The PR 20/20 Blog

This post originally appeared on the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's blog. The Marketing AI Institute was created and is powered by PR 20/20. 

A lot of people suck at content strategy.

Don't worry: We're only human.

Content strategy is an art and a science, after all. Humans are great at the art part. We excel at the creative side of the process, like the creation of compelling content and telling stories that resonate with customers.

Editor’s Note: The Book Clubbin’ series recaps business and marketing related books read by the PR 20/20 team each quarter as part of the agency book club. This series will highlight key takeaways and top tips directly from each book club book.

In the digital age, marketers now more than ever are looking for ways to make their companies stand out amongst all the noise. However, doing so is often tricky without the right strategy in place.

In this day in age, 50% of Americans would choose word of mouth as their source of information.

New year, same marketing program?

If the “same old, same old” mentality applies to your marketing goals and campaigns in 2019, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate how important success is to you. Without a refreshed outlook and adoption of current marketing trends and technologies, you can’t expect to outperform last year.

Every year, research firm CB Insights publishes their AI 100 list of hot companies to watch in artificial intelligence.

The list is compiled using proprietary CB Insights data and by weighing aspects of each business, like its momentum, market, funding and quality of investors. The result is a list of 100 privately-held companies that are reinventing industries using AI and machine learning.

January is the month for reflection and self-assessment. We encourage one another to look back on the year and set new goals for the year ahead. Best of all: it’s a fresh, 365-day start.

Since you’ve probably already set your personal goals, what about your professional ones? How will you make your marketing program even savvier in 2019?

For a little inspiration, we pulled PR 20/20’s most-shared blog posts from 2018. We used Buzzsumo’s Content Analyzer to curate the top posts across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, as well as links from other websites. Catch up on what you missed before you set your marketing intentions.

Best of luck in 2019! 🙌 

Just like any structure is built on a sturdy foundation, marketing depends on a strong, ground-up approach, or all else may crumble.

Marketing success isn’t derived from a single outperforming team member, a highly efficient technology integration or one successful campaign. Instead, a strong marketing core layers in success from multiple campaigns, perspectives, team members and stakeholders.

Laying a strong foundation is easier said than done, and it requires teams to take a step back and truly gut check where their successes stand. This is especially true if you’ve been operating at a “business-as-usual” mentality without raising eyebrows.

I’ve attended and presented at hundreds of conferences in my nearly (gulp) 20 years in the industry, but, this is my first time on the event organizer side as we build the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON).

And, like every event I’ve been to, we see the diversity and quality of the speakers as the fundamental building block of a great attendee experience.

You’ve likely heard the hype: Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s taking over! ROBOTS WILL SOON DO OUR JOBS! HUMANS WILL GO EXTINCT!

Kidding. (If this is the AI news you’re hearing, you need a better source. I recommend the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute.) But AI is poised to massively influence how marketers work. It’s estimated that 80% of a marketer’s job function will be intelligently automated, to some degree, in the next 3-5 years—and AI and other analytics will have trillions of dollars in annual impact.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in 2015 and has been updated to be more current and comprehensive.

"High performers differentiate by doing, not planning. Do your homework, put strategies in place, and then start testing and revising."
— The Marketing Performance Blueprint

Consider this scenario . . .

A B2B SaaS company with $10M in funding and aggressive growth goals is struggling to meet lead generation targets. The CMO fears they’re going to fall short of Q4 goals.

The marketing team is blogging 2x per week, and producing a high-quality ebook with an accompanying webinar each month. But, not enough people are organically finding the content.

What do they do?