Who is Bill?

Marketing is deliberate

Marketing should help you create, measure and optimize the journeys of your prospects and customers. Your goal is to deliver specific content that compels them to engage, self-nurture, and move faster through the learning and buying cycle. Every user isn't automatically qualified, you need to discover the right people and earn trust, ultimately building a community of advocates. This will not happen by accident.

MarTech stacks are required

The constant change in Martech means you have to be open to the many emerging technologies that can help you do your job(s). The end goal doesn't change, deliver compelling content and create remarkable experiences. Without an overall view of how each component has a part in the expereience and a cohesive strategy, any single component failure can destroy all your efforts.

Data driven decisions only

The goal of analytics is to help you determine if your objective has been met - duh. Assigning attribution to an interaction has never been more complicated. The sheer number of marketing channels and devices has added levels of complexity. Lack of understanding does not give you permission to not keep investigating and developing theories.

Demand generation as a core

Demand generation has a core goal to build and nurture prospect and customer relationships for the long term. To do this effectively, marketers need to do things like responding to customer questions on Twitter, promote blog posts through social channels, host webinars, and run email marketing campaigns. It’s not a quick fix, a banner ad, an email blast, or a call center blitz.

Community building is critical

The top three business objectives for communities are customer retention (70%), customer engagement (64%), and revenue (34%).* That’s why companies with a good product have nurtured customers as brand advocates with online communities, where they create peer influence in target markets.

* Forrester’s The State of Loyalty Programs Study

Conversations are required

Talking to your customers isn’t about blindly spitting out messages to everyone, or counting every customer contact as ‘qualified’ for a conversion. All contacts are NOT equal. If you design a system poorly you’ll have so many unproductive conversations your high value qualified contacts will suffer for it and subsequently, your company performance will suffer as well.

Speed in everything you do

I believe that speed in marketing is a mindset. Paraphrasing Gary Vanderchuck - ‘Speed beats everything else’. Speed for speed’s sake isn’t the goal, but doing something and then learning something is much better than inaction. Efforts once completed must be measured. You then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time - but you are constantly moving.

Test and learn daily

Along with speed I believe that test and learn is a mindset in marketing as well. A test and learn approach gives you permission to experiment and build upon successes while learning from failures. With technology improvements, it’s getting easier to take on large slow moving organizations that refuse to try innovative approaches. You have to be ready to embrace failures and be open-minded enough to take criticism.

Growth marketing helps the brand

Marketing is responsible for the customer lifecycle and we must deliver a specific experience at every touch. A "good" demand gen person worries about the top of the funnel but a "great" demand gen person thinks about all the funnel. Either way the path is measurable towards revenue which is very different from general awareness. Demand Generation must partner with all marketing strategies including Growth regardless of position in the funnel.