It’s that time of year, when B2B marketers create their big ideas and big plans for market domination in 2019.

And as every good marketer knows, next year’s plans begin with a review of this year: what campaigns worked and what didn’t? For most B2B marketers and for most companies, 2018 was a good year. Customers were buying, and many companies will finish 2018 with solid gains in revenue and likely profitability. Marketers are faced with that never-ending challenge – sure, this year was good. But what will you do for me NEXT year? How do we ensure that you don’t lose the traction that was gained last year?

We marketers seem to spend so much time preparing for product launches – get the web page launched, fuss over the data sheet, and prepare for searchability. Then, we throw it over the transom to the salespeople, and wonder why orders take so long to ramp up.  “Have at it, sales team.” But they have no input on key applications, competitive advantages, or who to target first. 

Much of our work involves helping manufacturers prepare their new products for launch. We’ll spend quite a bit of time crafting a message for a product, and then building a lead generation campaign to support it.

Tech Accelerators Will Win the Marketing Battleground 

I was stunned to read this:  Gartner Group reported recently that the technology budget for the Chief Marketing Officer in 2017 will be bigger than the CIO’s tech budget!

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, with the explosion in marketing tools coming to the market.  See the graphic put together by Chiefmartech.com, and you’ll see what I mean.  It’s a dizzying array of tech tools to measure and improve marketing.  No wonder marketing feels so overwhelming these days!

50% of Your Content Should be Video

That was a surprising comment, made by one of the speakers at HubSpot’s recent Inbound 2016 event on digital marketing. It’s one of the better conferences on all things online, all things marketing, particularly for a b-to-b marketer trying to make sense of all the ways marketing is changing. And changing rapidly.

So while we’ve all realized video’s importance, that was a bit of a wake-up call when I heard that. If I look at 2017 budgets, for instance, and I pull apart the section on content, is 50% of my activities next year for a client devoted to video?

If you’re in the market for a marketing firm, you’ve probably read a dozen articles about how to select an agency. After a while, they all sound the same: “we’re experts in digital marketing, we know b-to-b, we specialize in your industry…”

Sounds like a broken record (if we still listened to records). I went for a run the other day, and it just started popping in my head: here are criteria you’ll never hear when hiring a marketing firm. It ties to the old marketing story about uncovering what people really want, by considering what people want when they’re shopping for a drill: people want to buy a hole, not the drill. Same thing for marketing firms: as a potential client, it’s nice to see the shelf full of awards or hear the presentations about the “creative process.” But, you really want to know how these guys are going to make you a star, and help you hit your revenue numbers.

Jennie Ford, Digital Marketing Manager for Goldstein Group Communications (www.ggcomm.com), was a featured panelist at the American Marketing Association event in Cleveland on October 6.  The panel was one of a series of events connected to AMA’s Marketing Week.

Goldstein Group Communications announced that it has added Jennie Ford as digital marketing manager to its team of marketing communications experts. Ford will focus on content syndication and growing client exposure and engagement to generate leads and grow market share by building on the agency’s expertise in manufacturing and engineering-related fields.

Ford joins us from a public relations firm where she served two years as their digital marketing manager. She is an expert in developing and executing award-winning digital programs for various clients including manufacturing, healthcare, government and nonprofit.

“Jennie complements our team by bringing a fresh perspective and her extensive knowledge in optimizing digital marketing channels,” said agency President Joel Goldstein. “Because of her hands-on experience conceptualizing and producing marketing campaigns that tie to a successful sales process, she’ll be able to create powerful and high impact programs for our clients.”

Ford’s early career was spent serving in the United States Army- National Guard as an avionics communication systems repairer. Later she provided digital marketing strategies for local Cleveland businesses to reach new audiences.

More recently, Ford founded her own SEO firm in Northeast Ohio, where she developed optimized content for social media, websites and advertising channels. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Master of Arts in Communication: Applied Theory and Methodology from Cleveland State University.