1. Start By Knowing Your Story.

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.

2. No Dogma About Channels.

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.

3. There Are No Required Tasks.

Marketing work is not an end in itself – marketing changes minds and creates demand for sales to convert. Don’t do marketing (create blogs, social media posts, update our website) because you think you should or that’s what someone else is doing.

4. The Specific Role Of Marketing.

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.

5. Attribution Is By Definition Imperfect.

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.

6. You Cannot Make People Do Things By Force.

Optimize marketing efforts for revenue, but be patient in allowing for a campaign to have its desired outcome. You cannot make anyone buy on your timeline, but by tapping into a problem they know they have to solve, you can be there when they are ready to solve it. There is no ‘creating urgency’, only ‘uncovering urgency’.

7. You Cannot Change Minds Overnight.

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.

8. Your Opinion Is Only One Data Point.

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.

9. You Can't Skip Brand And Go Straight To Lead Gen.

If you go about getting demos from cold advertising or outbound, you either won’t succeed or will end up with leads that have a very low likelihood of becoming customers, especially long-term ones. After all, they don’t trust or know you well yet – so don’t expect them to make big decisions quickly.

10. A Competitor Is A Company That Vies For Your Customers' Attention.

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.

11. In B2B, The People Matter More Than The Company.

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.

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