We’ve been having such interesting conversations about marketing strategy over the last year with clients, partners and colleagues, so I wanted to share some of the common threads that keep emerging...

When it comes to marketing, you do you. 

I'm sure that many of these will be very relatable: 

• Marketing budgets are not what they used to be and marketing directors are being asked to deliver far more with less (people, resources).
  

• The status quo is cutting it less and less. Management wants direct line attribution and closed loop reporting — traditional ‘awareness’ or brand marketing offers no direct ROI understanding.

• There is a growing movement towards consultative selling (we are excited by this... read more about it).

• Sales and marketing are often not well-aligned (no grand revelation here) but people are thinking out of the box to make them work better together.

• There is hesitation to ‘own’ a consolidated effort to centralize strategy and execution (especially in large corporations), but there is a growing sense of need.

• People are sick of 'spin' and want authenticity.

• There is a widespread, intuitive interest in persona-driven, buyer-journey calibrated content (more than ever).

• Companies are focusing more on ABM (in our view, this is not incongruous with well-ideated Inbound strategy).

• Outbound sales efforts can benefit greatly from the use of Inbound content (having the right convos to identify and nurture cross-sell opportunities).

• Traditional agency models are not built to address unified strategy, attribution or ROI for clients.

• Classic marketing tactics are becoming less and less palatable as companies look to realize wider margins and fuel growth in different ways. 

• Content marketing and email marketing on their own are not strategies.

• 'Digital' on it's own is also not a strategy.

• You can - and should - be able to connect brand activation investments to business results for clients. Clients don't care (nor should they) how clever you - or your colleagues - think you are. Great ideas are not enough.

• Spending huge budgets on TV, radio, or out of home for brand awareness... can be useful in many ways, but can also burn through resources with little ROI intelligence. 

There are so many smart, passionate marketers out there. We meet them and learn from them every day, and are lucky enough to work with many of them.

What's interesting to me, is they generally don’t care about being perceived as thought leaders. They do care about offering real value and hanging their hats on results. 

So do we, and I think that's where marketing value skyrockets. In this day and age, there are abundant opportunities for any marketer to take their marketing strategies to the next level, to show your own colours, and challenge convention.

Up next: learn how B2B Inbound marketing works.

Titan One is a strategic marketing Agency helping clients across North America drive results.  

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