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Understanding Buyer Personas: A Collision of Human and Technology (June 19)
Define the Human Side of the Buyer Persona (June 26)
Buyer Personas and the Marketing Funnel (July 5)
Finding Your Buyer Personas in Your Data (July 12)
Buyer Personas, the Editorial Calendar, and Real Life (July 17)
#contentmarketing, #buyerpersonas, #data
Contact me on Twitter @johnbugay
Once you understand your “buyer personas” in human terms, how do you target them, in actionable ways, in your data?
I’m discussing that topic in a series of guest-blog posts at Acooze.com, content marketing consultants from Melbourne, Australia.
Finding Your Buyer Personas in Your Data (July 11)
http://acooze.co/capital/finding-your-buyer-personas-in-your-data/
Admittedly, this blog post is going to be a bit more granular and detail-oriented than you’ll see from many content marketing providers, but given that we’re involved in “database marketing,” it seems important to understand some basic things about data.
I’m @johnbugay
I am still: a marketing manager (recently with a start-up software/robotics firm), long-term copywriter, seeking a position as a marketing technologist (Eloqua preferred) on a team dedicated to marketing automation, digital marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and social media.
My current résumé: Bugay-2013-Resume-REVISED-07-01
I’ve also added links to articles I’ve published in the last several weeks:
Understanding Buyer Personas: A Collision of Human and Technology (June 19)
http://acooze.co/capital/buyer-personas-a-collision-of-human-and-technology/
If content marketing is one side of the coin, then could marketing automation be the other? In fact, could we argue that the software came first, and [only] more recently, the set of best practices that have evolved around the software (which became known as content marketing or inbound marketing)?
Define the Human Side of the Buyer Persona (June 26)
http://acooze.co/capital/define-the-human-side-of-the-buyer-persona/
The buyer persona from the human angle: Most likely, you as a marketer will need to work with sales in order to understand who you’re likely to be speaking to. You know what you should do this with as much detail as possible. You may even want to poll or interview some customers.
Buyer Personas and the Marketing Funnel (July 5)
http://acooze.co/capital/buyer-personas-and-the-marketing-funnel/
Of course, to draw a proper map at this point would be an extremely complex task, even in the generic. All that we’ve done at this point is to try to put together the big picture of content management and data analysis, and how they fit together. To get specific would become even more complex than that. We have not yet begun to map data to the various touch-points.
See also: http://acooze.co/content-marketing/
Please follow me @johnbugay
What’s the right way to think about “buyer personas”? I’m discussing that topic in a series of guest-blog posts at Acooze.com, content marketing consultants from Melbourne, Australia.
… if you’ve studied content marketing at all, you’ve seen the sales funnel or the marketing funnel. This is traditionally how marketers are given to think about how customers progress on their journey from someone who doesn’t even know about you to being a customer.
About a year ago, Forrester Research published a new version of the funnel…. As you can see, the funnel has become a bit more complex.
My article this week walks you through the growing number of complexities that are being faced as marketers delve further into the world of marketing automation.
Read more here to see and understand the current state of “the marketing funnel”.
I’m @johnbugay
Alan Pringle @scriptorium has put together an article that could have been subtitled, “The Technical Side of Content Management: 11 Questions to Ask”.
When IT is MIA, content strategy crumbles.
Based on “hard experience”, he makes the following personnel-based observation:
Among those authoring content, have at least two tech-savvy employees who are the main points of contact with the IT department. These technical liaisons collect information about performance issues and other problems and then work with the IT group to solve the issues. Don’t play the I’m just a writer and don’t want to be bothered with the technical details card and leave all the heavy lifting to the IT group.
He notes, “Having a primary IT resource for content processes is a logical approach, but there needs to be a secondary resource who is more than just a backup in name only. The secondary resource should be well-versed in the tools and participate in basic maintenance to develop a working knowledge of the system.”
At this point, I just want to point out the line on my résumé where it says I was “marketing liaison with MIS/IT”. I’m a guy who can handle the heavy lifting on the IT side of the Marketing house.
Do you know someone who needs help with that?
I’m @johnbugay.
This is a serious question. Just two months in to a job search in which I’ve focused on offering my skills in the specialized field of “marketing automation”, I cannot say that I have found any marketing automation practitioners among the ad agencies in Pittsburgh.
I follow some very active discussions about it on LinkedIn and Twitter.
But it seems as if very few people in Pittsburgh even know what “marketing automation” is, and fewer still know how to excel at it.
While things like “marketing automation”, “inbound marketing”, “content marketing”, and “demand generation” are setting the rest of the marketing world on fire, it seems as if very few marketing organizations and fewer ad agencies in Pittsburgh even know what it is.
Take a look at the websites of three of the largest ad agencies in Pittsburgh:
You won’t find “marketing automation” or the other terms on these sites. And yet, it should be “bread-and-butter” for these folks. Especially if they want to consider themselves as “thought leaders”.
“Marketing automation” is as important a discipline as there is now. And yet there are still agencies who are leading with their prowess on “SEO”, even though changing Google algorithims are rendering that discipline obsolete.
Eloqua and Marketo are probably the leading solution providers in this space. Eloqua had an IPO about a year ago for $12 per share, and Oracle bought them in December for $24 per share at quite a premium. Marketo had an IPO on Friday, opening at about $13 per share, and closing at $23.
Neither of these is an earth-shattering amount in the billions, but these are only two of probably several dozen “marketing automation” solution providers who are elbowing each other for market share. Their success portends a trend.
And it’s not so new that folks can’t have heard about it. Especially not if they’re having extremely successful IPOs.
Much of Pittsburgh seems to be sitting out this hugely important technological development.