The measurement tail is wagging the marketing dog … and it’s turning your marketing into a dog. Unfortunately, few marketers have the insight needed to illustrate the problem, and even fewer have the guts to take it on within their organizations.

Content marketing strategy begins with an understanding of audience and context — everything from analyzing your competition, to assessing economic pressures and exploring competing priorities. Based on that understanding, you identify the opportunities or challenges marketing needs to tackle.Continue Reading

Lead generation and demand generation, often used interchangeably, are essentially at odds with each other. When many B2B marketers say demand generation, they mean lead generation — which is to say they will measure success based on the number and value of the leads their efforts bring in.

The problem is this: Demand generation is focused on shaping the audience’s perspective, while lead generation is focused on capturing their information. Continue Reading