Those Annoying Spooky Emails
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It was Halloween yesterday & in true marketing fashion, all emails from products, services & other folks who email me were full of Halloween themed subject lines.
I just did a search for spooky in my email & these gems showed up (even Facebook API Launch has a Spooky Lesson in it).
I hate it.
It’s the same feeling when someone publishes a ‘7 things you can learn from GOT for Account-Based Marketing’ posts during peak GOT season (what a disappointing last season that was eh?). Don’t try to be cute. It doesn’t help me like you any better & honestly when everyone does it, it’s as much harder to stand out.
Some things I’ve been thinking about lately:
Hiring ( I am looking to bring on help & its incredibly hard to hire & find the time to make recruitment a priority)
Is the Marketing/Sales Ops world too focused on the mechanics of tools vs thinking about systems architectures? I am 'toying’ with the idea of an Ops Bootcamp but should it be focused on tool (like Marketo) or a general systems/architecture type? Tools can be learned, it’s thinking about how to solve business problems with scalable processes that is the challenge I think.
Every company is a media company. I’ve been following the media/tech biz for a while. I even have a couple of failed media/tech mashup companies in my past. On a recent pod (Recode Media with Peter Kafka) there was a really interesting discussion about the move away from distributed media (like publishing things on Facebook vs pushing people back to your website) - I can’t remember for the life of me who the guest was. But the interesting bit was - this company doesn’t even publish full videos on Youtube - they do use Youtube but the majority of their video content points back to customized Brightcove players on the owned properties. On the flip side, Buzzfeed/upworth (RIP) and have distributed strategies (like an Instagram account that pays for itself with sponsored content) vs just selling display ads against the traffic to the site. In the long run though - like any other company you have to ‘own’ the audience.
On the every company is a media company - Wistia/Drift/Intercom/MailChimp are all producing original content (video/written/audio) and increasingly investing more into it.
All the answers are still around FB/GOOG. One of the underdogs for B2B Ads is Quora. They’re surprisingly launched a pretty mature ad product ( i was on the beta) that skipped all the nonsense of not having basic features & they’re continuing to add great features (like question remarketing). If you are are curious about Quora ads, shoot me a message - I’d be happy to chat.
Take away - “If you have high churn, start with customer success. If you have large accounts with high organic growth and strong retention, prioritize sales. “
A couple of interesting reads:
Adidas on digital marketing spend & its effectiveness: https://www.marketingweek.com/adidas-marketing-effectiveness/
Facebook & Scammers (surprised?) : https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc
Why I avoid Airbnb at all costs now: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-host-scam-on-airbnb
Till next time.
Kamil