Jesse Noyes

This morning the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs released its latest look into the field of content marketing this morning. The report, “B2B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budget and Trends – North America”, which was sponsored by Brightcove, not surprisingly are spending more on content marketing. B2B organizations are allocating 33% of marketing budgets on content, which is up over the 26% reported last year.

What is surprising is that fewer know whether they’re getting it right.

Last year, 40% of the B2B marketers surveyed said content marketing was “effective” or “very effective.” This year, that figure dipped to 36%.

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There are common principles that define all of marketing. Who can forget the four P’s, after all?

But when you drill down – industry by industry – you’ll find unique challenges. Marketers in the asset management business certainly have their own challenges: a tough regulatory environment, a need to get closer to customers, etc.

Asset management has always been about establishing trust. But as communication fragments and digital channels proliferate, asset management marketing needs a strategy for a new set of challenges. Here are three of the biggest.

1. Getting Compliance Right
There’s just no getting around this one. Asset management marketing needs to comply with some tough regulatory requirements. This can feel daunting.

For instance, SEC Rule 204-2 demands that advisors keep and...

We’re all familiar with the divide between sales and marketing. The two teams should be working together, but often they feel like they’re on separate islands.

This exact situation was the topic of conversation yesterday at Dreamforce ’12 during a discussion among Splunk’s CMO Steve Sommer, Senior Vice President of Sales Tom Schodorf, Eloqua’s President, Alex Shootman, and CMO Heidi Melin.

The group discussed two of the most common, recurring scenarios that plague sales and marketing, resulting in frustration and even dissension. But they also discussed practical ways to solve the problem, leading to a happy state of sales and marketing alignment. Here’s a summary of what the group came up with.

Problem 1: The Lead Quality Problem

This one is marketers are all too familiar with – the dreaded “the leads suck!” situation. It manifests in several ways...

Dreamforce is the kind of event that touches virtually every industry, not just sales and marketing. The media industry is no exception.

Yesterday, I caught a panel led by media prognosticator, Jeff Jarvis, and featuring heavy hitters from Salesforce.com, Newsweek, comScore, and Questus. The discussion largely turned to the forces altering the media landscape (social, search, etc.), and the future trends that will shape it.

Content marketing is turning brands into publishers, and so many of the lessons shared are perfectly applicable to modern marketing. We share a few here, and the takeaways for marketers.

1. It’s Not the Message, It’s the Relationships

“I don’t think we in media are in the content business. I think we should be in the relationship business,” Jarvis said.

The same could be said for the...