If you are reading this article, you are interested in marketing. So why not indulge ourselves for a moment? Marketing is now mission critical to the success of every organization. Every brand. Every thing! In hyper-competitive markets, categories or industries, perfected marketing is the key differentiator. Of course your products and/or services have to be perfected. But quality or excellence no longer guarantee success. Consumers and business customers will no longer beat a path to your door. Buying products and services is increasingly undertaken digitally, via the Internet or a search engine.

So like 20/20 vision, in 2020, the future of marketing is marketing perfection. Now available to everyone, not just global brands with huge budgets. Now possible because marketing is almost completely digital. And digital marketing can be perfected, or optimized using a multitude of tools, software, apps, and yes, skills. Skills that can be trained, certified, or outsourced.

No question, some consumer brands still require old-fashioned advertising. And many brands still acquire customers via old-fashioned trade shows and events. But the balance of the proverbial marketing mix is all digital. Websites are the foundation of marketing, and yes, websites can be perfected or optimized. Other digital marketing tactics including search engine optimization (SEO), content, email, social media, paid search, advertising, publicity, market research, and more. Each can be A-B tested, optimized, and often automated. In the not too distant future, many marketing functions will use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate, manage and report marketing initiatives. Today, you can subscribe to a custom Marketing Dashboard that automatically pulls analytics and marketing metrics from different platforms, for a real-time view of marketing initiatives. Following is an example from Geckoboard.

What is Scaled Marketing?

The aforementioned digital marketing optimization, marketing automation, and advanced reporting is well documented. But no one is talking about how to just do more marketing—more efficiently, faster, more frequently and more effectively. This is Scaled Marketing with a clear objective—to achieve no less than rapid lead generation, sales, and potentially market domination (sounds like marketing perfection).

Scaled Marketing involves creating content in multiple formats and distributing it via multiple communication channels. Scaled Marketing likely requires data-mining and segmenting email lists of decision makers and prospective customers to feed frequent email campaigns. Using promotions, offers, calls-to-action (CTAs), and registration forms. Scaled Marketing is multi-channel, so use websites, social media, video, webcasts, live events, publicity, and more. Scaled Marketing might require Pay-per-click (PPC), Remarketing, and display advertising. Scaled Marketing might have campaigns and initiatives for niche or vertical markets, or targeted communications for different customer roles (e.g. CFO). With Scaled Marketing it is important to measure all prospect actions, ideally reporting these measures real-time for immediate sales follow-up (and ultimately sales conversion).

Scaled Marketing Requires Speed, Awareness and Preference

Besides volume, scaled marketing is also requires speed and frequency. Think Volume & Velocity. Marketing technology or MarTech provides the tools to manage and automate many aspects of digital marketing.

But brands require something more than scale and speed. To achieve market leadership, brands require awareness and preference.

To hasten awareness, build brand preference and ultimately sales, brands must communicate higher values. For consumer brands, this can be a cause. For business brands, this might also be a cause, but most definitely requires thought leadership via educational initiatives. Consumers prefer to buy from a brand that cares about the world. Business customers want to buy from a  brand that is the perceived expert or thought leader as a result of educational marketing and communications. Both scenarios can leverage scaled marketing to communicate to target audiences.

Scaled Marketing is the Future for High-Achieving Brands

The most rapid path to lead generation and sales is the scaling of marketing to large proportions. Double, triple and quadruple your marketing implementation without compromising quality to take market leadership. Take no prisoners. Dominate. No one is talking about this. A few (leaders) are doing marketing at scale.

With 2020 Vision, the future of marketing is scale. To be sure, scaled marketing is not just about quantity. Marketing must be effective. For consumer brands, communicating a cause can hasten awareness and preference. For business brands, marketing should strive for thought leadership via scaled educational marketing initiatives.

So the Future of Marketing is effective, scaled marketing, with cause and/or education components. There are many examples of consumer brands that have scaled rapidly with a major cause component (think TOMS shoes). Examples of business brands are more difficult to identify. Here’s a case study of a small healthcare software brand that scaled marketing, and implemented an educational program to achieve rapid growth, Wex Health.

Meanwhile, following are some relevant resources.

Recommended Resources:

The Pros and Cons of Hyper Marketing (Marketing Strategy Expert)

10 Marketing Dashboards for Visualizing Performance (Technology Advice)

Outsource vs. Insource Marketing (MMP)

Thought Leadership Marketing Guide (MMP)

BTW, contact Modern Marketing Partners (MMP) if you want to achieve market-domination via Scaled Marketing. We have some ideas.

The post 2020 Vision – The Future of Marketing appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

Another TLM definition references the need for expertise when a high degree of financial or emotional risk is involved. That said, TLM is likely important for a broad range of categories including information technology (IT), software, consulting, big ticket purchases, new technologies, and complex products or services.

As you might expect, there are many challenges to effective thought leadership marketing including a growing quantity and quality of competitors, and the consequent oversaturation of marketing, communications and sales targeting the same executives. No question time and resources are always a consideration when implementing a new marketing program.

Marketing and Sales Challenged More Than Ever

Many of the categories identified above are witnessing tremendous growth in the number and variety of competitors. The software category, as an example, is witnessing rapid growth of Software as a Service (SaaS), coupled with stratospheric valuations that attract new entrants. Channel partners and consultants add to the shear number of competitors.

At the same time, marketing has evolved dramatically to a focus on digital tactics (websites, search engine marketing, social media, content, lead generation, email, etc.). Today, these digital marketing tools and techniques are more widely available, leveling the playing field, and allowing smaller brands to compete against the giants. What’s more, in most categories, there are portals or directories that rank high in search results.

Intuitively, this combination of increased competitors and incremental marketing and sales—all targeting the same prospects—leads to communications overload. Prospects often tune-out or ignore marketing, and avoid sales personnel.

Of course, one option to compete has been to spend more than competitors on marketing, which favors larger brands and is not practical for most. However, if vendor marketing and fatigue exists, more marketing or sales may just further annoy prospective customers.

Besides these effects on prospective customers, journalist targets also experience a similar over saturation of vendor communications, and increasingly avoid or ignore such efforts.

Faced with all these challenges, how can a company be effective in marketing and sales? No question, traditional marketing and sales are declining in effectiveness. Let’s get to those tips and trade secrets.

A Marketing Silver Bullet

Yes, the above statement suggests that there is one thing you can do to achieve great success, which is usually never possible, especially in marketing. So put aside everything you have learned about marketing for a moment, and consider that while your prospects are truly oversaturated, fatigued, and even avoid vendor marketing and sales, the same prospect seeks information and education regarding new and changing technologies, significant investments, and complex alternatives.

These same prospects will seek information and training from associations, publications, conferences, professional communities, and peers. These same prospects often understand that analysts, directories, and even review sites are often paid by vendors, and therefore might not be credible.

Enter branded thought leadership (BTL)–an educational entity that leads with information, resources and training, but is sponsored by the vendor or company. Won’t prospects be skeptical? Not if well-executed with excellent content that addresses their information and education needs, and avoids aggressive sales pitches. Not if content addresses key questions and information requirements. What’s more, the branded thought leadership entity and company can be cross-promoted for maximum exposure and engagement (more on this later). The illustration below shows how branded thought leadership marketing does not experience vendor fatigue, and communicates directly with prospective customers.

So how does it work? To Find out, download our Thought Leadership Guide.

The post Thought Leadership Marketing Guide appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

Thought Leadership Marketing Best Practices: Executive Briefing

For complex or expensive products, customers won’t buy from just anybody. These purchase decisions take time and research; buyers want experts. Thought leadership is one of the most effective ways to prove your company to prospective customers. Although this is a great marketing tactic, it’s becoming more widely used than ever. How do you stand out for less?

What’s Covered:

• Understand the challenges of thought leadership.
• Learn how even small brands can attain category leadership, and beat even the biggest competitors.
• Be privy to proprietary processes for building a thought leadership brand.
• Learn tactics for significantly increasing lead generation, with less marketing spend.
• Dramatically increase website traffic and search authority.
• Achieve media placements, mentions, and speaking opportunities.
• Measure and report KPIs via a marketing dashboard.
• Case Study – Learn how a small software brand achieved category leadership and doubled sales for 3 consecutive years by implementing marketing best practices.

Date: Tuesday, June 14^th at 1 PM CST

Register for this free webcast here.

Learn more about Software Marketing Best Practices: Executive Briefing here.

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