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The role of the CMO is amidst a major transformation especially with the pandemic pushing towards a digital-first focus. The role of the CMO isn’t easy, to begin with however this past year has made it increasingly difficult. On average, CMOs are the shortest-tenured members of the C-suite. Companies all around the world are dealing with growing customer expectations, smaller budgets, adjusted customer priorities, and the CMO is set to take responsibility for how well their company deals with those pressures.

If a content strategist leads a conversation with “I think this will work,” or “I like this topic,” you must stop them right there before any content is actually created. Content based on gut instinct isn’t going to cut it in an account-based marking (ABM) campaign. The digital marketing strategy relies on data and analytics in order to effectively nurture high-value prospects. On the other hand, if a content strategist begins a sentence with “I’m writing this because the intent data is showing us…,” listen closely; their content plan of action is not only informed, it has a much better chance of engaging target accounts and helping push your campaign toward its end goal.

We often think of marketing messages as springing from serendipitous breakthroughs, big ideas that come in a flash of creative brilliance. And that may be true, sometimes. But like many aspects of B2B marketing, message strategy can be developed—and improved—by following a proven process.

B2B companies make three big mistakes in their messaging:

1. They fail to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Their message sounds the same as the others. And worse, it’s filled with hackneyed buzzwords, like “transformation,” “innovative,” and “leverage.”
2. The target audience doesn’t care about the seller’s main claim. Either the claim fails to express a benefit that solves a pressing target audience problem, or it merely says what they do (like, “we’re a cloud computing company”) and leaves out the benefit altogether.
3. Their main claim isn’t used consistently. They use a shotgun approach. For example, their main claim may jump out on their home page but never appear again. They fail to use the power of repetition. It takes at least 10 impressions before your target audience will notice your message. Also, neuromarketing tells us that the decision-making portion of the brain notices the repetition of a few keywords, earmarks them as important, and thus remembers them.

Differentiation is essential if a company has any hope of claiming a position in its market. Your goal is to create a message that is both unique and important to the target audience. A message strategy consists of a positioning statement, three to four support points and as much detail as necessary to communicate a compelling, comprehensive story.

Lead generation, the process of identifying and nurturing potential customers, continues to be a major challenge for marketers in 2021.

The biggest reason behind it is that competition in every field is growing every day, and to get a significant number of leads, a business needs to stand out from the crowd.

But here's a fact: lead generation isn't about finding a "secret sauce" to help in the generation of tons of leads. Instead, it's about exploring the tried and tested methodologies to create the most practical combination of strategies based on the objectives and target industry. And determining the most appropriate methods can massively transform your overall revenue.

What is B2B Lead Generation?

In a nutshell, lead generation is the art of attracting and capturing your target audience's interest in a product or service for developing a sales pipeline. Lead generation lies in the second stage of inbound marketing. The inbound marketing process goes like this:

Attract → Convert → Close → Delight

Lead generation occurs in the second stage after your target audience has been attracted to your brand, and you're ready to convert them into your customers. For example, if a social media post attracted someone to visit your website, and then your website's content influenced the person to provide their email to you, that person would be considered a lead. And once you have the email address, with a proper strategy, you may end up turning that lead into an actual customer.

In fact, our recent ‘Experiences Customers Want’ report found that 74% of businesses have accelerated their investment in online experiences as a result of the pandemic, with 76% claiming their online offerings saved their business. We expect these trends to continue in 2021.

High on the priority list when it comes to online is adaptable content that can be structured and organised to create customised and personalised experiences. In a world where marketers are constantly pivoting their strategies due to the ever-changing COVID-19 situation, they need to be able to surface new products and get to market quickly with relevant offers and having an agile content strategy in place is imperative to achieving this.

Defining ‘content agility’

The term content agility describes a brand or organisation’s capability to optimise the end-to-end process of delivering customer experiences at scale. To become more agile, brands must remove the technical bottlenecks often associated with delivering content at speed.

This will mean getting several things right – from having the right tools and technologies in place to building a great author experience, so that content authors and agencies can deliver and update online experiences fast.

The term artificial intelligence (AI) may bring to mind scenes from a sci-fi movie, but in reality it’s already transforming many industries, including marketing. AI is gaining widespread traction as a way to solve seemingly impossible problems and accomplish tasks that previously could only be achieved with great effort, time and resources. In a marketing context, AI has the potential to make marketers better at what we’ve been hired to do. Here are five common challenges marketers face today and how AI can help.

If you believe ads are becoming more invasive, you're not alone.

Ten years ago, businesses were racing to understand and capitalize on concepts such as data mining, search technology, and virtual collaboration.

Nicole Burford, Digital Marketing Manager at GutCheck, has been responsible for their industry leading digital marketing campaigns. She details some of her hard won knowledge on how to build an effective digital strategy in the research space.

Just to put it out there, cold calling is dead and digital marketing has now taken over as the best method for lead generation. Here are just a few of the reasons why people seem to prefer digital marketing to the now ancient art of cold calling.