The PR 20/20 Blog

Based on our own analytic data, the vast majority of you reading this are marketers, sales pros, service professionals, and business executives. 

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.

Thinking. It’s something we do on a daily basis. From deciding what you want in your coffee to preparing for a business call, thinking is required for almost every aspect of daily life.

But, how often are other people thinking the same way we are? 

As marketers, it’s critical to have a strategic process in place to ensure your company is maximizing its efforts every single day.

Ready to drive strategy and performance? 

I’m convinced there are two databases every marketer needs at-the-ready to do so effectively. 

Audit your company’s (or client’s) audiences and accelerators. Create two living databases.  And keep these databases updated.

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. 

How do you get started with marketing artificial intelligence?

The short answer is quick-win pilot projects with narrowly defined use cases and high probabilities of success. That’s how you build executive support for the longer term vision and transformation.

PR 20/20 launched Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute in November 2016 with the mission to make AI more approachable and actionable for modern marketers. 

We wanted to understand and apply AI ourselves, and figured other marketers might be curious too. So, we started a blog at www.MarketingAIinstitute.com, and began telling a story about the current and future potential of AI.

Trust Insights, a marketing analytics and data consulting company, just dropped a stellar report about social media trends and what they mean for 2020.

It’s all about user interest in social networks, and how that translates for marketing strategy—namely, where marketers should put their time and money as they plan for 2020.

The insights within are based on search volume, in short. Trust Insights selected the most popular social platforms and learned what conversations users were having based on search terms that indicated starting or closing an account. Then, it compared the search volume of those terms and projected change in volume to pull predictions. The full methodology section of the report is very descriptive, and will definitely appeal to all of the data nerds out there. 🤓

The full report is well worth your time—but at the very least, stop and read these key takeaways before you start mapping your 2020 social media strategy.

Marketing conferences have shaped my top team memories. I always leave events feeling more in sync with my colleagues, and usually with an expanded network of intriguing people. (Pictured below, see our smiling faces at this year’s #INBOUND19 for evidence of a good time.) 

Plus, I head home feeling more inspired than when I showed up—armed with big ideas and a renewed sense of motivation and purpose. What work activity is more meaningful than that?

Each year a few members of the PR 20/20 team head to Boston for a non-stop week of catching up with good friends, meeting new partners, taking in all the knowledge, and filling up on our share of inspiration. Boston’s famous lobster rolls are a pretty great part of the week too. ;)

This year at INBOUND, the heart of the message I received: It’s all about creating amazing experiences.

HubSpot walks the walk, making its INBOUND conference an experience to remember each year. 

Crafting a marketing strategy is not a light lift. 

With so many channels to choose from and endless data points to analyze, we could invest time and resources into thousands of areas. So where do you focus your efforts knowing that both time and resources are finite? 

It’s time to level set and prioritize those areas that are going to have the greatest impact on your marketing. 

Luckily, there’s a tool that will do the heavy lifting for you.

In most cases, marketers are creative sorts. We are communicators and storytellers, strategists and promoters. When we signed up for this gig, few (if any) of us came at it from an interest in statistics and math. 

Yet here we are, marketing in the digital age, where everything we do is trackable and we are without want for performance data. We are now expected to make marketing decisions based more on metrics than experience and intuition.