Marketers and business folks love the expression, “Data is the new oil”, and I find it apt. Like oil, data has incredible potential to change and transform business. The energy surplus of the last century was powered mainly by oil, in the sense that oil vastly amplified the amount of work our species does. There’s…
If you’ve never taken a statistics class, yet you’ve ended up being responsible for your company’s marketing analytics, then this article is for you. One of the core statistical concepts we rarely hear about is the median. We hear about averages all of the time: average revenue per user, average website traffic, average number of…
A few folks, as is traditional this time of year, have written about the efficacy of inbound marketing as Hubspot (the pioneer of the term) throws its annual conference. This prompts the annual question, is inbound marketing still effective? What is Inbound Marketing in 2017? From Hubspot’s official definition page, this is inbound marketing: “Inbound…
Players on the World of Warcraft forums were debating what the best titles for individual classes or players to have were, as a proxy for prestige and proof of competence. For those that don’t play, World of Warcraft awards you titles such as Deathlord or Kingslayer for accomplishing certain feats in the game. For players…
While conferences will never go away, companies of all sizes have put scrutiny on us when it comes to attending conferences and events. What’s the value, they’ll ask, of an event? What’s the ROI? How will we justify our trip? The stingiest will ask, “Why do you need to go since you can just watch…
This year, I’ve been invited to speak at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum not once, but twice. Where I’ll Be(2B) First, I’ll be delivering one of the opening keynotes, on how AI will change marketing forever. We’ll look at a brief overview of what AI is, how it’s being applied today in B2B marketing, and how…
When marketers approach content that needs freshening up, we tend to just wing it. We make changes in a disorganized, disorderly fashion – tweak some copy here, change the headline there, maybe swap out an image or two. This would be fine if we didn’t then expect our content to deliver disproportionate results to our…
Here’s a brief thought exercise. Would you hire this employee? If they were on your staff, would you retain them? Punches the clock exactly, and refuses overtime without significant compensation Does the absolute minimum work possible to not get fired Spends their free time outside of work promoting themselves relentlessly Spends half their time at…
If we survey the landscape of the most popular social and business influencers, we find common words and themes such as “rise and grind”, “hustle”, etc. In an era when lots of people believe they are automatically entitled to The Good Life, a message that work is hard is a welcome one. Far too many…
Marketers have traditionally been famous for not being mathematically-inclined. However, without an understanding of statistics and economics, marketers will be less effective in their work. In this post, we’ll explore why macroeconomics matters to marketers. Macroeconomics is Marketing’s Precursor What is macroeconomics and why should marketers care? Macroeconomics is the study of (and the corpus…
