We find a lot of articles that discuss how to better align your organization's Sales and Marketing departments to create an effective flow of inbound leads who convert into paying customers. This article, however, discusses how sales teams can use content marketing to generate leads, nurture opportunities and establish an authority in the industry that would greatly increase closing rates.

There’s been a long-standing division between sales and marketing that’s frequently discussed but few organizations have been able to resolve. On the ground it might seem like an age-old cultural friction but a survey conducted by Demand Gen shows us this lack of alignment between sales and marketing will directly impact your bottom line...

Content marketing helps us achieve a lot of things such as nurturing leads, building social distribution channels, establishing authority and a myriad of other important goals. However, one of the most important and often overlooked byproducts of content marketing is better SEO. Good content is getting shared on social media and linked from authoritative websites, all of which is strongly taken into consideration by Google's algorithms. It takes time to start ranking high and for the keywords you want, but once there the flow of steady qualified traffic and potential leads is likely to last for years to come.

If you sink enough money into most marketing tactics, you’ll see nearly immediate results. Since content marketing is often an exception to this rule, many marketers mistakenly think their content strategy is ineffective if results don’t come quickly...

Like most marketers, I've been noticing a rapid shift in where long-lasting competitive advantages lie. Modern companies that seem to consolidate their dominance in a market are those who have become truly customer-centric. The good news are that almost every organization has some internal data that would help it to understand its customer. The bad news are that this data is usually hidden under layers of nearly-meaningless metrics. In this article, Keith Weed, the CMO of Unilever provides a framework to work with internal data and uncover insights that would help any organization to shift to a more customer-centric strategy.

Operational skill used to confer long-term advantage. If you had leaner manufacturing, made higher-quality products, or had superior distribution, you could outrun competitors. But today those capabilities are table stakes. The new source of competitive advantage is customer centricity: deeply understanding your customers’ needs and fulfilling them better than anyone else...

Data without the right framework to wrap it in, often hinders organizations more than it helps as managers get lost in numbers that don't represent much. In this article Disney, eBay and The Telegraph give a peek into their processes that deliver actionable insights be it from unstructured data, shopper signals or bringing data together.

At Marketing Week’s Data Storytelling Conference on 1 November, attendees will hear from the likes of Disney, eBay and The Telegraph on how brands can set up their data systems and processes to derive business-changing marketing insights. The three brands gave us a preview of their presentations...

‍We often get the question: "Can social media drive tangible results?". The question is very understandable given that marketers invest a lot of effort often without seeing a clear impact on results. Nevertheless, the answer to the question is a definite "Yes!" with the caveat of it being really really hard to measure (which is not all bad because it means that it's not impossible). Here is a detailed infographic by Salesforce that helps dive into the important metrics to measure your social media ROI.

A common calculation in the business world is return on investment, or ROI. Finding the ROI of your social media marketing, however, can be difficult. The normal factors may not be as obvious as in other ROI calculations...‍