INBOUND ACCELERATOR

How often does your marketing department share information with sales? What about the flow of information the other direction, from sales to marketing?

Let’s face it — not everyone works in companies where the two departments work well together. In fact, according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report, as many as 1 in 3 marketers and sales professionals say their two departments are not well aligned. And that hurts results for everyone.

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Topics: Collaboration, Closed-Loop Marketing, Service Level Agreements, Management, Sales-Marketing Alignment

Who do you rely on for marketing content creation: an in-house team, outside agencies, or some combination? Chances are that each brings different strengths to the table, judging by the response of 300 B2B marketers to a survey by Walker-Sands.

What advantages does an in-house team have over outsourcing? What do outside firms tend to do better? And how can you get the best of both worlds when you work with an agency?

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Topics: Public Relations, Resourcing, Infographics, Management, Integrated Marketing & PR, Agency Partners

Whether it’s your car’s wheels, your spine, or your company’s marketing and sales departments, when things are out of alignment, it causes problems. But when everything is aligned, everything works more effectively and efficiently, without the headaches and hassles.

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Topics: Collaboration, Strategy, Service Level Agreements, Management, Sales-Marketing Alignment

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something right is by facing the consequences of doing it all wrong.

When it comes to hiring, I’ve made mistakes. And regretted them. But, I’ve also learned from them. Those mistakes, combined with what I know now about how I like to structure the workplace, have led me to develop a few guidelines I now keep in mind whenever I am hiring.

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Topics: Resourcing, Management, Marketing Lessons

Did you know that the average client-agency relationship in the marketing and PR world is 3.2 years or less? That’s really not much time when targeting strategies and campaigns that can extend for months and generate results years down the road. And with turnover that rapid, it means that the average agency is spending a lot of time prospecting and trying to land new contracts to replace the ones that are closing.

(Sources: The Drum and Bedford Group Consulting)

What would happen if the energy dedicated to finding new accounts was instead focused on building relationships that maintain the clients you already have and increase the likelihood that the contacts you have in those businesses may bring you even more business in the future?

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Topics: Strategy, Resourcing, Management, Marketing Lessons, Client Success Stories, Agency Partners

2019 marks 15 years since I took the leap and founded the first iteration of JONES.

Since 2004, we’ve seen the introduction and nearly universal adoption of Facebook, YouTube and smartphones — and all the changes in buyer behavior that go along with them — which has changed the marketing and PR field tremendously.

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Topics: Inbound Marketing, Management, Marketing Lessons, Client Success Stories, Agency Partners

 

I’ve said many times that analyzing metrics is how marketers prove and improve: How we prove the value that our marketing strategies bring to the company (in real customers and dollars) and how we improve our strategies on a continual basis.

I’m not the only one saying that.

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Topics: Analytics, Metrics, Management

When the Content Marketing Institute asked B2B buyers what they look for in content from vendors, nearly 50 percent said they want content that is more informational than promotional. (Infographic)

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Topics: Surveys, Management, Agency Partners

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. So what are the differences between those who always seem on top of things and get everything done, and those who always seem busy, but don’t accomplish much?

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Topics: Management

In some companies, the end of the year is a mad rush to the finish. In others, the time around the holidays, especially the last week of the year when many take extra days off to spend time with family, can be a great time to settle in and catch up on organizing your desk, cleaning out cluttered inboxes, and reading the blogs and news articles you’ve been pinning or bookmarking for “someday.”

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Topics: Planning, Marketing Job, Management