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At this point, you’ve probably read more “new year, new you” posts than you can count. And while I hate to throw another one at you, there really is no better time to reevaluate your existing marketing strategies than at the start of a new fiscal year. Whether or not you participate in yearly or quarterly marketing campaign planning, it’s a great time for teams of any size to look at what’s working and what’s not.
And just as often, it’s a time to think about the new and innovative marketing strategies you might want to implement this year. How can you really stand out from the competition? What cutting-edge tactics can you try that other businesses aren’t even attempting yet?
For marketers who are looking to stand out from the pack this year, Pardot is hosting a webinar with LinkedIn and SalesLoft in an effort to bring you the latest marketing strategies for the new year. For those who can’t spare the time to listen in on the entire webinar, take a look at a brief synopsis of these must-implement strategies below (but for those who can spare the time, we’ll be giving away free copies of Mathew Sweezey’s Marketing Automation for Dummies to all attendees — that’s a $20 savings right there!).
If you think about the B2B buying process, how many stakeholders are involved in the purchase decision? Typically, though one person may give the final go-ahead, it’s a collective of people that participate from the initial research phase to purchase. Account-based marketing is based on this process of collective decision making, and uses IP-based targeting to efficiently display ad messaging to a group of people within a company. Marketers who invest in account-based marketing in 2015 will be ahead of the curve when it comes to having a solid paid promotion strategy.
According to VentureBeat, 2015 is going to be the year of marketing automation — and for good reason. Companies who are not adopting marketing automation are falling further behind because they lack an integrated marketing system that can help them move deals through the pipe to close. In fact, according to the article, “if a company doesn’t adopt the technology, their competitors are going to take their lunch money like a 200-pound fourth grader with daddy issues.” Strong words, but you get the idea.
Marketing is valuable, but it’s also marketing’s job to prove it — and many of the reporting models of the past won’t cut it now that it’s becoming easier to report on more impactful metrics like marketing’s contribution to ACV (Annual Contract Value) and opportunity creation. It will be important to look more holistically at how marketing and sales are working together, and fortunately, some of 2015’s new reporting models will allow marketers to do just that. Check out the aforementioned webinar for more details on how these models actually work.
As Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, stated in a Pardot webinar last month, “we don’t need more content. we need better content.” This is the foundation of agile content marketing. Instead of focusing on creating a vast quantity of content, slow down and create a few high-quality pieces of content instead. You may not be able to cover the same range of topics, but you can easily measure the success of each specific content piece you create and base your future content on those metrics. This is where the term agile comes in — because it’s the ability to learn from your short-term content successes and failures and extrapolate that for the long-term.
