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By Randy Mitchell You’re a reasonable marketing professional: smart, productive, and you have great taste in blogs. You work for a reasonable company: they have important programs, big plans, and they were wise enough to hire you. So, when your company’s leadership team makes the all-important decision to bring in a marketing firm, it’s only reasonable to expect the agency’s best work. But will that expectation truly materialize? Far too often the answer is no, particularly when it comes to B2B marketing. The relationship starts well enough. Everyone seems to connect, and the agency promises a quick ramp up and real progress. “They actually get it,” growls the company’s tough CEO, and everyone is smiling. Then
B2B marketing trends among friends
By Randy Mitchell What are your go-to resources for the latest B2B marketing trends? Popular options include HubSpot, Digiday, Forbes, the ANA and LinkedIn. But those industry experts only represent the top level of available insights. If you truly want to dive deeply into emerging B2B marketing trends, there is a data deluge just waiting to wash away a few hours of your day. For the sake of brevity and your busy schedule, I’m proposing an entirely different approach to trendspotting. Let’s call it: “B2B marketing trends among friends.” That title is appropriate because the driving forces behind these particular trends are our clients and contacts, and all of the topics we’ll cover are
The marketing elephant in the room
By Randy Mitchell It can crush budgets, trample timelines and smash strategies. It has a nasty habit of monopolizing planning meetings, status calls and your lunch hour. It packs about 13,000 pounds of angst, and it just landed squarely on your shoulders. What is it? The marketing elephant in the room. Every B2B marketer has one. I’m talking about the massive program that gets assigned to you as coworkers sigh audibly and avoid your glance. From that day forward, your pachyderm of a project will follow you around the office, onto the bus, and sometimes, it even comes home with you. Maybe your elephant is a social media program. It can be a beast to develop
4 B2B video questions that will make you a hero
By Randy Mitchell For many years, my title included the word “producer.” I quickly learned that the unwritten rule for any successful B2B video producer was “be prepared.” When you are prepared in advance for any eventuality, the production should be seamless. The cast, crew, creatives and client will all appreciate the extra effort. You might even come in under budget. In short, you will feel like a hero, and deservedly so. However, if there are any unresolved issues going into production, your B2B video could quickly spiral out of control and infuriate everyone involved. And the budget will balloon with every revision and retake. How do you avoid that scenario? Ask the right
Reimagining the quadrant
By Randy Mitchell Boomm works with many diverse technology companies. Some are clients others are partners. They come from multiple practice areas, including data management and marketing automation. And they range in size from startups to industry leaders. However, despite their many nuanced differences, these technology companies have one trait in common. They all dream about getting their platforms into the Gartner Magic Quadrant. If you’re not familiar with the Gartner Magic Quadrant, let me do my best to give you a creative person’s rudimentary definition. The Quadrant provides a graphical representation of where companies and their tools rank on a simple Cartesian grid. The Quadrant is influenced by key criteria such as “ability to
One word of advice (literally)
By Randy Mitchell The question still haunts me. It was the 4A’s annual Career Day, an event that brought hundreds of aspiring advertising professionals into Chicago. I was on the portfolio panel with three other agency creatives. Surrounding us was a wall of eager college seniors, all ready to shove their portfolios into our chests. (Remember physical portfolios? They could do some serious damage.) Just before the eagerly anticipated Portfolio Review, the floor was opened for questions from the students. Most of the inquiries were directly related to finding a job: where to look, who to contact, what to say, what to show in the portfolio. Then, a quiet student from Indiana University asked us
Taking social media seriously (and taking it to the bank)
By Randy Mitchell First, a painful confession. Seven years ago I was a hater. For a number of reasons, I simply could not take social media seriously, especially when it came to B2B marketing. That cautious thinking seemed to make sound business sense at the time. Our agency accounts were global companies. We worked with top-level decision makers that had ironclad objectives. They needed to grow market share, not followers. In short, ROMI was the mantra and every campaign demanded tangible results. If I had actually dared to suggest using social media to that C-Suite group, their first reaction would have been laughter. That would have been followed by this bottom line challenge: “If you’re really
Reinventing foodservice, one bite at time
By Randy Mitchell Driverless delivery. Ghost kitchens. Takeout everything. What in the name of Ray Kroc has happened to the world of foodservice? The industry is emerging from its most challenging year with remarkable resilience and some amazing innovations. An operator friend who owns a neighborhood café put it best: “Foodservice had a full-on freak out. But we found ways to make it work. We always do.” Here are a few quick content bites that illustrate her point. Bite #1: Driverless delivery Houston is famous for launching astonishing technology into the heavens. Recently, it also became the test site for rocketing pizzas to hungry Earthlings via driverless vehicles. Who is behind this stellar idea? A technology
Three secrets behind the best webinars
By Randy Mitchell There are far too many webinars in the world right now. In the last year alone, the use of webinars grew by 69% according to HubSpot. Chances are, you have two or three B2B webinar invitation emails in your inbox right now. On the flip side, there are far too few excellent webinars to satisfy our content-hungry world. We don’t need a data point to prove that one. If you recently wasted an hour enduring a bad B2B webinar, I’m afraid you will never get that time back. Which brings us to the question marketers everywhere are asking: How can we rise above the noise and create a webinar that people will
The year of being wrong and why it turned out right
By Randy Mitchell “See you back here in a couple of weeks.” That was what we said to each other as we left the office on the morning of March 16, 2020. And we sincerely meant it. That “quick return” theory was the first wrong belief in a year that was full of them. But it was also a rather small miscalculation in the grand scheme of things. Thinking back on the last twelve months, I am still astonished at how many longstanding professional marketing beliefs were challenged and ultimately changed. These were the rocks of our profession, and they were rocked to their foundations. Let’s consider some of those long-held beliefs and how a better