This Week in Marketing: Models That Drive Success

Success in marketing takes many shapes and forms. There is no “right” way to do things, and even the generally accepted best practices of yesteryear look different today.

For this reason, it’s essential for B2B marketers to maintain an open and experimental mindset. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t be influenced and inspired by what others are doing well, but at the end of the day, you need to perfect your own signature recipe.

This week, we’re curating some examples of models and approaches that are generating buzz. Maybe you’ll find some ingredients you can use.

What to Read

Take Control of Your Digital Marketing by Prioritizing Your Online Presence (FastCompany): Tom Martin, Chief Revenue Officer at Conductor, shares a method his company has developed for sustained organic search impact. It’s called PIE: Protect, Improve, Expand.

3 Effective ABM Strategies You Should Consider (MarTech): Account-based marketing has become an extraordinarily common framework for B2B marketing, but within this structure, there is plenty of room for innovation. Corey Patterson offers up three approaches that go beyond targeting the most obvious accounts. 

B2B Marketers Adjust to Shifts in Buyer Behavior (SmartBrief): Perhaps the most universally important quality of marketing strategies today is that they remain agile and adaptive to keep up with fast-changing buyer preferences and expectations, as Ambreen Ali covers here in highlighting new Forrester research.

Novartis' Netflix Moment? Big Pharma Launches New On-Demand Video Hub to Boost Digital Engagement with Doctors (Fierce Pharma): The influence of the “Netflix model” on content marketing has been pondered and dissected ad nauseum, but it’s always interesting to see real efforts playing out. This story of a Swiss pharmaceutical giant rolling out a program featuring “tailored, education-based videos aimed specifically at rheumatologists” is worth a read.

What to Watch

One of the fundamental questions in building a B2B marketing strategy today is how closely it should mirror a B2C model. The past decade has seen business-focused content and experiences take on a much more consumer-centric vibe, with marketers embracing the tremendous impacts of emotional connection and brand salience.

Recently, Justin Keller of Drift was joined by Shift Paradigm's Mike Barbeau and Mike Kaput of the Marketing AI Institute for an intriguing conversation about how the blurred line between B2B and B2C ignites growth. You can watch it below:

What to Know

Video completion rates as high as 63 percent. Costs per view as low as $0.02. Conversation Ad engagement rates surpassing 70 percent.

These are the results Pluralsight achieved with a winning LinkedIn marketing model that involved shifting focus to upper-funnel tactics to account for a lengthy purchase cycle, with active collaboration between teams. Check out their story and see what you might take from it.