You don’t have to be a data scientist to be a CMO these days, but it helps.

That might be stretching the idiom a bit – but a data-centric background certainly hasn’t hindered Yannic Pluymackers. The chief marketing officer of Lastminute.com for more than two years – while admitting he is no data scientist himself – studied economics and statistics at university, and feels being conversant in these disciplines is...

It’s 9am on a regular working day, sometime around 2012. The computer has just been fired up, the coffee is starting to cool, and you ease yourself into proceedings with a cursory scan of your inbox. The vast majority of what you find is not to your taste. Emails that are full of jargon, with a cliched call to action, and so lacking in personalisation that they all blur into one dirge of dullness.

It certainly...

Pinterest bamboozles a lot of marketers and brands. It’s clear that brands can get amazing results on the platform, but they don’t always understand how.

Pinterest, after all, is so different from other social media platforms, and with audiences using it in different ways, businesses need to adapt in order to get results. The best way to do this, hands-down, is to create clickable pins that users are excited to view and...

Marketers are always experimenting with all sorts of campaign and content ideas. Many of them may have had multiple previous reincarnations. Several unused blog cuts or email newsletters laying on the workshop floor waiting for an inspired marketer to piece them together to create the next content masterpiece. I came across the concept of Frankenblogging on our own Marketo blog, a phrase introduced by one of our past colleagues, Jason Miller, and it takes inspiration...

The rise of online communities, peer review sites and social media has forever changed the impact of the customer voice. Customer feedback has evolved from something owned and managed by customer service teams to a force that influences every department across an organisation: product, HR, finance, IT, and marketing.

Marketing agencies are experiencing this shift more acutely than most as often, in these types of companies,...

Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, explains why the role of the chief marketing officer is one of the most stressful in any forward-facing organisation. “The customer has dramatically changed; they’ve been dramatically much more connected, informed and empowered,” he tells MarketingTech. “Technology in marketing in general – you have cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning now, all these different things you have to simultaneously...

Influencer marketing has become all the rage in an industry where social media is increasingly at the epicenter. The early days of influencer marketing were characterised by a less than structured approach and lacked what would usually be considered a stitched-up strategy. Then larger brands began dabbling in the space under the advice and counsel of third-party influencer marketing specialists, who brought methodology to the process. The net result was a rise in...

No matter where they are in their journey, buyers have access to more information than ever before. While companies think that providing more content is helpful, buyers can find it overwhelming.

For this reason, buyers find it easier to put off a buying decision rather than make one. In order to differentiate from market competitors, organisations need to provide prospects with exactly the right content, at the right time, in a...

You spend valuable time and money crafting your marketing messages, but do you really know what your company is saying? Sometimes the message you think you’re sending isn’t always the one that’s being received. It's important to occasionally take a step back and conduct an in-depth audit of your customer communications plan — particularly where loyalty is concerned — to ensure you’re sending out a cohesive message that upholds your brand...

Having a solid content strategy and a customer-centric approach to your marketing is vital to growing your business. Avoiding the three pitfalls below can help you stay on track to building long-term, profitable customer relationships and put you on the path to enhanced ROI.

Pitfall 1: Losing your focus on content