By Jeff Campbell
This is a familiar phrase to all those who have used the tube to get around London. It may also be familiar to those who continue to try to reconcile the information we often use to measure marketing effectiveness with sales forecast. In other words, trying to answer the question, “How will my marketing spend translate into revenue?”
Along the continuum from awareness to closed sale, marketers and sales leaders use many measurements to manage the processes and understand the effectiveness of various investments. The thing is, marketing uses metrics like impressions, click-through rate and conversions (among many others) to understand the effectiveness of campaigns while in sales, measurements are typically activity-based or state-based. Some examples include: number of leads, number of calls, number of opportunities by stage, and so on. All of the sales measurements are provided through the sales people themselves while the marketing measurements are taken directly from prospects’ actions.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are MarketingSherpa, Fast Company, MarketingProfs, SocialTimes, and Jeremiah Owyang.
Content marketing: 3 tips from the trenches
Short and sweet, MarketingSherpa provides three content marketing gems in this post.
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By Francis Moran
Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that I am passionate about entrepreneurship and a huge fan and supporter of startups. So it’s not unusual to find me at almost any event where startup entrepreneurs gather.
On Monday, however, I found myself in a bit of a more atypical venue for such a gathering — the barrel cellar of Laughing Stock Vineyards on the Naramata Bench near Penticton in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. (I snapped the alongside picture from just outside the cellar.)
Gathered around a long table in the cellar was an eclectic collection of agriculture and agri-tourism entrepreneurs, brought together by Laughing Stock co-founder and former investment executive Cynthia Enns. Cynthia took advantage of the arrival in BC of Startup Canada’s national tour and invited a number of her neighbours and other local stakeholders to come together to discuss how they could help each other and better promote their region.
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By Alexandra Reid
Following the release of her latest book, Marketing in the Round, I sat down with award-winning marketer Gini Dietrich to discuss the new push for businesses to break down organizational silos and adopt a “round” approach to marketing operations. In this podcast, Gini explains what’s going on in the marketing world today that convinced her it was a good idea to write this book, steps to develop a “round” marketing process, and shares specific applications for this approach for all kinds of businesses.
Our conversation was recorded over Skype and, due to sound quality issues, had to be edited significantly. The meat and potatoes are solid, though, and so I encourage you to have a listen.
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By Leo Valiquette
As Francis will blog about later this week, Victoria Lennox and the team at Startup Canada were back in Ottawa last week and my brief showing at one of the events left me with plenty of food for thought.
Startup Canada wrapped up two busy days in Ottawa with a “Wine Down” event at The Hub on Bank Street on Friday evening. For those of you who don’t know it, The Hub is a co-working, meeting and learning space focused around social entrepreneurship.
I am a Gen Xer, not a boomer, and yet, to be in that room, I certainly did feel my age in a way that I haven’t before. There was plenty of idealism, ambition and energy. There’s plenty of idealism, ambition and energy to be found all over Ottawa wherever young entrepreneurs tend to congregate, be it The Hub, TheCodeFactory, or any of the various open labs, watering holes and caffeine bars that lie in the orbits of Carleton, Ottawa U and Algonquin.
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Your cheating brain
September 10, 2012 by Bob Bailly
Mistakes were made, but not by me, a book by Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson, explores the very human tendency to deflect blame, to admit error begrudgingly and to avoid responsibility. They explore the notion that too often we hear the self-justifying, “There was […]
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Great articles roundup: Personas, branding, content marketing, simplicity and social
September 07, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we read in the past week. On the podium this week are Velocity, Forrester, TopRank, The Washington Post, and Econsultancy […]
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You don’t have sources anymore, you have clients
September 06, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
There’s a quote that I am fond of from journalist and author Gene Fowler, who passed in 1960: “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” I could only wonder what he would say […]
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Does anyone listen to podcasts anymore?
September 05, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Mitch Joel sparked an interesting conversation recently on his blog when he argued that podcasts could make a comeback […]
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Don’t believe everything you read: Why journalism still matters
September 04, 2012 by Chamber of Commerce
In an earlier post, Leo Valiquette wrote about the rise in incidents of plagiarism among high-profile journalists. Leo contends that the timing of this increase is no accident; forgetting ethics that were learned in Journalism 101 is part of a larger cultural shift stretching professionals too thin […]
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August roundup: What does it take to bring technology to market?
August 31, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As usual, we covered a lot of ground this month on our blog. We argued that RIM won’t commit suttee, why Harper’s free trade efforts need more thought, how Don Drummond’s arguments on Canadian business are flawed, and we also offered loads of advice for PR […]
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Marketing’s hidden treasure map
August 30, 2012 by Francis Moran
Whenever I present to groups or prospects on my Four Steps on the Road to Revenue™ marketing methodology, the first sentence out of my mouth is always, “It all begins with the customer.” My point is that marketing must start with identifying a customer requirement […]
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Thinking outside the bunker
August 29, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Effective marketing is often an exercise in thinking outside of the box to make the most creative use of the assets that are already at hand […]
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By Jeff Campbell 
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The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
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