The author, David T. Scott, is the founder and CEO of Marketfish, a data management and lead generation platform. Prior to Marketfish, David served as VP of Marketing for PeopleSoft and Intermec, and also has  Boston Consulting Group and GE in his resume. His solid business background shows that he is not just a “consultant”, “marketing guru” or some “speaker”.

But is this book for you? I hope the following review helps you make up your mind.

New and Old Rules

First, I’ve got to say that the title left me a bit uncertain. I have read the other David Scott (the one with Meerman in the middle) book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” and know that he has started a series of “new rules” books and eBooks. So my first impression was that David T. Scott (or his publisher) was trying to jump on the well known “new rules” title created by another author and take advantage of it.

Leaving the issue of the title aside, the book doesn’t focus only on “new” lead generation tactics like social media and online advertising but instead it gives you a more comprehensive roadmap for implementing a lead generation program at your company using both tried-and-true lead gen tactics like direct mail and cold calling and social media advertising, display advertising, and search engine marketing.

The Basics and More

The book starts off talking about basics of lead generation, how to develop your strategy, and gives an overview of each tactic. The first 5 chapters set up the stage and are great for someone new to marketing or that is interested in getting a better understanding of lead generation. The remaining 11 chapters go deep into each tactic.

Planning Your Strategy

According to David, there are 5 steps to a successful lead generation program:

1. Determine and plan your approach
2. Research and discover your target customer
3. Build your assets
4. Execute your test campaign
5. Measure

And he adds a ‘sixth’ step: Repeat!

Sounds simple and trivial, but unless you and your marketing organization are in sync as to what needs to get done to setup your lead gen program, it will be tough to get good (and measureable) results.

One thing I really liked was that he mentions in several places throughout the book the importance of coordinating your lead generation tactis and testing. He says “You are constantly testing and anlyzing your results to see which lead generation tactic works best for you”. This is important, because you don’t want to go ahead and spend money on certain tactics just because your competitor is doing it or because it is being talked about in the media. Testing is important if you want to improve your lead gen results.

Lead Generation Tactics

The 7 lead generation tactics that the author believes are the most successful ones are:

• SEM
• Social Media Advertising
• Display Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Cold Calling
• Direct Mail
• Trade Shows

There’s one chapter for each of the tactics. Although you won’t get a lot of deep information on the many ways to use a certain tactic, it will get you up to speed on what exactly each one is and how it is used.

Lead Gen Basics

As I said earlier, this book focuses on the basics of lead generation. Having said that, I think the book is missing a couple of important topics. First, the author presents the reader with the AIDA framework, a model that every marketer should know. It would have been better, however, if he also had introduced the reader to the SiriusDecisions demand waterfall model that is becoming prevalent in larger B2B organizations and a key component in any discussion about lead generation tactics.

Another point I think was not stressed enough in the book is the importance of defining what exactly constitutes a lead and how this seemingly simple concept can be the cause for a great divide between sales and marketing, especially because the book is aimed not at the experienced marketer but the beginner.

Finally, is not until chapter 5 that the author talks about the marketing and sales funnel, discussing the concepts of Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Accepted Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, and Sales Qualified Opportunity. I think that it would have been better to have brought up the funnel earlier in the book to set the stage for how different lead generation tactics should help drive and move leads from one stage to another.

Regardless of these issues, the book is still a good source of information for those starting off in their marketing careers.

For more information about the book, check it out on Amazon and on the book’s website.

Content Marketing Leaders and Followers

According to Aberdeen’s report, the companies it considers leaders in PR and Brand Management achieve greater performance metrics than followers, such as:

• 23% of their marketing-generated leads are sourced through inbound or content marketing (vs 10% for followers)
• 12% growth in year-over-year company revenue (vs 3.5% for followers)
• 20% year-over-year increase in media mentions (v 2.7% for followers)
• 15% year-over-year increase in social media mentions (vs 2% for followers)

The Changing Role of PR

One of the key insights from the research has to do with how PR has changed in the past few years. While the key mission for Public Relations in most B2B companies is still related to brand recognition and market credibility, the increasing role of content marketing in assisting PR with such efforts is now being seen as critical at most leading companies. The research points to 63% of respondents indicating that content marketing is being used as part of an overall PR strategy at their companies.

Companies considered “leaders” are the first ones to understand the importance of integrating content marketing into a broader PR effort, as their report points to 94% of leading companies stating that their PR function is now a component of their integrated marketing communications efforts and showing also that leaders are 50% more likely than followers to indicate that PR has evolved into a content marketing role.

Recommended Actions

Aberdeen recommends the following actions as you develop or reconsider the role of PR and your PR strategy:

1. Align PR and Marketing: this involves a shared editorial calendar and unified web strategy
2. Content Rules: you have to change how external PR firms and agencies are hired and evaluated, and also pay special consideration for SEO
3. Search Engine Optimization: having PR work closely with the SEO team to navigate the new waters of content marketing, like correlating inbound website traffic with PR activity
4. Measure what Matters: new measures for PR (inbound site traffic, web analytics, etc.) should be carefully considered in combination with more traditional ones (media mentions, advertising equivalents, etc.)

If you have been adopting content marketing strategies at your own company, the research results are probably not surprising but rather reinforce the notion that content marketing is here to stay. If your company has a traditional PR department or agency, now is a good time to start re-thinking your public relations strategy and how you approach it with content marketing.

To access the report click the image below.

If you are a product marketer, your challenge is getting everything done while at the same time keeping the big picture in mind. That is, the story you are telling. Product marketers work on product messaging and positioning, which requires a great deal of story telling. What is the product, what problem does it solve, and the typical checklist-style questions you see everywhere are just scratching the surface. A good product marketer gets deep into the customer’s mind, understands the marketplace, and can tell a compelling story not about the product, but about the customer need.

That’s the key difference. When I look at work from different companies and different product marketing teams, I see which ones are simply following the “corporate policy” or “product marketing as we have always done it” and those who try to take a step back to ask the question of “why is this relevant?”.

It is more than saying “we are the leaders in [fill in the blank]“. It is about communicating to the customer that you not only understand their pain, their needs, but that you also care about solving them. In sum, it requires people that are willing to ask the right questions and to challenge everthing without the fear of doing something different.

So, if you are a product marketer, keep in mind that above all, you are the company’s Chief Story Teller.

Although interesting, I am not sure the infographic format is the best way to visualize this information. First, there is a lot of text, a lot of data, and you have to scroll through infinity to reach the end. My recommendation would be for them to transform this into a nice SlideShare presentation.

Also, the infographic seems to focus more on the evolution of marketing channels rather than the evolution of marketing automation per se. It completely ignores the rise of Fax machines, for example, which were used for B2B outbound marketing until email came along (and also until the Junk Fax Prevention Act was passed in 2005). Other important marketing channels like direct mail, and the once-popular online banner ads of the 90′s are strangely not mentioned.

So for someone who is publishing content with the title of evolution of marketing automation, they are surely missing out on a LOT of stuff that happened before in marketing history. Sure, I get it that they want to focus on the ‘old’ broadcast systems to contrast with the ‘new’ marketing tools (email, social media, marketing automation), but by leaving them out makes the “Evolution of Marketing Automation” topic a bit of a mismatch with the content.

Maybe a good source of comparison is another infographic titled “The History of Marketing“, published by HubSpot about a year ago. HubSpot’s version is also brief (the point of any infographic, sure) but doesn’t overlook key events in marketing history. Another marketing automation vendor, Eloqua, also published an infographic about the same time as HubSpot titled “A History of Disruptive Innovations in Marketing” which focused mostly on the technology advances. Heck, even the simplistic “History of Marketing Channels” infographic from Visual Loop published back in 2010 had more meat.

Maybe I am being too picky. What do you think?

P.S.: for those interested in more information about the evolution of marketing and marketing through history, check out the following links:

• A Brief History of Marketing (Advertising Age)
• The Reality of Mad Men (Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History)
• The History of Marketing Theory and Practice (Chapter from Marketing: A Critical Text Book)
• A Brief History of Content Marketing (I might as well have a link to my eBook)
• The History of Content Marketing (CMI)

Once upon a time, marketers just played the quantities game. Pay for the biggest audience you can afford – whether that’s a billboard, newspaper advertisement, radio or otherwise – and trust that increased sales after the fact resulted from that investment. Well, times have changed. Today’s marketer can target prospects to an increasingly granular degree and measure return on spend to the cent.

But this ability raises another issue. With so many options available, it’s difficult to know where to prioritize your spend. Which channels move your ideal customer down the sales funnel fastest? Which content produces the highest quality lead, and does it matter where we measure this success in the customer journey?

Marketing automation solutions reviewer, Software Advice, created this video guide recently to help guide businesses along this uncertain terrain. Analytics expert Laura Patterson describes step by step how to create an attribution model. This method maps channels and content along your customer journey, then identifies those with the highest rate of success for moving contacts to conversion.

Click to Play

About Ashley Verrill
Ashley Verrill is a market analyst that writes for theSoftware Advice. She has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising. She is a University of Texas graduate with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

When asked about the narrow vs wide focus in content marketing, my first question is always “what is your goal?”. Do you want to generate leads to the top of the funnel or do you need to close deals that are being worked on right now? Do you need to test whether your message is on target (based on your buyer personas) or do you need to get prospects through the marketing funnel and further qualify them?

These are simple, but important questions. I’ve seen lengthy discussions arise because the marketing team is not in sync. Some want to go after additional industries so that the message can be spread out and the company name (or product) can become known elsewhere. Others don’t want to “abandon” leads they have already generated and argue for more nurturing campaigns with content that will guide those leads down to eventually close a sale.

So how do you solve this? I believe it is a matter of understanding a few important things before making a decision, such as:

1. How long is your sales cycle?
2. Who are the decision makers and all the personas involved?
3. What content has already been created?
4. Which content pieces were successful in the past and why?
5. What is the profile of your ideal customer?

Number 5, although the last one, is typically the first thing your company should know. This sounds obvious but for startups it might take them a while until they figure out who exactly is their ideal customer, which can change from the day they set out to actually sell the product until they close their first few deals.

If you have a relatively short sales cycle, then developing content focused on driving leads down the marketing funnel to help close deals might be the best bet. If, on the other hand, you don’t expect deals to close within the next 6 months, then you can afford to verge off track for a bit and create content for other industries/personas/segments and come back later with additional content for existing leads.

Whatever your decision, make sure you understand what and why you are doing it and have some metrics in place to tell you what is working and why.

The tower of Hobbit books

Keeping Your Content Fresh

When talking with other companies about content marketing, the discussion is often steered to how much content to create. All the ideas start flowing and the great topics that will make prospects notice the new product being launched. Only to dawn on everybody that with a staff this small there is no way we can pull it off. Then I like to raise my hand and ask them to rethink their content approach. Is more content the same as good content? How about instead of trying to write blog posts every day, host webinars every week, and create new whitepapers every month we just stop to think about the following elements:

• What is the message?
• Who do we want to reach with our message?
• Why is this message important for this group of people?
• What is the most effective way to reach them?

I also like to ask something like “if you only had resources (budget, staff) to do one content piece, what would it be?”. The idea is not to do less content, but to do better content.

How do you do it? The answer is focus.

The marketing focus I am talking about is not the concentration of all your efforts into producing content while forgetting everything else, but rather the focus of knowing exactly what type of content to produce.

I’ve seen big and small companies alike fall into this content creation trap. It starts with a brainstorming session to talk about all content that should be produced, followed by assigning priorities to each content piece and getting it in a schedule with respective owners assigned.

What’s wrong with this approach? It misses the point entirely. FOCUS means understanding what message you need to tell, then focusing on the story and making sure each content piece created tells and reinforces the same story.

It is less about creating a lot of content for creation sake but creating content that helps your audience (i.e. prospects) understand why your company is different and what story it is telling. To do that I like to ask marketing teams to get out of the brainstorming of content types (videos, whitepapers, ebooks, etc.) and think first of the topics, themes, or high-level stories that have to be told. Then we figure out which types of content will help tell that story. We focus on how to tell the story and disseminate the story so that we reach the higher number of prospects instead of just trying to create content like crazy.

Focus is the name of the game if you want to get more done with the same resources.

1. Does it have your product name sprinkled throughout?

2. Does it focus on what your product does and describe features?

3. Does it use technical terms and acronyms?

If you answered “yes” to at least one question, your content might be the one to blame. So it’s time to clean up the house.

Cleaning Up Your Content

The best way to start cleaning up your content is to review it with a buyer’s eyes. What do buyers want? Try this:

A. The CFO doesn’t want another financial management system, she wants month-end closings to happen faster and without errors.

B. The VP Sales doesn’t need a new CRM system, he needs a better way to keep in touch with current opportunities and gain better visibility into the pipeline.

C. The Marketing Manager is not looking to replace the email software, she wants a better way to generate qualified leads.

Sometimes marketers and especially product marketers suffer of what I am going to call industry-induced content myopia. Just because every other vendor in the industry uses certain terms and creates certain types of content, it doesn’t mean you should follow their lead. Instead, take a breather, spend some time in another department, and ask for your 8 year old to review the latest customer case study you just published.

Yes, is tough to create content that will rise above the noise, that will get picked up and shared, but creating content that talks about what the buyer really wants is a good first step. What are you waiting for?