Bradley H. Smith >

14 tips for MarkOps success: Adopt an Agile and Darwinian framework for weekly priorities.

One characteristic risk of “marketing operations” is that the right-brained MarTech solutions overwhelm the left-brained creative marketing, handcuffing the Darwinian marcomm needs with a static technology process. To mitigate that risk of inflexibility, the adoption of Scrum & Sprint methodology must be a built in element of the plan – right from the start.     

Originally developed for software development teams, Scrum is an agile framework for managing projects that allows for short development cycles and testing (Sprint). Set up a small board of appropriate people and establish the Scrum Master, whose main job is to clear away the roadblocks and bottlenecks to the team completing work.

Marketing (especially digital) is an iterative, creative process.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"Bradley Smith and I have been corporate business partners on several occasions in our industry – and now as teammates at PR Newswire. I can state indisputably that working with Bradley is always a personal pleasure and commercial success. One project was honored with a Fast Company magazine “Champion of Innovation” award and our current project generated revenue in its very first month and continues to escalate exponentially.

His marketing is brilliant and most importantly, he executes on his strategies. In our industry, Bradley is known for his creativeness, effectiveness, and many memorable campaigns.

He is one of the most widely known and most trusted corporate services executives in investor relations."

John Viglotti
VP, Investor Relations Products and Services ~ Cision / PR Newswire
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-viglotti-b03b6a

 

 

Gate or ungate, but DO NOT slam the content gate shut on me.

For me, the deliberation between gating or not gating content is tired. I’ve created enough content and client journeys to know what works. And here’s the bottom line answer…

…there is no bottom line answer.

The amount of interrelated, real-time variables i.e. the content depth, the persona description, the stage within the funnel, the analytics and what you will actually do with the collected information – is far too custom per each demand-gen program to claim a clear “do-this” approach.

Google “gated or ungated content” for yourself. You’ll find heartfelt and diagnostic pundits and posts to offer opinions.

However, this post is neither heartfelt nor diagnostic. I am a little incredulous towards the practice of slamming the gate shut on my fingers. I would like to know what consultant first suggested it. 

What am I kvetching about?

The landing page forms that do not accept @gmail or other ISP email addresses. “You must use a business email address.”

We all know HOW this happened. Someone thought it was a great “lead qualifier.”

It’s not.

• What if I am a consultant, working on behalf of a client?
• What if I am at a corporation, but for my own, personal reasons, need your whitepaper on my private email?
• What if I am between jobs (ahemahem), but am looking for solutions to bring into my NEXT job?

You have shut down ANY AND ALL opportunity to follow-up. I will certainly agree that the likelihood of having a B2B sales person reach out to [email protected] is unlikely. But what about [email protected]?  

By slamming the gate, right from the very first interaction, you have zero chance to drip Winelusher451 or smith.bradleymarketing more content. Remember, I am persona-less. You need to begin the process of uncovering who I am before deciding my value is zero.

Slamming the gate also prevents any retargeting. One of the key points I try to impress on my teams: the B2B customer is the same person EMOTIONALLY and DIGITALLY as a B2C customer. Let me in. Drop the cookie. Let me engage. I assure you, if your content motivates me, I will introduce myself. It may even be at your “analog” trade booth next month. I may just walk up and say, “hey, I read your whitepaper on…”

Another consideration: your martech may already have a cookie in my system that can be synched up with an existing activity record… where I did use my so-called business email.

BTW, you have created another problem.

Whenever I do get the gate slammed shut, I simply change my @gmail.com domain to @dell.com and I get the content anyway. (sorry, Dell, but your name is easy to type). Only a few sites use the “we have sent (@dell.com) a link to the whitepaper you requested” rather than a “download now” button.

Now, not only do you not have my actual contact email, your martech stack has a bogus email address that will log-in as a bounce.

Data is the new oil. Filter it after you get it in, not before.

There are serious real-world best-practices about gating or not, and I encourage you to sculpt a strategy to your unique services and product portfolio. However, by slamming the gate shut at the first interaction – you have functionally hung up the phone on a prospect who is asking for more information. An experienced sales person would never do that. A sales person would ease (engage) the prospect into a conversation (a relationship) to carefully qualify their value. That’s what top of funnel content is supposed to do. This is exactly what demand-gen planning and content strategy does.

Do you really want to risk not building a relationship with [email protected]? After all, I usually buy the first round. 

PS: I am job hunting. Dig deeper at www.iBradley.com.

 

14 tips for MarkOps success: Measure each program and campaign as if your life depends on it.

Thanks to marketing ops, the sting of the proverb “I know I am wasting half my advertising budget, but I don’t know which half,” is becoming less and less.

Marcom ROI is obtainable. But, before you push the send button or publish a single piece of content – be ABSOLUTELY SURE your team has a marketing operations analyst focused on developing ROI measurements. By measuring the return of each program, you’ll identify which sub-campaigns are truly working and prioritize around those. Once this metric tracking is in place, everything else within marketing will have definition and become aligned.

The end from this means (besides revenue) will be the HARD DATA you need to request (and receive!) more budget for investing in other programs and people.

Including your OWN salary.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"Bradley Smith is an incredibly creative and strategic marketer with strong content, data and tactical skills, and his marcomm programs are successful across the mosaic of marketing metrics: generating awareness, engaging community, acquiring leads and delivering sales.

Using a mix of channels – content, social, email, events, video and more – Bradley built PR Newswire’s Vintage brand into a top three leader in the SEC filings and regulatory compliance industry, alongside industry gorillas RR Donnelley and Merrill.

Bradley and I were senior members of the pioneering PR Newswire team that won the 2016 Marketo Revvie award for Enterprise Marketing Team of the Year. We were recognized for an automated demand generation program that achieved a 166% lift in qualified leads and a 361% increase in marketing-influenced revenue year-over-year.

Last points: he’s always thinking on new paths to differentiate products and, as a bonus, he’s a joy to work with."

Eva Rohrmann
Director, Product Marketing ~ Cision/PR Newswire

14 tips for MarkOps success: Stay. On. Brand.

Obviously, integrated ops planning is a function created and managed through the marketing team. Establish the brand voice and manically strive to consistency implement that tone across all of your creative (and non-creative) assets, communications channels and within all other internal divisions and business teams.

It's not easy. You have to be a Marketing S.O.B.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"Bradley Smith is one of the most talented and creative new marketers I've had the pleasure to work with. In the year leading up to the sale of Shareholder.com to Nasdaq, I worked very closely with Bradley to develop social media marketing initiatives to position Shareholder.com as the undisputed market leader.

While I thought I'd teach Bradley a thing or two about marketing, it ended up being more the other way around -- I was learning from a master marketer. In fact, the programs we developed together were so successful that I featured them in my international bestseller ‘The New Rules of Marketing & PR.’

Now Bradley's ideas are seen as a benchmark of excellence and are studied by marketers in 29 languages around the world."

David Meerman Scott
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmeermanscott

Marketing strategist and bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR
BusinessWeek Top Ten business book, 2009: Amazon #1 PR and Marketing booklist, 2009 – 2017

14 tips for MarkOps success: Set expectations. Meet expectations. Be accountable when you don’t.

In order to be effective, marketers need to have credibility…. we have to do a lot of leading by influence, a lot of aligning and engaging and evangelizing, and that only works when people trust you. They only trust you if you deliver the goods and are accountable; you do what you say and you say what you mean.

And admit your errors. Transparency also build trust.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"I have worked with Bradley for over fifteen years and without a doubt, he one of the most respected and talented marketers in our niche.

Prior our current formal partnership, Bradley created an “informal” sales and marketing relationship between our two companies. This successful synergetic relationship influenced the formal partnership with Nasdaq and our exciting joint-product development. His brand development, messaging and subsequent sales and marketing launch of this joint-product was extremely successful - orchestrating all communication channels: print, video, news and especially social media."

Brian P. Rivel
President ~ Rivel Research Group
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-rivel-73b5073

14 tips for MarkOps success: Client (and prospect) data must be controlled and centralized, yet shared.

Develop and institutionalize a centralized client (and prospect) marketing profile. This defined profile becomes the communal persona shared by all marketing teams across the organization for driving their individual programs and campaigns.

It’s essential that the data is well managed by marketing ops, in real-time, without creating an unusable colossus. Allow the product and solutions experts to have the capability to control what’s most important to them in that profile.

Don’t get possessive. The database is the means. Not the end.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"During my tenure working with Bradley at Shareholder.com, we grew our client base from 350 to over 1,300 companies and grew revenues over 600%. The highest professional compliment I can offer regarding Bradley is “he respects and understands sales.” I have found that to be a unique attribute for a marketing professional.

He fueled my sales team with exceptional marketing leadership and most importantly, with tools they needed to find, convince and close deals. Bradley’s a great partner for a sales leader and a creative asset to a sales force." 

Michael C. O’Brien
Senior Director, Enterprise Sales ~ SocialChorus
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcolemanobrien

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: Vice President, Worldwide Sales ~ Shareholder.com and Nasdaq, Inc.

14 tips for MarkOps success: Create a long-tail plan.

Write (and get TOTAL senior buy-in) on a comprehensive 12-month marketing operations strategy WITH goals. Developing a strategy with defined action items and setting both short-term and long-term measurable objectives drives you to assign team members and actually implement the tasks.

It's OK for the creative team to be a wee more "make it up as we go along," but Ops needs more structure. 

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"I learned more about event marketing from Bradley Smith than the preceding four marketing leaders I worked for at PR Newswire. Not only is he calm under the great pressure of physical events, he is a master at maximizing the enormous effort and expense associated with conferences – as well as setting realistic goals and expectations. His booth placement strategies and designs are second to none.

At our first event together, he literally tripled the booth traffic compared with all the previous years’ at this same industry annual conference. More importantly, these were conversations, not cards dropped in a fishbowl.

Bradley also connected the dots between the “analog” aspects of a physical event with our “digital” demand generation methodologies. Lastly, I could always depend on him to participate or moderate on live panels and on webinars. Events require creative problem-solving, and that is exactly Bradley."

David Korvah
Marketing Manager, Specialized Technologies and Global Cross-Market Programs ~ CSA Group
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkorvah/

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: Marketing Manager, North American Events ~ PR Newswire

 

14 tips for MarkOps success: Everyone, top-down, must agree: content is now a strategic priority.

You cannot just stumble onto content. A marketing department must have a dedicated team focused on content strategy and on creating a recurring Pipeline of Content. This pipeline must encompass all the process around content creation and curation: Internal sources, external (paid) sources, existing, new, SME, formats, approvals and distribution.

Without this map, you have nothing to show the executives responsible for approving the needed budget.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"Bradley Smith is one of only a few marketing leaders I’ve worked aside who truly partnered with sales, strategically and tactically. Together, we had the responsibility to rebuild the Vintage brand while continuing to propel it forward as a valued PR Newswire division.

One initiative converted our annual client contact renewal from a tedious phone and manual email process into a streamlined automated email process. Not only did his campaign generate over $2,000,000 with a single email, this saved my sales team hundreds of hours so they could focus their efforts on developing new opportunities.

Bradley’s consistent and creative thought-leadership, messaging and communication positioned my team for daily success. He is an incredible asset to any sales leader and made Vintage an eventual gem for acquisition."

Trevor Loe
Senior Vice President, Sales Manager - Toppan Vintage
https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorloe/

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: VP, Sales ~ PR Newswire/Vintage

14 tips for MarkOps success: Continuously creating and testing new ideas is your job.

MarTech processes never sleep: it’s all about experimentation, testing and measuring different methodologies to find what works better than last time.

In addition to the Scrum board, the entire team should meet regularly to openly (and hopefully playfully and without judgment) brainstorm and come up with one new idea to apply and measure. It can be a subtle change – like a CTA button color – or a large, systemic change to the Marketo flow.

Just ALWAYS creativity challenge the status quo and try something new. The “idea journey” is as varied as the “buyer’s journey” that you’re trying to map. Evangelizing ideology within a department is a sure way to unwrap the golden ticket to further prove your marcom ROI.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"I have worked with Bradley Smith as CEO of NIRI for several years. He is an important, trusted and knowledgeable marketing and business professional. Bradley's energy is infectious as he represents his organization and helps others around him succeed.

He has been a critical resource to NIRI on many occasions regarding key investor relations issues - disclosure, transparency, communications, both to help educate NIRI's 4,000 members, as well as an information resource for advocacy efforts with the SEC. Bradley is truly “a member and partner” of our professional organization and has always gone well beyond being just a “service provider.

In my personal opinion, Bradley Smith is an outstanding individual and professional."

Jeffrey D. Morgan, CAE
CEO ~ Club Managers Assn of America (CMAA)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreydmorgan

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: President & CEO ~ National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI)

 

14 tips for MarkOps success: Create company-specific (micro) key marketing metrics.

Certainly, KPIs will guide all your marketing efforts. Without forming these benchmarks, your marketing team won’t have anything to measure against, individually or departmentally... or financially.

Regrettably, most marketing departments don’t get creative enough with their performance metrics -  only setting broader, important, but less reveling macro-KPIs of click-through rates, leads generated and sales.

Establish KPIs that are micro-specific to your company and products i.e. text-only press releases vs. press releases with a graphic asset, transactional revenue accounts vs. subscription revenue accounts, etc.

Senior management may not care about the micro-KPIs, but what they can reveal will trickle into the macro-KPIs.

It’s about the data. Again.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"I have worked with and met hundreds of marketing executives, both entrepreneur and enterprise and I can unequivocally say that Bradley Smith is the real deal. He is a fearless digital marketer, steeped in creativity and leadership expertise.

Annutias and PR Newswire collaborated to build a comprehensive persona-driven automated lead generation program that not only exceeded PR Newswire's marketing ROI KPI, but, wonderfully, earned a coveted award from Marketo: 2016 Enterprise Marketing Team of the Year. Bradley's contribution to the award is immeasurable. His understanding of the power of content, MarTech and the lead-gen process is first class.

Bradley will infuse immediate impact into any organization hunting for a goal-oriented leader who will absolutely roll-up his sleeves and get the job done. I hope to work with Bradley, and his infectious high spirits, again."

Adam B. Needles
CEO ~ Annuitas
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abneedles/

 

 

14 tips for MarkOps success: Plan a Rinse & Repeat methodology to define which campaigns to improve or dump

An essential aspect to A/B testing - create (measurable) outcome suppositions during the initial planning sessions. Build your messaging and media variables to prioritize those suppositions – keeping the A/B variables very lean and well-defined. The campaign results will quickly give you hard and specific data per tested variable, step-by-step. Rinse away the variables that under-perform, repeat (and improve) on the messaging and media that met and exceed your suppositions' expectations.  

As a simple guideline, remember that the letter A and the letter B are right next to each other. It’s not A/Z testing, with 24 variables squished in.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"Bradley Smith delivered the highest ROI (Return-On-Intelligence) of any marketing officer PR Newswire ever hired.

The quality and quantity of work he creates – ranging from macro strategic messaging to the micro-level of his industry-leading blog to the complete rebranding of our compliance services division is overwhelming. Inventive and relentless, Bradley has a creative mind underpinned by drive and resourcefulness. Simply put, he gets things
done. 

Since his joining PR Newswire, he aligned marketing with sales, resulting in a 42% CGR for our shareholder communications division. He is the consummate content marketer, has an in-depth knowledge of demand generation and, wonderfully, is a ton of fun to work aside."

Sarah Skerik
VP of Marketing ~ SurePay, a division of PayChex
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahskerik

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: Vice President, Strategic Communications ~ PR Newswire

6 reminders why to FINALLY use marketing automation

Whilst* I am job hunting** for an appropriate*** full-time position, I have been working freelance as an “On-demand CMO.”  I am happy to report it’s been both successful and rewarding, as a couple of the accounts are JUST getting into deep content and marketing automation. That's kinda fun. I bring impact.

But, prior me... it has not been easy for these companies. The clients have tried to implement marketing automation themselves, but there is SO MUCH information to be sifted through — including random bloggers like me — that they get lost and revert back to a la carte email only.  

Part of my role is to sooth them into marketing automation, as well as remind them WHY they were looking into a process or product the first place. Getting lost in the jargon is commonplace. What the hell is "data activation" anyway? 

1. Timesaving – You can plan multiple campaigns well early and have them released according to your preset settings. This saves time by building once and giving it a chance to run. Also, all you need to execute another campaign is duplicate an old one and change the content.
2. Productivity – Why get tangled up in manual, traditional processes when you can automate everyday actions? You can lessen the time and effort required to get your marketing activities running at optimum levels.
3. Customer relationship management integration – This can help you keep every one of your leads on the radar, without worrying about them disappearing because of a couple of unsuccessful contact activities. Additionally, client support and sales teams work together as the information is shared and in the marketing system.
4. Knowledge Management – Marketing automation allows you to gain significant understanding to optimize your marketing campaign and communications, and make essential adjustments in real-time.
5. Multi-channel administration – It’s difficult to oversee relationships with clients over various channels physically. Because of marketing automation, you can nurture leads and existing clients as though they were on a 1:1 relationship consistently and automatically.
6. Cost Effective – Most of these systems are not difficult to operate, once the marketing department understands how to work the SaaS portal(s). Because of the efficiency of the systems, you can stop a poor campaign off hastily, make changes, and relaunch them quickly. In this situation, time truly is money.

*I never use this word before in a blog. Sounds snazzy.

** That's a hint. CV here > www.ibradley.com 

**Free coffee in the office. I have simple needs.

14 tips for MarkOps success: Create a 'Client Insights' position

Current clients spew off a ton of raw data that needs to be analyzed and maximized for the marketing trifecta of cross-selling, upselling and ye olde attrition.

This is a new mindset for many companies. Think of it as a client services person with marketing responsibilities. They must have a direct understanding of the full sphere of clients’ interests and clients’ apathies – and be able to articulate their insights in the context of products, services and brand.

In the past, these individuals may have become “sales specialists,” but enlisting them into marketing will create scalable programs from their know-how, rather than the one-on-one needs of “good sales demos.”

Not that those are not essential.    

 

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

Simply, Bradley is the most dedicated and dynamic marketer who has ever worked for me. A real conceptual thinker who knows how to execute his ideas. 

I would hire him again in a heartbeat.  

William C. Greenway
Retired
https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-greenway-8738444

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: CEO and President ~ InfiMed, Inc.

14 tips for MarkOps success: They aren’t targets, they are people.

Bad marketing is often borne of bad data. Make sure you begin with the right information about the right audience – and carefully parse your macro-list data (CRM, email activity, web forms, hard events, and owned & paid web traffic) together to generate precise micro-lists data. You’ll sculpt a sharp understanding of your targets – and you can then create smarter, actionable and (perceived) humanized messaging.

But, remember, data is a means, not an end. You are communicating to a person, not a datapoint, macro, micro or otherwise. The content MUST be a fit.

And importantly, creativity is always a variable.

 

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

In my experience, Bradley is a unique marketing talent. He is not only highly creative with excellent hands-on skills, but also works hard and works fast. As a result of Bradley's efforts, Shareholder.com was able to project a marketing presence - at conferences, in our literature, on our website, through direct mail - far larger than our actual size. As a result, Shareholder.com as acquired by Nasdaq for multiple times revenue.

He's also a real pleasure to work with.

Ronald H. Gruner
Retired
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ron-gruner-085015b

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: CEO and Founder ~ Shareholder.com

14 tips for MarkOps success: Write for your audience, not your CEO.

 Your CEO will understand if you make a clear plan.

Begin with your readers (and prospects): take the time to understand your data and analytics, interview current customers, listen to social media. From that, create your content brand and voice – making unique content that aligns your goals with your audience’s goals.

It is crucial, especially in commodity-esque businesses, you MUST make either unique content or speak in a VERY unique voice.

Track and measure contiguously. Content is a long-play. Take the air you need. 

Be realistic, not random.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

About Bradley:

"Bradley Smith is the most dynamic and dedicated employee ever in my charge. His marketing leadership and niche expertise was a keystone for the acquisition of Shareholder.com by the Nasdaq Stock Exchange as well as the product, marketing and sales integration of the subsequent acquisitions that became Nasdaq corporate services.

A fair but fierce competitor, Bradley is extremely attuned and excited by top-line growth. In addition to an outstanding marketer, he is a true sales enabler. During our working tenure at Shareholder.com and into Nasdaq, our corporate services revenue grew from $6 million to $72 million."

Douglas A. Ventola
Managing Director ~ Consilio LLC
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-ventola-a83b893

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: CEO, Shareholder.com, SVP, Nasdaq, Inc.

Read more at www.ibradley.com.