This Week in Marketing: Redefining the Qualified Lead

Saturday was April 1st—hopefully everyone made it through the day without getting fooled. 

April Fool’s Day has become a holiday for marketers, an excuse for bringing some levity to the brand and having a little fun. Even B2B marketers are encouraged to be creative, much to the delight of their buyers. Imagine if that creative energy was celebrated year-round!

But don’t worry; there aren’t any pranks or tricks in this week’s roundup. Here, you’ll only find great marketing posts that can help your team hit the ground running as summer approaches.

Get started with a post redefining what a “qualified lead” means in the modern data-rich world of B2B sales and marketing. Then you’ll find thoughtful discourse on age diversity in marketing, a deep dive into content marketing budgeting, and much more.

Read on for the best new marketing content from the LinkedIn Collective and the rest of the internet.

What to Read

The One Thing All Marketers Must Measure in 2023 (LinkedIn Collective): To truly prove the marketing department’s value, there’s a new gold standard: high-fit, account-qualified leads that are already primed for handoff to the sales department. Jodi Cerretani explains how the GTM team can work together to deliver the goods.

How Brands Can Take the Lead in the Global Conversation Around Age Diversity (LinkedIn Collective): One way to reach high-quality leads: make sure your team is diverse enough to relate to your target audience. LinkedIn research shows that over half of B2B leads are over 40 years old—but portrayals of older people in advertising are 7x more likely to be negative. Jonathon Palmer and Deirdre Wafer present an action plan for embracing and celebrating age diversity.

A B2B Marketer’s Guide to Long-Form Content (MarTech): There’s still enormous value in creating comprehensive, expansive content for B2B audiences, says Michael Brenner. In this post, he explains why long-form content still matters, and offers a succinct but useful guide to creating it.

How Much Should You Budget for Content? (Search Engine Land): What does the average content marketing budget look like? Julia McCoy dives deep into what it takes to create great content, including data from multiple studies to help you benchmark your own budget.

How Do You Clean Up Content Without Affecting Rankings? (Search Engine Journal): Long-form content can certainly help boost your search engine rankings. But too much content—especially outdated and irrelevant content—can do the opposite. Tony Wright offers expert advice on finding and fixing content that holds your site back.

What to Watch:

AI Risk vs Reward in B2B Marketing, with Pam Didner

The advent of generative AI (like ChatGPT) has the marketing world in an uproar. In this interview with Lee Odden, martech expert Pam Didner cuts through the hype with expert perspective on how best to use these new tools.

What to Know

New LinkedIn Pages Features

Last week, LinkedIn launched new tools to help you engage your Page audience. Learn how to schedule posts in advance and run audio-only events for your subscribers in our latest update post. The LinkedIn Audio Events Overview has an in-depth guide to the latter.

Follow the LinkedIn Collective for even more expert insights.