The best marketing springs from a strategic narrative: a compelling point of view about how the world should change, and how people’s lives will improve. Meet people where they are first, then lead them to change their minds about something. Pull, don’t push.

No channel is inherently ineffective – what matters is how it’s used. Organic marketing will always have the highest ROI, but almost every company will need to use a mix of channels to reach the efficient frontier of their ideal marketing investment to sales velocity ratio.

Marketing creates demand, sales converts that demand to bookings. It is possible for salespeople to do marketing, too (e.g. cold calling); but no matter what you call these roles, think of marketing as creating and increasing demand where there was none or less before, and think of sales as matching and tailoring that demand to a contract. Design your revenue roles from how your customers buy, not from a template of how another company’s organization is set up.

Perfect attribution is impossible because the data you would need about how 100% of your customers decided to buy from you is within the brains of their people, and is partially subconscious. Thus, trying to achieve perfect attribution is stifling and harmful to doing real, high-quality marketing. Because people don’t even know themselves perfectly, we can’t even construct the perfect buying journey from what our customers literally tell us. But we can start with how they say they found us.

Stifling a campaign before it has the chance to work will stunt your ability to actually do marketing. Writing a handful of social media posts does not inherently guarantee you will see new customers directly sourced from those posts: you have only begun to change people’s minds. You are not done. Make sure that your point of view has sunk in, and trust that – if you are right about their priorities and how you can help them – they will approach you when they are ready.

Create educational content from a place of research and data about what your buyer needs – not necessarily what pleases you to write. Unless you have extensively researched and conversed with your buyers at a detailed level, your intuition about things is just one data point. Hone your intuition but check it against the data before investing into content.

Not just a company whose product does something very similar to yours. It’s also a company whose product does something different, but causes the same outcome for your customers. Thus a competitor from a sales perspective is more specific than a competitor from a marketing perspective. There are many more marketing competitors than sales competitors.

You will achieve little traction in B2B social by focusing your efforts on the company account. Invest in the leadership team, particularly in your CEO, to gain ground on LinkedIn. People relate to other people, not to organizations. Communicate with your market in an organic and personal way, in order for your narrative to actually stick with them.