The PR 20/20 Blog

Oh, premium content. We as marketers love our ebooks, whitepapers and infographics— they’re mutually beneficial pieces of content for both us and the downloader.

On the marketing side, we’re able to gate our content behind a form to gain rich lead generation intelligence, like basic contact information, persona type, content interests or funnel stage. Armed with that info, we can then enroll leads into future marketing programs that are most relevant to them.

If you’re just diving into the world of artificial intelligence (AI), the sheer number of terms and confusing jargon can make the subject seem totally out of reach. Machine learning and deep learning are terms that could make any marketer’s head spin.

But it’s not as confusing as you may think, and because our mission at the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute is to make AI approachable for marketers, we’ll break it down for you.

Exercising your mind, especially in the workplace, is a great way to improve key traits and characteristics needed to fuel a successful career.

One way the PR 20/20 team exercises the mind is by conducting monthly morning meetings to focus on a variety of professional development activities. Not only does this provide the opportunity to support knowledge-share and brush up on our skills, it also provides the chance to learn more about our marketing team and creates a sense of team bonding. Plus, it’s a nice way to break up the daily grind!

Some marketers aren’t afraid to take a risk on new ideas, push leadership on new technology or champion an entirely new methodology. They are often the ones that drive real, lasting change and quickly gain influence.

We call these people change agents.

In the words of a colleague, a change agent is “a visionary who looks beyond, brings vision to life, and successfully champions ideas forward.”

These marketers aren't afraid to take risks to make an impact. So, we decided to spotlight these professionals in an ongoing series, so we can all learn from their successes (and failures too).

In this spotlight, we’ve featured Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille), CMO of Crayon. Crayon provides market and competitive intelligence tools to help businesses track, analyze and act on everything happening outside their four walls. And after growing more than 300% last year, Crayon announced this week that it raised $6M in Series A funding.

Read on to see how Ellie has helped to build marketing programs from startup to scale-up.

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! 🙌