While SEO is important for driving traffic to your website, the success of this marketing channel has began to plateau and has recently seen a decline in performance for the first time in the last 20 years. With the advent of voice-controlled technology, AI assistants, and easier access to online information, people are less frequently clicking through to websites. In this episode, Rand Fishkin, Founder of SparkToro, shares his perspective on where the future of SEO is heading and how you can evolve your current SEO strategy to remain successful. Rand and I also talk about what it takes to start a business and highlight some valuable tips from Rand’s book, Lost and Founder.

 

 

Nobody knows how to do event marketing better than Kristen Alexander, CMO of Certain. As a leader in the event management space, Certain is working to increase pre- and post-event engagement, help marketers deliver more personalized and targeted event sessions, and guide prospects through the buyers journey in a more sophisticated way. In this episode, Kristen shares valuable tips around building successful event marketing strategies that lead to better in-person interactions. She also highlights the importance of leveraging event-related data and how to properly setup attribution for this marketing channel.

  

As Co-Founder, CMO & President of Uberflip, Randy Frisch knows how to position a company to meet the needs of clients and customers. In this episode, Randy shares his struggle of whether or not to continue to establish “Content Experience” as a category within marketing, or to position Uberflip alongside more familiar topics, such as ABM or demand generation. Every company must undergo repositioning at some point in order to stay relevant and provide great customer experiences. Listen as Randy and I outline how to properly reposition yourself while staying true to your vision.

Don’t miss out on Uberflip’s upcoming conference. Register for CONEX using promo code DG100 to save $100 off registration. https://contentexperience.uberflip.com/

 

In this episode on lead scoring, I teach you one of the five principles of successful lead management. I explain everything you need to know about lead scoring so you know whether you should be scoring your leads and how to go about building a scoring model and collaborating with sales in the process:

You’ll learn:

• Should you be scoring your leads in the first place
• An overview of the various types of scoring models
• What it takes to implement an effective lead scoring system
• How to establish the criteria used in a scoring model
• The benefits of creating a lead scoring task force
• Lead scoring dos and don’ts
• What criteria you can use in an interest model
• The benefits of a multi-dimensional lead rating system
• The role lead scoring plays in changing statuses between inquiries and marketing qualified leads
• How to create service level agreements (SLA) with sales
• Marketing automation and CRM implementation considerations
• The importance of maintaining your lead scoring system
• Whether you should bring in an outside agency to help with the process

 

 

One of the biggest challenges in marketing can be defining a category for your new product or service. If you put your product in an existing category, you run the risk of not differentiating your offering in an already established market and being a “me too” solution. However, if you take the harder path of defining a new category to stand out and take a leadership position, it’s both expensive and certainly challenging. In this episode with Daniel Gaugler, CMO of PFL, we discuss why he established a new category for direct mail production and fulfillment called “Tactile Marketing” and the valuable lessons he learned in doing so.

 

 

John Barrows and I pick up where we left off on Episode 59 to discuss “Context –vs- Content.” More than ever, sales and marketing must be better aligned to drive growth together. Marketing is publishing content, and sales is a channel to deliver that content to prospects and customers. However, marketing traditionally has not spent much time teaching sales how to become storytellers. Even worse, so much of the content produced by marketing is not what I call “storyteller ready.” In this episode, John and I give some practical advice that will help sales and marketing become more collaborative, better aligned, and even more empathetic to their respective roles. Empathy creates trust and let’s face it, there’s often not enough of that between sales and marketing. Let’s fix that.

 

 

If you met Scott Berns, you’d immediately think “this is a great guy.” Although he runs marketing operations for the 3rd largest telecommunications company in America, he’s a humble, down-to-earth person that’s both a fantastic leader and constant student of learning. Scott has been leading the marketing operations team at CenturyLink for the past seven years, running it as a profit center. During that time, he’s grown the team from a handful of people to around 70 now under his leadership. What you’ll learn from Scott is how well he knows the marketing operations game and he’s happy to share his insights and lessons with you. Scott has led his team to winning the Marketo Transformation Revvie Award and has been finalists for Marketing Team of the Year. His marketing operations manager Kate (Cindric) Federhar, who I’ve also had on DemandGen Radio, was a finalist this past year for Marketer of the Year. These guys (and gals) are winners, so if you want to know what a top marketing operations leader does and how he does it, this episode is for you.

 

 

I hope you like to hear stories from winners and how they overcame great challenges.  While Henry Schuck might not seem like an ordinary 23-year-old after creating a $150M company called DiscoverOrg, he certainly felt like one.  Fear and self-doubt troubled Henry early on after starting the company. There were even a few times he was even willing to step down as CEO if investors thought that was the right thing to do.  Fortunately, they didn’t. Henry and his vision has been exactly what the company has needed and I know you’ll enjoy hearing his story.  In 2017, DiscoverOrg achieved what no other company has done so far by winning 4 Codie Awards in one year including Company of the Year, CEO of the Year, Marketing Team of the Year, and Sales Team of the Year.

 

 

Jeremy Bloom is a firm believer how learning to constructively deal with failure is the most important step that you can take towards accomplishing your biggest goals. In his book, Fueled by Failure, Jeremy points out that no matter who you are or what you have accomplished, you have experienced failure in your life. So many times failure becomes a destructive force in a person’s pursuit towards excellence yet there are ways to turn a failure into winning. Jeremy became a world champion skier and NFL football player not by denying or becoming trapped by his failures but rather by embracing them and developing a formula to use those experiences to bring him closer to accomplishing his goals.