Mad Marketing 104: Everyone is an Artist with the Talented Ron Tite

  Ron Tite is as fascinating as they come. Not only does he own a content marketing agency, but he’s a successful comedian, a professional speaker, and a recently published author. (Everyone is an Artist(Or at Least They Should Be) In this interview, Ron shares multiple nuggets of truth on the following subjects: Funny bits…

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A Connected Product Can Drive Success

Salesforce is conducting their annual Dreamforce conference this week with a variety of speakers giving talks. One that was interesting yesterday was from Bharat Anand, who is the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Bharat's talk was about 'Digital Innovation Trends Shaping Our Future' which is also the subject of his book that is launching in 10 days.

What is the problem with newspapers?

"I went up to the plant manager and asked, what is this room (rolls of paper for newspapers) going to look like 10 years from now?" asked Anand. "I thought I would get a rousing defense of print, but instead he walks up to me and whispers in my ear, I get all of my news on the iPad."

Anand asked what is the problem with newspapers and what are the challenges they face? plant manager sayid it's online news because you can get it quick, you can get it cheap, you have more variety, it's rich media and you can personalize it.

Anand wondered how has this has effected news readership? "This has been going on for 60 years," he said. "Oh my gosh, this has nothing to do with the internet. What started the decline? It was radio, then broadcast TV, then black and white TV, cable TV, 24/7 cable news, and then the internet. If you took out time, the impact of the internet is imperially indistinguishable from everything that came before it."

"And yet, every story we hear is about how the internet has destroyed newspapers," he says. "It did, but it had nothing to do with the news content. The impact was really on classifieds. Classified ads account for around 40% of the revenue of a newspaper and more than half the profits."

Anand points out that if you look at the New York Times between 1994 and 20110, average decline in news readership was less than half a percent a year. Be he says that classifieds on the other hand, lost 90% of those revenues. Why the difference?

News is Stable, But Classifieds Have Disappeared

"The reason goes back to something pretty fundamental about behavior, which is how do we consume both of these products?" says Anand. "Which news site would you like to go to? Well, it doesn't depend on what my friends choose. Even if my friends like Google, CNN and Yahoo, if I like the NYTimes.com, I will go there. In other words, I'm making decisions based on product quality and price."

He points out how classifieds have a very different dynamic. "Which classified site do I choose to go to?" he asks. "Where there are the most listings. Where do people list? Where are the most buyers?"

"More listings, more buyers...more buyers, more listings, exclaims Anand. "We have what I call a feedback loop or what is sometimes called network effects, meaning my decision to go to a particular site depends on the decisions of many other people."

A Connected Product Can Drive Success

Anand says that a connected product means there are connections between users and that news on the one hand is not a connected product but classifieds is. This has fundamental implications for a bunch of things.

He points out that for the last decade, circulation revenue for most newspapers was roughly stable. Why? "We had slight decreases in revenue per household offset by price increases, but with classifieds, we basically lose the entire thing, said Anand. "Meaning once we are ahead in classifieds, such as Craigslist and Monster, you get more and more listings, more and more buyers. It's what we call winner take all dynamics."

"When I have this conversation with news executives and I ask them what are the problems facing newspapers, they (typically) say it's online news and they explain because it's better, faster, cheaper," he says. "At some point I ask how their circulation revenues are holding up. They say, actually pretty well. Then what's the problem? Oh, classifieds! I say wait, you are in the news business." He says that even newspaper executives fall into the trap thinking the problem is about content. After all he says, "We never called it a classified ad paper, we called it a newspaper."

Where Else Do We See This Dynamic?

All over the place he says. It's the history of digital.

Microsoft vs. Apple and PC's: Apple has probably been the best product for 30 years, but ends up with 3% market share. Why? Microsoft owned the networks. More buyers, the more likely that other people will buy PC's because we want to share files, more buyers more app developers, more buyers more app developers and so on.

What's interesting about this is that we have just seen the greatest corporate transformation in history, where Apple's market share in PC's has increased from about 3% globally to around 9% globally. Barely moved the needle. Conversely, we've seen a company (Microsoft) that probably makes every mistake known to mankind, and yet top 5 in market cap. That's the power of networks.

Facebook vs. Google+: When Google+ came out many people said, this is a better product, allowing you to create circles of friends (and much more), until someone said, there is no one playing in the sandbox but me.

eBay marketplaces: When it wins around the world, it wins big. When it loses, like in Japan and China, it doesn't go from 80 to 75%, it goes all the way down to zero and exits the market.

AirBnB: Same idea of connections, which is the more people list on the site, more renters, more renters more listings. You end up with winner take all. This is a tweet from an AirBNB executive showing the power of networks:

Uber: What's interesting is that when they started Uber Black with their own drivers it was sort of going nicely. But when they opened up to partner drivers, exponential growth. Again the same dynamic.

Network Connections Can Be Created

Anand also talked about how companies, such as Pokemon, can create the network effect out of thin air. "There is nothing about a card that says this is a connect product," he says. "But Pokemon goes to great lengths to convince you and me that the value in this card lies in trading with others. Suddenly, I don't want to be the only kid in school who doesn't have a card."

He also gave the example of how building tools can help news organizations create a network dynamic. Trove is a personalized news reader build by the Washington Post that was doing okay, but took off after they connecting it to Facebook, prompting millions of new readers. Unfortunately, Facebook later changed their algorithm!

Another example he gave was of a Norway newspaper called Schibsted, which actually saw this dynamic about 15 years ago. "They looked at classifieds and said this is a winner take all dynamic and that if we don't move fast, we lose the entire game," Anand said. "They actually built out just when the dot com bubble was crashing. Everyone was moving away from newspapers, they moved in."

He added, "They create the online classified site, with the results being that when you win in classifieds you are 3-5X ahead of the second player. There is something quite fascinating about their market share, they now have a 90% market share of jobs and real estate in Norway, but they say in their annual report that we have a 100% marketshare in cars. I wondered why. They said that our size is actually so liquid that people all over Europe are actually listing their cars on our site."

The Norway newspaper created this network dynamic even more spectacularly in response to the European volcanic ash crisis that started in Iceland where air travel was disrupted. "The challenge for everyone in Norway was how do I get from point A to point B with all air travel disrupted," commented Anand. "They noticed that people were actually exchanging conversations on their website. Someone saying, anyone going from Oslo to Trondheim? Someone replies, yep, I have a car and I'm going at 3pm and I can pick up 3 people at the train station. This stuff was feeding on itself."

What did the newspaper do? The had their IT team build an app called Hitchhiker Central that became the most important product featured during this crisis, with everyone in Europe using it.

How Companies Can Gain the Network Effect

Now, every time there is a major news event Schibsted asks, how can we help readers help each other? "As a result, their front page traffic is off the charts, online CPM's are as high as print CPM's, which is unheard of in the Western world," says Anand.

"It's about user connections," he says. "One thing you can see is that companies that win on connections, they really don't have to market. Think about how much Microsoft spends convincing you and me to buy the next Microsoft operating system. Effectively, the installed based is their sales force."

He says that if you win the network game that often trumps product quality.

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The Most Common Demand Generation Mistakes That Sabotage Your Success

Author: Joe Paone

Sabotage is an interesting word. As a verb, it means to deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct something. As a noun, it refers to the 2014 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger about a team of elite DEA agents that are being taken out one by one. Spoiler alert: It turns out it was someone on their team who was doing it.

While sabotage infers that there is intent (usually from an opposing force), there are times when we do it to ourselves mistakenly and become our own worst enemy. When it comes to demand generation, even the most seasoned B2B marketers have fallen into this trap and sabotaged their success without knowing it.

Hopefully, I can help you avoid this disaster by shining a light on the most common pitfalls that demand generation marketers may run into. I’ll cover three big mistakes now, but if you’d like a deep dive on the below and/or you’re interested in learning about additional mistakes, you can register for my upcoming webinar, 8 Biggest Mistakes Demand Generation Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them.

Let’s take a look at three big mistakes that demand generation marketers make and how you can avoid them:

1. Pre-Existing Biases

Whether you have decades of experience in demand gen or are just starting out, we all have pre-existing biases that we may carry with us. For the seasoned marketer, it could come by way of a long history of successes and failures that have shaped your decision-making process. For the newbie, your biases could come from how you perceive marketing should be done based on how you have interacted with marketing in the past. In other words, you’re only considering marketing techniques that have worked on you and those in your immediate circle. When it comes to specific marketing tactics, biases can be very costly if you don’t keep them in check.

It’s important to recognize both your positive and negative biases as you develop your demand generation strategy. For example, you may have a positive bias towards something like paid search and believe that it’s the most effective way to drive demand. At the same time, you may carry a negative bias towards social media and believe that there’s no way to generate demand through that medium. (If you read our Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing, you’ll learn why this is simply not true.)

The key to removing biases is to rely on data to inform your decisions and be open to testing when no data exists. When you’re leveraging data, it’s important to look not only at the top-of-the-funnel metrics (i.e. cost per click, cost per acquisition, etc.), but also all throughout the funnel. Specifically, you’ll want to tie programs back to later stage metrics like net new opportunities, pipeline created, and revenue generated.

Taking the negative bias of social media as an example, when analyzing your data, you may find that you have a high cost per acquisition on your paid social media campaigns. At first glance, you might think this is confirming your bias that social media is not effective because it seems more expensive than other tactics. However, when you analyze bottom-of-the-funnel metrics, you may find that social media drove the most net new opportunities out of all your other marketing programs. When you compare the total cost of your social media programs over the number of opportunities generated to other programs you are running, you may find that social media actually yields the lowest cost per opportunity of all your programs.

2. Inaccurate or No Attribution Analysis

As a demand generation marketer, you’ll most likely agree that attribution analysis is extremely important. Proper attribution can help you remove bias, as the above example highlighted, but it should also be the primary driver of determining a program’s success. A demand generation marketer should be able to associate revenue generated (or pipeline created) with the marketing program(s) that contributed to that revenue (or pipeline). Conceptually it sounds easy, but it’s often difficult to run accurate full attribution analysis of your programs without the proper tools.

Top-of-the-funnel metrics like cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), and cost per lead (CPL) are important factors as they provide a basic indicator of how successful your programs are and can be leveraged to optimize programs, but they are not the only factors. The problem with only looking at top-of-the-funnel metrics is that they only tell a part of the story. In order to understand the whole story, you must be able to track all the interactions your prospects and customers have with your marketing programs. This includes looking at middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel metrics as well.

Ultimately, proper first-touch and multi-touch attribution analysis will give you a more holistic view of how your programs are performing. When you tie back bottom-of-the-funnel metrics to top-of-the-funnel costs, you are able to more accurately optimize your programs based on impact to the business. First-touch will show you which programs or channels are best at bringing the right type of people into the funnel and multi-touch will show you which programs or channels are best at pushing those people through the funnel.

3. Not Segmenting Your Database

It still surprises me how many marketers don’t use segmentation considering that the only way to get the right message to the right person is to properly segment your audience. Many companies bypass this by emailing a generic message to their entire database hoping that it will resonate with enough people to make it worthwhile. Other companies attempt a form of segmentation by uploading individual lists to their email service provider (ESP) for one-off sends. Outside of just email sends, the power of segmentation becomes clear when you consider that it extends to other channels—allowing an organization to show different content on their website to different people, serve different digital ads to different people, etc.

Segmentation starts with three few basic components:

• Demographic: Specific information related to that person (e.g. age, income, gender, and job title)
• Firmographic: Information related to that person’s company or industry (e.g. company size and annual revenue)
• Behavioral: Includes all the trackable behavior (such as pages visited on your website, emails opened, content downloaded, etc.) a person has performed.

With those building blocks, you’re able to more accurately determine what type of message, content, and product or service is most likely to resonate with a specific segment. You can then leverage those segmentations to deliver the appropriate message to the appropriate people at scale. However, keep in mind that segmentation relies on accurate data (which I’ll cover in more detail during the webinar).

This is just the beginning—join me for my upcoming webinar, 8 Biggest Mistakes Demand Generation Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them, on October 14^th at 10am PT, where I’ll cover these same mistakes in more detail and expose five other common mistakes demand generation marketers make that sabotage their success.

What are some other common mistakes that demand generation marketers make? Share them in the comments below, along with how you’d fix them!

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The Most Common Demand Generation Mistakes That Sabotage Your Success was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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13 Mistakes Conference and Event Organizers Just Keep on Making

I love the events space. My job allows me to travel the world and speak for a living and, more often than not, I feel like the luckiest guy alive. With such a profession, I get to attend 50-75 conferences and events annually, the majority of which are great experiences for the attendees. Notwithstanding these…

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3 Simple Ways to Increase Your Landing Page Conversions

Author: Mike Madden

Picture this: You’re at a car dealership. A salesman approaches you and says “Hi there. Can I please get your first name, last name, email address, home phone number, and home address?” Taken back, you eyeball the guy up and down, looking at his clothes, shoes, posture, hairstyle, and facial expression, all while trying to figure out why this person asked you for this information when he doesn’t even know who you are or what car you’re interested in yet.

This awkward encounter is similar to what people might experience when they arrive at your landing page. Within only a few seconds, they’ll decide whether or not you’ve created a effective landing page that is interesting, relevant, and enticing enough to divulge their precious personal information.

Although there is no exact recipe for whipping up the perfect landing page, there are definitely a few design techniques you can test that will help produce aesthetically pleasing, high converting pages. Let’s dive right in!

1. Whitespace Directional Cues

It would be a lot easier to find Waldo if he wasn’t always hidden in a crowd, wouldn’t it? That’s because crowded spaces create distractions, which makes it a struggle to focus on one particular element. If your landing page visitors have to search high and low to find your call-to-action, they’ll leave without thinking twice. To highlight areas of importance, utilize the page’s whitespace, which is an area that is intentionally left blank and doesn’t necessarily need to be “white.”

Allowing your form or call-to-action (CTA) some breathing room will help it stand out from the rest of the page and get noticed. However, keep in mind that although whitespace is critical to the organization and flow of a landing page, it can just as easily be overdone, creating a sense of disconnect and lowering the chance of conversion.

In the example below, Wishpond does a great job of giving this form plenty of space, but not too much, and using complementary colors (blue backdrop and orange form button) to draw your eyes into the form.

2. Explicit Directional Cues

To make things incredibly simple for your landing page visitors, I recommend testing explicit cues. As far as directional cues go, arrows are about as subtle as a flying brick! Think about it though…you only have a few seconds to capture your visitors’ attention, so why not make things really obvious for them? Arrows say “Please just do this. You don’t need to worry about the other stuff”.

In this example below, AT&T does an incredible job keeping whitespace around their form while still incorporating explicit directional cues that point to the form. You’ll also notice there isn’t just one arrow–there are four! The light green “U” shaped element points to the form from the left side in addition to the swirly blue arrow. From the bottom, the green “Order by Phone” cloud comes to a point on top. On the right side, several blue arrows point back to the form. Even with all this action, the page doesn’t feel crowded nor do the explicit cues feel overdone.

If the fancy arrows in the AT&T example are too much for you, check out this example from Kingsley Judd. The white arrow at the top left corner of the form is simple, yet effective.

3. Line-of-Sight Cues

Less subtle than arrows, but arguably just as effective, is the use of line of sight. Have you ever seen a group of people point up and stare at something? If so, you probably didn’t just stand there and watch them look at something else. You looked in the same direction and tried to figure out what was so great, right? That’s because we tend to follow the gaze of others out of curiosity.

If you’re building a landing page, experiment with images of human faces and use line of sight towards the form to increase conversions. Here’s a great example from GoToMeeting.

I hope these landing page tips inspire you to get out there and start increasing your conversions. But remember to test for success! You’ll never know which combination of these work best for your audience unless you try them out.

Do you have any other design tips that produce better conversion rates? Share them in the comments below and explain how you tested it!

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3 Simple Ways to Increase Your Landing Page Conversions was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Facebook Launches Marketplace, Could Challenge Craigslist, eBay

Facebook announced today a formal buy and sell platform called Marketplace, which is likely perceived by Craigslist and eBay as a new hugely powerful competitor nudging into their space. There has always been some buying and selling via Facebook Groups, but this is the first time that Facebook has focused this activity into a single feature. At launch, the goods available to buy and sell will only be viewable to people in your local geographic area.

Although Marketplace is free (at least initially), it's not hard to imagine that over time Facebook will add payment and shipping features that make it an eCommerce competitor to eBay. With Facebook's tremendous reach and the massive amount of buying and selling already happening in Facebook Groups, it already is a competitor with Craigslist and classifieds. Facebook says that more than 450 million people visit buy and sell groups each month worldwide.

Marketplace will be part of the Facebook mobile app, easily accessible by tapping on the shop icon at the bottom of the screen.

How To Buy Stuff via Facebook Marketplace

Both selling and buying items on Facebook Marketplace is very easy. "Marketplace opens with photos of items that people near you have listed for sale," notes Mary Ku, Director of Product Management, in a blog announcement. "To find something specific, search at the top and filter your results by location, category or price. You can also browse what’s available in a variety of categories such as Household, Electronics and Apparel. Use the built-in location tool to adjust the region you’re looking in, or switch to a different city altogether."

Once you find something you want, you simply send the seller a direct message right from the Marketplace feature and make an offer. All further negotiation takes place via DM and you will have to work out payment logistics.

How To Sell Stuff via Facebook Marketplace

Facebook provided this list of how to sell::

1. Take a photo of your item, or add it from your camera roll
2. Enter a product name, description and price
3. Confirm your location and select a category
4. Post

Rolling Out to 4 Countries

Marketplace is launching in US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand on the Facebook app for iPhone and Android. "We will continue expanding to additional countries and make Marketplace available on the desktop version of Facebook in the coming months," says Ku.

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5 Tips for Surviving B2B Marketing Management Disasters

Author: Joel York

You might have heard about the rule that marketing managers should spend about 95% of their time thinking about marketing and 5% of their time thinking about management. While this is a perfect recipe for success in business school, it can lead to disaster in the real world where individual success depends on the success of the entire marketing team.

However, marketing doesn’t live in isolation. Unsympathetic markets, unpredictable competitors, and changing company initiatives all conspire to disrupt even the most well-thought-out marketing plans…unless you have a disaster survival plan.

Let’s take a look at five common marketing management disasters and how you can prevent them using concrete survival tips:

1. End Demand Drought with Continuous Innovation

Creating demand and driving sustainable revenue growth is the primary charter of every B2B marketing organization. However, these things are easier said than done. There are times when generating demand is as simple as ramping up campaign spend, but sooner or later, almost every campaign or channel will run dry without fresh ideas. Ending a demand drought requires marketing innovation, and marketing innovation requires the ingenuity of skilled marketing managers.

Survival Tip: Source New Ideas Broadly and Routinely

Sustainable revenue growth cannot rest entirely on your shoulders because ingenuity simply doesn’t scale. To prevent recurring demand droughts, you need to systematize marketing innovation. New marketing ideas, both big and small, should be sourced, brainstormed, prioritized, tested, measured, and assessed on a regular basis. Successful new ideas will then become ongoing marketing programs, and innovation should shift to marketing program optimization. But this shift must not be at the expense of new idea innovation. If you want to be a revenue rainmaker, you must build a marketing innovation machine.

Consider sourcing new marketing ideas broadly and routinely by conducting regular surveys with your sales team and customers, sending out feedback forms, and soliciting suggestions from throughout the entire company. Regular interaction with sales and customers, both active and passive, is critical for sourcing new ideas. Customers are the ultimate source of ideas, and sales may be closer to them than marketing. Make sure you are closely in tune with both.

2. Prepare for a Flood of Work

Marketing managers plan campaigns, content, product launches, promotions, and events to capture the attention of busy buyers, but this also routinely stretches their team’s bandwidth. If you don’t brace yourself for these foreseeable floods, your team will drown in a sea of work and the quality will suffer. Marketing management at scale is a process, not a project, and marketing managers must master important process management principles to open the floodgates when the tide runs high.

Survival Tip: Define Marketing Workflows and Handoffs

Handling a deluge of work with limited marketing resources requires scalable, efficient marketing production processes based on increased standardization, automation, and quality. The more your marketing production processes resemble a factory, the more marketing output you can generate per team member. Most marketing projects, from websites to trade shows, require the coordination of cross-functional marketing teams and a complete marketing automation platform that supports scalable, automated campaigns that can be personalized for each prospect and customer.

While people-centric processes cannot be fully automated in the same sense as running campaigns, their production capacity can be dramatically increased by standardized workflows, formalized hand-offs, deliverable templates, reusable assets, and proactive management of resource bottlenecks. Once standardized, routine tasks can be automated and end-to-end processes can optimized through continuous improvement.

One way you can dramatically increase the efficiency of people-centric marketing processes is by focusing on the handoffs. Define specific process stages, such as draft, copy, design, proof, etc. and create outlines and templates for deliverables that get handed off at each stage. Track marketing projects by stage to ensure a smooth workflow (just like you would with the purchase funnel). Once you are tracking the flow by stage, you can address the bottlenecks as the flow changes. As the volume of work rises, finding and managing these bottlenecks will dramatically lessen the impact of the flood.

3. Ground Yourself Against Unexpected Shocks

Budget cuts, competitor moves, PR crises. Sometimes, unexpected bolts from out of the blue shock a well-organized marketing plan into complete disarray. When things change rapidly, does your marketing organization absorb the shock and rebound nimbly? Or, does it end up in a panic that puts everything else on hold until the crisis passes? Insulating your marketing organization against sudden shocks requires a flexible management process that expects change and adapts quickly.

Survival Tip: Employ Agile Marketing Sprints

If you find it difficult to plan because you are constantly dealing with unforeseen changes, then you should consider adopting agile marketing best practices, such as working incrementally. For example, if you know your marketing plan will change each month depending on various factors, don’t make rigid plans that extend out several quarters. You can break big projects up into smaller ones that fit into your known time horizon, and then set long term goals and prioritize your backlog of projects accordingly.

If you work incrementally, you can fit projects neatly into weekly, bi-weekly or monthly work sprints. Then, you can strive to complete projects assigned to the current sprint and realign priorities for any changes as you plan the next sprint. Sprints increase your flexibility, strengthen your focus on tangible results, and establish a regular heartbeat within your marketing organization. And with them, when lightning strikes, you only have to adjust your priorities, not your plans.

4. Clean Up Toxic Waste

Most marketing departments are under-resourced and over-committed. And we all know very well that there is no time for do-overs. Unclear objectives, assignments, agendas, hand-offs, and communications lead to endless marketing rework and countless hours spent in useless staff meetings. Busy-work that eats up precious marketing resources and time without moving things forward is a toxic waste of time that can seriously undermine your team’s performance.

Survival Tip: Use a Marketing Collaboration Platform

Cleaning up waste from rework requires clearing up day-to-day management activities. Luckily, this doesn’t require a lot of overhead. Rigorous work habits and simple process rules will often do the trick. Make sure your strategic marketing goals are clear, so you don’t waste time on unimportant projects. Create modest project plans with a special focus on deliverable hand-offs to coordinate cross-functional teams, and make sure every project and deliverable has a single, clear owner. Also, it’s a good idea to bring an agenda to every meeting and record issues, decisions, and action items.

While email, chat, and social media are great for one-off conversations with your team, they lack the context, depth, and continuity required for purposeful collaboration. Generic project management tools likewise are good for an isolated project here and there, but they are not specifically tuned for marketing, and they lack an integrated view of all marketing projects that allows you to balance projects across channels, key initiatives, industries, geographies, etc. Consider a marketing project management platform that links conversations, documents, workflow, priorities and decisions directly to projects for greater efficiency.

5. Fight Marketing Blackouts with Complete Visibility

If no one knows what marketing is doing, then the natural conclusion is that marketing isn’t doing anything terribly important (and we all know this just isn’t true). Moreover, when different groups within the marketing organization don’t know what other groups are doing, it’s impossible to provide your prospects and customers with a unified experience. Unfortunately, most marketing plans, projects, and performance reports are hidden away in spreadsheets, documents, email inboxes and other poorly lit locations.

Survival Tip: Publish a Marketing Calendar and Roadmap

To end a marketing blackout, make sure your team’s work is visible to the rest of the organization. Keep everyone informed about upcoming marketing promotions, projects, and events by sharing marketing plans throughout the company, and share high-level roadmaps, monthly marketing calendars, and regular updates with all stakeholders. Within your team, make sure you clearly communicate your marketing plans, the status of work-in-process, and marketing performance reports. This will help you evaluate whether projects are properly balanced, prioritized, and integrated by highlighting critical strategic dimensions such as market segment, channel, product, buyer persona, and strategic initiative.

Without the right tool, consolidating and communicating marketing activities is pure overhead and can be quite labor intensive. The best practice is to use a marketing calendar that is tied directly to your marketing project management system or marketing automation platform, so everyone on your team can access real-time information.

These are just a few of the marketing management disasters that can derail your marketing department. Some are unavoidable, some are not. But the key to surviving these potential disasters is to be prepared. Strong marketing processes, established systems, and prepared team members are the key to handling, and even thriving, when these potential disasters pop up.

Have you survived a marketing management disaster? Share your tips in the comments below!

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5 Tips for Surviving B2B Marketing Management Disasters was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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