The PR 20/20 Blog

Editor's note: This post was originally published in 2011 and has been updated to be more current and comprehensive.

The goal of most marketing activities is to drive leads, which will convert to new customers and grow the business. To do this effectively, however, a deep integration between marketing and sales is needed, and it starts with shared information and processes.

While marketing and sales integration is seamless in a perfect world, the scary truth is that too many companies aren't there. In Kapost's B2B Marketing and Sales Alignment Benchmark report, it was uncovered that more than half of all marketing teams have no idea what content assets sales use most often— and within in sales, team members don't know what's used across their department. What's worse than the clear lack of visibility is that marketing and sales teams admit they don't meet together frequently, resulting in a loss of feedback and unused content.

So, are you ready to dive into a better relationship between marketing and sales? Below are three steps to ensure that marketing best supports the sales process and vise versa. 

Overall, 2018 was a “down” year for trust, according to Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer. The study found that people are unwilling to believe information they see and read. The media scored as the least-trusted global institution, with social media and search engines following closely behind.

Some marketing and PR pros, like Beth Monaghan (@bamonaghan), were ahead of this curve. Writing for Forbes, Monaghan predicted in late 2017 that trust was at stake for every American organization and it would play a major role in 2018 PR strategies.

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.

As a marketer, it’s easy to get caught up in the mix of your day-to-day responsibilities. But, as our most recent book club book asks, how often do we stop and ask ourselves, “Am I creating busywork or my best work?”

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, and scale, artificial intelligence in your marketing? There’s a conference for that, and you’re invited.

Registration for the inaugural Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON) is now open. The event will be held in Cleveland, Ohio at the Huntington Convention Center, July 16 - 18, 2019.  

MAICON is designed to help marketing leaders truly understand AI, educate their teams, garner executive support, pilot priority AI uses cases, and develop a near-term strategy for successfully scaling AI.

According to Content Marketing Institute Research Director Lisa Beets (@LisaBeets), “Nearly all top-performing B2B content marketers—90%—put their audience’s informational needs ahead of their company’s sales/promotional message.”

That’s a far cry from the marketers of the past, who pushed promotional messaging at consumers with a wish and a prayer that someone would convert.

Today, more B2B marketers than ever rely on a content marketing approach. To quantify the trends among this group, each year, Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs gather up their extensive survey findings for a B2B content marketing report.

Image credit: Content Marketing World and MarketingProfs

The trends informing the savvy content marketer’s year-end planning have become even more reliable this year, as CMI and MarketingProfs only surveyed respondents whose organizations have used content marketing for at least one year. They also qualified respondents “by asking them to confirm they are a content marketer, someone who is involved with content marketing, or someone to whom content marketing staff reports.”

Editor's note: This article was submitted by Natalie Slyman, the director of content and social media at Influence & Co. Natalie loves telling stories, cooking, and her two cats, Roxanne and Priscilla.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have the gift of seeing into the future? There'd be no surprises, no "gotcha" moments. You'd know exactly what to expect, and you'd be able to completely prepare yourself and your team for whatever's next in the world of content marketing.

While we can't know the future, we can look to the trends and technologies that are shaping the marketing industry today and predict what they could mean for brands and content marketers in 2019.

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. 

Marketers always have the same question when it comes to artificial intelligence:

“How do I get started with AI?”

The best way is to experiment with AI-powered marketing tools. But there are a lot of vendors out there. And a lot of bold claims about what AI can and can’t do.

So taking demos and trials of tools is a must.

We can point you in the right direction.

Over the past year at PR 20/20, we’ve spent time reflecting on our core audience—who they truly are and how we can inspire them. 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 Cathy McPhillips (@cmcphillips), Vice President of Marketing at Content Marketing Institute (@CMIContent). Just in case you’re not familiar, CMI is the leading global content marketing education and training organization, teaching enterprises how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multi-channel storytelling. 

It’s that time of year again. Before we know it, it’ll be time to wrap the year’s marketing campaigns, report on performance and write the plan for what will bring next year’s successes.

It’s important that marketers constantly iterate strategies throughout the year based on performance. However, the end of the year presents the perfect opportunity to evaluate what worked and what didn’t— including which marketing mediums were successful.

While we’re on the subject of marketing mediums, have you leveraged the power of video? If not, you should.

According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey, 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool— up 18 points from 2017. In addition, the average respondent consumes 1.5 hours of video a day, and 72% would rather use video to learn about a product or service, if both video and text are available.