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Your content marketing strategy is vital to your organization’s overall success, so getting buy-in from stakeholders outside the marketing department is crucial to keep everyone aligned toward business goals. When everyone puts their heads together to provide input into the new plan, fresh perspectives and ideas are uncovered to make the strategy work better for each department.
We’ve spent years discovering the most effective approaches to get buy-in from stakeholders, so we combined our knowledge to create this guide. Keep reading to discover our 3-step process to winning your entire organization over to your brilliant new content marketing strategy.
There are many reasons why getting buy-in from stakeholders for your content marketing strategy is a step that should always be remembered. It may take hard work and patience, but it’s worth it — when everyone is aligned on a strategy:
Marketing is constantly evolving, so you must be strategic about getting buy-in when you propose changes to your strategy. Leadership especially wants to be reassured that any changes are highly likely to deliver results, so you’ll need to come prepared with plenty of data — but that’s not all:
Map out how various departments interact with or may be impacted by your strategy. Examples may include outside sales, customer service, IT, and others. Start thinking about their responsibilities, needs, and possible objections. What will you need from them, and how can you ease the burden on them to provide that?
Depending on your organization’s size, it might be worthwhile to have a different session with each department. This can help you avoid bogging anyone down with extra information irrelevant to them, tailor your presentation more closely to your audience, and provide them with individual attention.
When it comes to getting leadership buy-in, ensure you understand what metrics leaders are most interested in improving and can demonstrate how your plan will help move the needle toward the company’s goals.
Make sure everyone knows the purpose of each meeting beforehand, so stakeholders know what to expect. Don’t wait until the end of the session to finally get to the ask — tell stakeholders what you want from them at the beginning, then provide a clear explanation of why they should agree.
Set a baseline by explaining how things are currently done and where there’s room for improvement. This is an excellent opportunity to incorporate data showing where your current strategy could improve.
Pro tip: don’t just rattle off facts. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool — don’t just use it in your content marketing strategy. Use it to create an engaging and impactful presentation that pulls your stakeholders in just as you would a customer.
Once you’ve captured your audience’s attention and imagination, appeal to their logical side by providing data to give your proposal more legitimacy. Make sure it’s easy to understand and leads to a clear conclusion. Share examples of other organizations that have seen success with similar strategies. Most stakeholders don’t want to be the first to try a new tactic, but if they can see that others have succeeded, they’ll feel more comfortable giving it a try.
Clearly describe the benefits of your plan. A strong content marketing strategy makes customers feel more comfortable interacting with you because they’ve come to you. It also often costs significantly less than outbound marketing strategies while netting higher quality leads and improving visibility online. Make sure your audience also clearly understands any benefits specific to their department or goals, and make a clear and concise ask for exactly what you want them to do next to support your plan.
Sometimes there are factors beyond your control influencing stakeholder decisions. For example, if you’ve just joined the company, your peers and leadership might not have had enough time to get to know and trust your expertise. While it can be frustrating, it is understandable, and there are ways to help stakeholders warm up to your ideas even if they haven’t yet warmed up to you. For example, consulting with an outside expert, someone likely to be trusted and respected, can be valuable in helping to reinforce your claims.
If your plan requires marketing skills you don’t currently have and you aren’t ready to make a significant investment in headcount, you can outsource key roles. It’s common to do this for tactical roles like website design or content creation, but you can also hire part-time executive-level content marketing help in the form of a Fractional Content Marketing Officer, or fCMO. An fCMO can lead your team in both strategy and execution of your content marketing strategy without the high overhead of adding another full-time member to your C-suite.
Content marketing is ultimately a long-term strategy, but stakeholders are often interested in hearing about short-term results whenever possible. At the outset of your plan, establish your baseline to measure against. Short-term goals to track include social media interactions (likes, shares, mentions, followers), backlinks, and leads and conversions. Search engine traffic will take longer to rise, but with a baseline, you’ll be able to see any quick bumps if they do happen.
Whether you need help creating an impactful story for stakeholders or customers, we’ve got a roadmap for you. To help you successfully lead your hero down the path to their own happily ever after, &Marketing has broken down Donald Miller’s StoryBrand roadmap into easily digestible bites. Download our free guide to narrative marketing for a simple breakdown of each step.
Content Specialist Kim Steinmetz helps brands and thought leaders discover and develop their unique voice and tone while establishing authority on a topic through compelling messaging and copywriting. An accomplished writer and marketer with over a decade of experience, Kim is well-versed in both B2C and B2B content.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
Marketing budgets vary drastically by industry and there’s no one single formula to perfect budgeting. Even within the same industry, each business has its own nuisances—like company structure, goals, and customer journey (also known as the sales and marketing funnel). This doesn’t even include the one-off events and ideas that come up halfway through the year or the fourth quarter blitz many businesses perform surrounding the holidays.
Allocating your budget in the wrong places will lead to spending too much in certain areas and potentially running out of funds. Setting your budget too low will lead to poor results and a likely poor return on investment (ROI). The bottom line is, there’s no perfect system or cookie cutter template for a marketing budget that can apply to everyone.
In order to set the right budget and use it effectively, you need to:
Keep reading to dig a little deeper into the three steps above.
(Curious how much you should be budgeting? Check out our marketing budget calculator.)
A marketing budget is an estimate of costs related to marketing your products or services. A typical marketing budget takes into account all overhead marketing costs (ex: software, salaries for marketing employees, cost of office space). However, much of the budget is concerned with actual marketing communications and campaign efforts like public relations, website development and hosting, advertising, etc.
A marketing budget plan will help you put your marketing funds in the right place. When you know how much you can spend, you know how much you can put into each marketing strategy and channel. It allows you to determine which approaches work with your budget or if an outsourced digital marketing company’s packages fit within your budget. But before you create your marketing budget, there are a few foundational steps to take:
When you set your business’s goals, make sure they’re SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). You don’t want to set a goal like “increase sales.” It won’t give you a precise target to work towards and achieve. Instead, set a goal like “Increase sales by 20% by the end of the year.” This goal is easily measurable and gives your team something precise to achieve.
SMART goals will give you a concrete reference point when budgeting for marketing because all activities can be measured by milestones that work toward a specific revenue goal.
Perform a competitor analysis to see how your top competition performs online. While you’re at it, perform some market research and aggregate all the places your ideal customer hangs out online and plan how much it might cost to get your message and offer in front of them. You can even use some top-notch tools to get this information quickly and easily.
If you want to know how to prepare a marketing budget, start by establishing your external costs. You need to know the price tag attached to everything your company needs to succeed so you know how much you can allocate for marketing. Not only does it determine what services you can invest in, but it also helps you set a baseline for your ROI. Examples include:
Develop an idea of which strategies you want to use for your business when creating a marketing budget. When you know which strategies you want to invest in, you can determine how they will fit into your marketing budget plan. For example, do you want a robust content marketing plan that includes blogs and ebooks? What about email automation? Social media? Influencers? Be mindful not to try and do too many things at once, and always have a way to measure the strategy against the goals you set above.
Budgets are not unchangeable plans—they’re allotments you can tweak when you need to. Business changes throughout the year based on trends, seasonality, the economy, and other unpredictable factors. Budgets, like strategies, must be adjusted at any time.
The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends small businesses (businesses with revenue less than 5 million) allocate between 7% and 8% of total revenue to marketing — assuming your business has margins in the range of 10-12 percent. The number goes up from there for smaller businesses.
The amount of revenue businesses typically allocate to marketing has increased steadily over the past 10 years, with average marketing percentage of revenue landing around 13% in 2021, compared to just 8% back in 2011.
Try out our marketing budget calculator and see how much you should be preparing for your marketing budget!
Want to talk to someone on our team about how to put that marketing budget to use? Just fill out the form below and we’ll reach out to connect.
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
We’re all full of uncertainty as we map out the next year, but you don’t have to worry about drowning in doubt. With a solid plan and strategy in place, you can do more than just tread water. You can swim past the competition.
With today’s rapidly changing business landscape, 2023 planning can feel paralyzing at worst and daunting at best. From rising inflation and operating costs, to employee retention and supply chain gaps—chances are you’re sitting down to plan for 2023 and finding yourself at a loss.
The good news is, planning for growth in 2023 doesn’t have to be overwhelming, stress provoking or confusing. With advice from the leading experts in business and marketing, you can equip yourself with the knowledge, tools and action steps to prepare yourself for an uncertain 2023 and position your business not just to tread water, but to swim faster and stronger than your bigger competitors.
What’s their secret? We’ll let them tell you. Our network of business and marketing leaders shared their top challenges and best tips on navigating uncertainty. Our experts will discuss the trends and provide a roadmap to grow in 2023.
Our Founder & CEO, Rajat Kapur and trusted industry CMOs Alan Gonsenhauser, Danielle Cantin and Jennifer Garcia who each bring 20+ years of business and marketing leadership, teach you:
As the Founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Raj strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.
Alan Gonsenhauser, Founder and Principal of Demand Revenue, is an experienced CMO and general manager, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. He now offers Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership, CMO Executive Advisory and Coaching, and Keynote Presentations, bolstered with comprehensive Strategic Marketing Services.
Danielle Cantin is an award-winning creative, mentor, and strategic branding and marketing expert. She helps companies reconnect with the Soul of their Brand so they can uncover missing pieces and achieve the deeper brand alignment needed for ultimate profits and success. Honored with the Vanguard Award for Innovation in Communication and a Cannes honorable mention for her work with Mazda, Danielle is a lifelong seeker, bringing the highest tools and teachings to her clients so they can break through to the next level.
Jennifer Garcia, CEO of Red Bamboo Marketing, brings a wealth of industry experience and an entrepreneurial spirit to lead an agency that blends marketing strategy, technology and creativity to drive genuine growth for clients. In her most recent role as Director of Marketing for Visual Lease (SaaS financial services), she drove 150% ARR growth during her tenure. She recently partnered with &Marketing to offer Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership to growing businesses.
In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.
&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.
This post was originally published at https://www.demandrevenue.com/cmos-what-kind-of-conductor-are-you-jazz-classical-or-both/.
Hopefully, as a CMO, you like an eclectic mix. Today’s CMOs need to be holistic conductors, balancing creativity with precision. You need a good balance of both to be really successful in today’s complex market. Let’s listen:
Being innovative and building strong connections with customers and prospects is like jazz. Remember Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis or Benny Goodman? Jazz requires expressing your creativity, using your gut, developing audacious breakthrough ideas, and taking risks to connect with target audiences in a really memorable way. They won’t remember numbers as much as how you made them feel. You won’t get big ideas from spreadsheets, either. Creativity requires you to:
Precision requires process, logic and consistent orchestration like the mathematically consistent phrasing in classical music. Remember Vivaldi, Bach or Handel? Over the last several years, digital and social media have enhanced the measurability of marketing’s impacts and value to the enterprise. Effective data analytics and process management are critical to lead efficiency and continuous improvement in today’s marketing organizations. To enable precision, you must:
So start making some beautiful jazz as well as classical music. Blending strong creativity with precision makes you a better marketer. It’s impossible to quantify creativity except in the rear-view mirror. And you can’t run an efficient marketing operation without the precision that data analytics and technology afford. Balancing both makes marketing far more interesting, effective and fun.
Alan Gonsenhauser, Founder and Principal of Demand Revenue, is an experienced CMO and general manager, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. He now offers Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership, CMO Executive Advisory and Coaching, and Keynote Presentations, bolstered with comprehensive Strategic Marketing Services.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
With detailed market intelligence and a solid content strategy, you can compete with your Goliath competitors for your buyers’ attention without spending all of your marketing budget on Google ads.
75% of people don’t click beyond the first page of Google when they search for help or answers online. Your larger competitors are ranking first and second organically and have the biggest share of voice online. On top of that, it’s likely the content you are creating isn’t answering the questions or solving the problems your buyers and customers are experiencing.
These obstacles are preventing you from beating those competitors and getting your target customers to visit your site and see your offers instead might feel insurmountable (especially without paying for ads so you can skip the line).
The good news is, it is possible to level the playing field with strong SEO and content marketing, grounded in solid research.
Watch Founder & CEO, Rajat Kapur as he hosts our Head of Business Intelligence & Analytics, Paul Ferguson, and our Director of Content, Beth McDonough, for a jam-packed, interactive webinar. You will learn how to:
We have applied these methods to clients across industries and seen success:
As the Founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Raj strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
As the Director of Content for &Marketing, Beth focuses on helping brands grow their business through personality driven, value-centric messaging and data-infused copywriting. The content department at &Marketing leverages SEO, analytics, proven marketing strategy, and compelling storytelling tactics to build brand awareness, attract, and convert new customers.
In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.
&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.
The targeting, planning, and tracking of content marketing campaigns continue to get more sophisticated as new capabilities and tools are tailored to the task. However, CMI recently reported that 44% of marketers still find some aspects of improving content measurement challenging, though it remains a top priority.
Measuring their return on investment, or content marketing ROI, is increasingly essential because customers engage with content at every stage of their journey. Forrester found that a customer engages with 11.4 pieces of content before purchasing. Furthermore, the customer journey is rarely linear, especially in the B2B sales funnel. Instead, potential customers may dip in and out of the funnel several times, sampling different pieces of your content before converting.
Measuring content marketing ROI is not an exact science, but tried-and-true best practices are emerging. Read on to learn more about content marketing ROI, measuring it, and which metrics are truly vital.
Simply put, content marketing ROI is a percentage showing how much you earned from content marketing compared to what you spent producing and distributing it. It is one of the most critical measures of the success of a content marketing program because it is directly tied to revenue.
However, content marketing ROI has been challenging for marketers to quantify because, as mentioned above, the customer journey is often anything but straightforward. Content marketing is, after all, a long-term strategy, which makes attribution more difficult to determine. Plus, content alone won’t necessarily generate ROI – it is most valuable when created to bring value to additional channels like email, ads, etc.
Marketers have developed a formula to determine the content marketing ROI percentage. Still, many more metrics are not tied directly to revenue but help provide a holistic view of the success of your content marketing campaigns. First, we’ll explain the formula.
Add up how much you’ve spent producing content. This could include images, video, audio, the content creator’s salary, work done by other departments, etc.
To that number, add what it costs you to distribute the content. This could include tools/software used for creation and distribution or paid promotions. If you are using those tools for multiple purposes, use a percentage of that cost – for example, are you using email solely to distribute content? Perhaps not, so focus on only the portion of the cost attributed to content. This sum represents the total cost of producing all of your content, or your investment.
Add up all of the sales or leads (you must establish a lead value) that resulted directly from a piece of content. This is your return.
To that number, add what it costs you to distribute the content. This could include tools/software used for creation and distribution or paid promotions. If you are using those tools for multiple purposes, use a percentage of that cost – for example, are you using email solely to distribute content? Perhaps not, so focus on only the portion of the cost attributed to content. This sum represents the total cost of producing all of your content, or your investment.
The first thing you should know is that it is counterproductive to try to track all possible metrics. Instead, you should hone in on specific metrics depending on what you want to accomplish with your content. When you begin a new content marketing project or campaign, focus on metrics that support your key goals and provide you with information you can use to optimize the project or campaign. Don’t wait until the piece is released to decide which metrics are important. Plan ahead and limit yourself to the most meaningful and actionable information.
Here are some key metrics to consider linked to some common goals:
There are many ways to measure lead quality, which are likely to vary from business to business. For example, if you have Google Analytics set up on your website, you can see whether visitors spend time on important pages. Set up a goal for those pages and view the results at Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization. Another way to evaluate lead quality is by looking at traffic, bounce rates, and conversions together. For example, high traffic with high bounce rates and low conversions can indicate low lead quality.
In B2C, if you want to know how many leads turned into sales and the value of those sales, you’ll need eCommerce enabled in Google Analytics. At Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, you’ll find a Page View column that can show which pages are driving the most revenue. However, this only works for straightforward, one-session conversions, which aren’t that common for most websites. You can learn more by visiting Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions, which measures conversions that each channel assisted with, and sorting by landing page. For B2B, focus on form submissions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases website traffic by helping your website rank higher in search engine results, where potential customers are more likely to click. Measuring the success of your SEO often involves looking at whether you rank well for your target keywords (this is vital), have high-authority inbound links, and are popping up in relevant answer boxes. You can check this by using a private/incognito window to search for key terms and seeing how well you rank. Tools like Moz’s Link Explorer that can give you specific measurements around domain and page authority, and show you your inbound links. Compare your SEO success with your social engagement to see how well your content uses keywords and whether it is finding the right audience.
The more exposure you get and the more you establish your brand’s authority both online and offline, the more people will want to share and link to your content. The Moz tool offers good insight into authority by domain and page, but you should also be sure to track offline metrics like instances of media coverage and participation in industry events. While authority is valuable, it can be challenging to track, so you may want to get creative with the types of metrics you measure here. For example, don’t forget to pay attention to what people have to say about your brand on social media.
You can also see what terms your blogs get impressions and clicks for in Search Console or Analytics. Additionally, there are tools (like Search Analytics for Sheets) that will continuously and automatically export out all queries your pages get impressions for so you can monitor average position and help determine which terms to target for new content.
Without traffic, you can’t generate revenue on your site, so web traffic is an important metric to combine with others for a well-rounded view. You can use Google Analytics to see how much traffic a content piece is driving by visiting Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. This view shows you which pages visitors first land on, sorted by highest-traffic pages first. Next, look at where your traffic is coming from (referral traffic) by clicking on a specific page and clicking Secondary Dimension > Acquisition > Source/Medium.
Once people arrive at your website, you’ll want to understand how much time they spend on which pages. Low bounce rates are a good sign that your content is well-received, but there are also other important onsite engagement metrics. In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Overview to see pages per session, bounce rate, and average session duration. To see how fast visitors are bouncing off a specific piece of content, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and find its URL.
Social media shares are important to track because social proof and peer recommendations have become so critical in the purchase process. You can see how much traffic you get from specific platforms at Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals, and the Social > Overview page can show you how much revenue that traffic has earned you.
Using &Marketing’s Content Marketing ROI Calculator is your first step toward creating a thoughtful content strategy that aligns with your business goals. This calculator will help you determine which keywords and topics will generate the most organic traffic and conversions on your website (depending on where your content ranks for those keywords on Google). It also calculates how much it would cost to get those same results via paid advertising. This comparison will help you determine whether it’d be more cost-effective to invest in paid advertising or organic content, or a combination of the two!
Looking for more guidance around understanding and optimizing your content marketing ROI? Contact us today!
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
Content Specialist Kim Steinmetz helps brands and thought leaders discover and develop their unique voice and tone while establishing authority on a topic through compelling messaging and copywriting. An accomplished writer and marketer with over a decade of experience, Kim is well-versed in both B2C and B2B content.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
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