding of your audience’s needs as well as improve functionality.
Using this kind of digital data to help inform the layout, agenda, and messaging for your event will take a lot of the guesswork out of planning, not to mention deliver a more qualified list of leads to your sales teams! And because events are an expensive and immersive experience for everyone involved, marketers need these kinds of insights to help them prove value to their attendees, sponsors, speakers, and exhibitors.
Conclusion
Connecting with your prospects and clients in person is key to driving your sales and marketing. As described in this post, I am proposing several ways that you can learn about the actual experience of your attendees. Because each attendee has their own agenda, priorities and social behavior, it is complicated to understand every journey throughout your event.
At the very least, you should identify and understand those attendees who are the most engaged at the event. By focusing on these attendees, you will be able to optimize your messaging before, during, and after future events? With the right combination of tools, you can reveal much about your attendees and translate this on broader scale into successful sales and marketing campaigns.
Watch Our Upcoming Webinar
Brian Friedman will be the presenter in our upcoming webinar, How to Leverage Data to Drive Event Marketing Decisions. Signup if you’d like to learn more.
About the Author: Brian Friedman is the founder and CEO of Loopd. Design driven product leader socializing technology through wearables and analytics.
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Thursday, 1 October 2015
What Marketers Need to Know About Cohorts
The word “cohort” can be scary to those unfamiliar with the term. It may sound like something out of a medical journal or statistics class. But, I promise you, there’s nothing to be afraid of. And, if you’re a marketer, it’s pretty important to understand cohorts if you want to get into and benefit from marketing analytics.
So, what is a cohort? Wikipedia defines it as:
“A cohort is a group of subjects who have shared a particular event together during a particular time span (e.g., people born in Europe between 1918 and 1939; survivors of an air crash; truck drivers who smoked between age 30 and 40).”
Pretty simple, right?
And, if you’re one those left-brained people who love to analyze data, then cohorts are perfect for you.
Cohorts are frequently used in studies to compare groups of people. They’re useful because, in a cohort study, you track the cohorts over a period of time to see what kind of data each one brings.
To use one of the examples from above, you could study truck drivers who smoked between age 30 and 40 compared with those who didn’t smoke at all and/or those who smoked earlier or later in life. You would then look at various test results for each cohort and compare the data.
Now, we’re not going to be talking about truck drivers who smoked. Since we’re marketers, we’re going to run through how we can apply cohorts to optimize our marketing. We’ll also examine a couple of tools that offer cohort analysis.
How Can Marketers Use Cohorts?
There are literally hundreds of cohorts marketers can create. But, the question here is not how many they can create. It’s which cohorts will produce the most insightful data.
When thinking about which cohorts to track, ask yourself these questions:
- Will the data I get from these cohorts produce insights that can change my marketing strategy?
- Will I be able to clearly know what’s working and what’s not when it comes to marketing?
- What targets do I need to hit this year? Will this cohort help me improve that metric?
Here are three cohorts marketers may find useful:
1. Signed Up / Purchased, Organized by Time
You’re a marketer, so it’s critical for you to deliver leads and signups to your sales team. Create a cohort that tracks people who visited your site and signed up. You’ll see when they first visited your site and how long it took them to sign up after their first visit. This can essentially tell you if your marketing campaigns lead people to take immediate action. Let’s break it down.
The new year begins, along with your new marketing campaign. You’ve spent the past 2 months planning it, designing it, and setting targets. Now it’s prime time, and you’re ready to see how it performs.
Your campaign runs from January – March. You get 100k visitors to your site, and your signup rate during this time remains at .5%. You start a new campaign in April.
Fast forward a few months, and you’re looking at a Cohort Report. You’re viewing the people who visited your site and signed up. For the people who visited your site sometime in the period January – March, you notice a slight increase in signups in the months following. You see that 1.0% of the people who visited your site in February came back in June and signed up. This means that the January – March campaign was more effective than initially thought.
As marketers, we often expect people to sign up right away. In our minds, we think they come to our site and either sign up or don’t. But the truth is, it’s not that binary. It’s not a yes or no at that very moment. Sometimes it’s a “wait and see.” People might visit our site, browse around, but then not sign up until later.
This is why it’s a useful cohort. Signups don’t always occur right away, and a cohort reporting tool can track signups over a long period of time.
2. Your Most Loyal Customers
Every marketer wants to acquire customers. But, as we know, not all customers are created equal. Some spend more than others, and some may require more “help” than others. There are also customers who sign up for your service and cancel a few months later (which doesn’t help your Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC)). Most important, there are customers who sign up, stay engaged with your product, and tell their friends about it. You need to know who these customers are, where they came from, and how you can get more of them.
With a sophisticated Cohort Report, marketers can create a cohort of users who frequently login, and then they can segment (aka group) those users by the marketing channel they came from.
Here’s a way to think about it:
Your marketing challenge is finding loyal customers. You have no problem delivering signups, but 80% of them cancel their accounts after a few months. What about the other 20%? Where do they come from and how do you get more of them? This is where a Cohort Report can help you.
This is the Kissmetrics Cohort Report. It’s one of the best places to get this kind of data.
On the left, we see the marketing channel users came from. Move to the right, and you’ll see how well each channel performed. The darker the shade of blue, the higher the login retention.
With this information, we can see which channels are sending us the most valuable customers and then spend more money and energy on them and less on the ones that aren’t delivering.
3. Repurchase Rates
Every business needs loyal customers. That includes retail stores, SaaS companies, subscription-based companies, you name it. They need customers who come back and make purchases on a recurring basis. There’s no getting around it.
So how do you, as a marketer, find and acquire these loyal customers? Use a cohort. Here’s what you’ll want to do:
Find the people who have repurchased. This can be for any business, but let’s use e-commerce as an example. Then segment the purchases by product categories, marketing channels, or marketing campaigns. Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Do certain product categories keep people coming back? Maybe people who purchased ties come back frequently and purchase other items. If so, it’s time to start promoting your tie collection more often.
- Do any marketing channels have a tendency to bring loyal customers? For example, perhaps your AdWords campaigns are outperforming your Facebook ad campaign in bringing repeat purchases. If this is the case, you’ll want to spend more time and money on the AdWords campaigns.
- You have dozens of marketing campaigns running. You have seasonal campaigns running four times a year and dozens of other campaigns running in between. With a Cohort Report, you’ll find out which ones drive purchases and repurchases.
The Value of Cohorts for Marketers
As you can see, there are many insights you can gather by grouping people together and tracking their behavior over time.
Each business and marketing challenge is unique. I’ve listed a few ways marketers can use cohorts to help optimize their marketing. But your challenges are unique, and only you will be able to create cohorts that garner valuable insight.
Where to Get This Data
There are two tools we’ll focus on that provide cohort reporting. The first is Google Analytics and the other is Kissmetrics. Let’s start by examining Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Cohort Analysis
Google Analytics has a feature called Cohort Analysis. Here it is:
You have four choices in setting up your cohort analysis:
Cohort Type
This is where you choose a cohort. Acquisition Date, for example, groups people based on when they first came to your site.
Cohort Size
Here you choose the time frame for each cohort. You can measure people on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Metric
Here you choose what you’ll be measuring for each cohort. There are a variety of choices.
Date Range
You have a variety of date ranges you can choose from. This is determined by the size of your cohort. For example, if you choose a cohort size “by day” you’ll have the date range options of 7, 14, 21, and 30 days.
Underneath these options, the Cohort Analysis presents the data visualization. Users can see how well the cohort is performing over time.
The bottom part contains the raw numbers and the retention afterward. The darker the shade of blue, the higher the percentage (i.e., better retention).
The Cohort Analysis is still in its early stages. Some of the more advanced things you’ll want to do may be a little more difficult to set up in Google Analytics. It is, of course, free and does not inherently come with support. You can get support through a partner.
Kissmetrics Cohort Report
This report is one of the most customizable out there. You can track any event and property across a custom date range. Using this report, you’ll be able to measure how your marketing campaigns are performing and refine them based on the data. The report’s usefulness can also extend beyond the marketing department. Here are a couple of other departments that could use it:
Product Team
- Track the features users keep coming back to. Which ones aren’t used as often? Why? Getting answers to these questions will help improve future product iterations and can help you find your product/market fit.
- Know which features are used first by new users. Are new users gravitating toward one feature over another? What was their experience with this feature?
- Understand the feature utilization that leads to payment. Is one cohort of users, who use a feature or area of your site more often during their free trial, more likely to pay for your product or cancel? Perhaps some features turn people off and they never return. Knowing this can make a huge difference.
Sales Team
- Know the product plan that has the best retention. Your sales team should not knowingly be pushing product plans that have been shown to have higher churn.
- Does viewing a certain element on a page lead to a signup? Maybe visitors who downloaded a white paper are more likely to sign up. If so, you can push people to download that white paper and even ask the marketing department to create more white papers.
- Find which product features are used by each customer segment. For example, let’s say your sales team is trying to land a big account from a well-known SaaS company. To sell the account, your sales team needs to show them the features your other SaaS customers use. Think about it. You don’t want to show them features that none of your SaaS customers are using. You want to show them the features that their peers are getting value from.
Here’s a video demo of the Cohort Report:
If the video embed is not showing up, you can click here to view the video on the Wistia page.
Recap
We’ve gone through a lot. Here are the takeaways:
- A cohort is a group of subjects who have shared a particular event together during a particular time span (e.g., people born in Europe between 1918 and 1939; survivors of an air crash; truck drivers who smoked between age 30 and 40). To put it another way, a cohort is a group of people who have a similar characteristic. Their behavior is then tracked over a period of time.
- These cohorts can help marketers understand how groups of people compare against each other. If you have two groups with different behaviors, notice which one delivers the best results. Then refine your marketing with what you learn.
- Sometimes signups don’t occur right away. A visitor may visit your site in January, bookmark it, and then return in June to sign up. The June marketing campaign may incorrectly be attributed with the signup even though it was actually the marketing campaign in January that brought the visitor. This is where the Cohort Report comes in handy.
- One cohort that marketers commonly use is people who have signed up. Marketers can see how each marketing channel or campaign performs at delivering signups.
- Many tools provide cohort data, but we focused on two of them – Google Analytics’s Cohort Analysis and Kissmetrics’s Cohort Report. Both have their upsides. If you’re looking to get more advanced analysis, definitely go with the Kissmetrics Cohort Report. The Cohort Analysis tool is still in its early stages.
- The Cohort Report can be used by more than marketers. Nearly all departments in your company will be able to get useful data out of this report.
See How Cohorts Can Impact Your Marketing
Want to learn how the Cohort Report can help you optimize your marketing? Request a personal demo today!
About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.
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Research: Successful CMOs have Fundamentally Changed the Sales and Marketing Relationship
It goes without saying that in recent years, the rise in marketing technology has created a resulting accountability for marketers like never before. Somehow there’s still tension between marketing and sales on their contribution to the pipeline. According to Forrester’s research, however, successful CMOs (the top 21 ranked by them) have taken a new approach to the sales-marketing dynamic.
First and foremost, they see the sales role as an extension of their own. Instead of salespeople being contractual, paper-pushing colleagues, they’re seen as craftsmen, carefully customizing the company’s value prop for each individual decision-maker.
Top-performing CMOs also shifted theirs and their team’s thinking from “passing leads” to “sharing the buyer’s context”. For them, it’s not about collecting the contact info and moving on to the next target. It’s about working collaboratively with the sales team to arm them with the best information and work in tandem to customize the company’s value prop.
Lastly, they are also visualizing marketing programs around the customer’s lifetime and not just their path to purchase or worse, just the path to sales. Successful CMOs know the long-time value of the customer and work with the sales and customer team to provide valuable content to keep them engaged in the long term.
Learn more about Forrester’s research and how CMOs can help create sales and marketing collaborate for maximum performance in this report:
The post Research: Successful CMOs have Fundamentally Changed the Sales and Marketing Relationship appeared first on Vidyard.
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