Inbound Marketing Age

In the past, the roles of Sales and Marketing have been fairly well-defined, understood and respected, but the changing nature of the market and buyers' behaviour has brought them into inevitable conflict.

Compartmentalised Departments

If we go back a few years, most companies had two, distinctly separate departments – Sales and Marketing.

In simple terms, Marketing would create all the sales materials and handle the brand positioning of the business. And sales would deal with the prospects and turn them into customers. It was more or less cut and dried.

Read the following sentence:

‘If people want to become more productive and efficient at work, they should implement the following habits into their working day.’

Let’s change one thing:

'If you want to become more productive and efficient at work, you’ll need to implement the following habits into your working day.’

Notice the difference? Which is more engaging?

As marketers, data analysis takes a firm seat in our weekly schedules. But so many of us are just skating across the surface of what can be achieved.

By shifting the focus from output toward outcomes, a business can maximise its performance and potential.  

Your output is the avenue you take to achieve outcomes; it’s the daily activities you use to generate exposure, connect with prospects and promote your business. Your output includes your newsletters, your emails, your website, your blogs.

You’ve spent hours producing content, publishing it and promoting it and now you have to measure its impact and prove Return On Investment (ROI) to the board as well? Isn’t just publishing it enough?

In a word, no.

If you can’t prove your marketing is working, then you are putting effort in for nothing.

• How do you know it is useful?
• How do you know it is the best you can do?
• How do you know your efforts are not making things worse even?

So measuring is essential.

Mobile internet usage has long surpassed desktop and laptop usage, and not just in the consumer world.

B2B buyers are just as glued to their phones as consumers. A recent study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) revealed some powerful stats about how B2B buyers use mobile in the purchasing journey:

• 80% of B2B buyers are using mobile at work
• 60% of B2B buyers report that mobile played a significant role in a recent purchase
• 50% of all B2B search queries are made on smartphones (this is expected to rise to 70% by 2020)

If you have been on social media, reading the news or following all things marketing, then you can’t help but have noticed the public response to the ‘banning’ of Iceland’s latest advert featuring the animated story of Rang-Tan – an orangutan whose had to leave his native forest due to palm oil production and ends up ransacking a little girl’s bedroom.

Currently, the advert is hosted on YouTube which has seen an estimated 30 million views (a figure that includes social media shares).

And a petition to “Release Iceland’s banned Christmas advert on TV” on Change.org is headed for a million signatures as of the time of writing.