Hey there, it’s Matt from MessageUp.
Happy New Year!
Hopefully you successfully navigated the holidays without running into any health or travel issues—or recovered quickly from them if you were among the millions of less fortunate.
Turning our attention to the New Year, it’s tempting to make grand plans. But, even as a perennial optimist, I know the foolhardiness inherent in that approach. Instead, I’m setting myself a handful of important and achievable goals (q.v. SMART goals, with h/t to Atlassian for the exemplary write-up), balancing my 2023 mantra of “100 percent” (commitment) with a healthy dose of pragmatism.
At a company level, this can be difficult. Your business will have numerous, competing, high-priority things it wants to accomplish in 2023. Marketing will have a role to play in many of them. This can easily lead to dozens of goals that pull on common resources but aren’t necessarily developed with those constraints in mind.
Hot tip for the day: Review your goals in aggregate, not only in isolation, and look for bottlenecks that might arise when you try to accomplish them in parallel.
A commitment that I encourage you to make across all of your content marketing efforts is to maximum authenticity. If there’s one thing that can take your content to the next level without requiring extra resources, it’s this: Authenticity applied consistently to your content helps prospects engage with you more willingly because they perceive your company as more reliable and trustworthy. Read this week’s post on The Framework blog, Commit to a Year of Authenticity in Your B2B Content Marketing, for a primer on what authenticity means, why it matters, and five steps you can take to bring authenticity into your content.
I took advantage of dead week to read a slew of content marketing related blogs and articles, several of which I bookmarked to share with you in the coming weeks. Scroll down to What We’ve Been Reading to see the first four, with quick summaries and the relevant URLs. This week’s selection spans taking a RevOps approach to industrial business marketing, the changing landscape of B2B influencer marketing, content trends to keep in mind as we dive into 2023, and how B2B marketers can usefully tap into proven B2C tactics.
Rounding things out for this week, our One Step actionable tip ties into the goal validation theme mentioned earlier. Take five minutes to mentally explore what happens as you pursue your goals, anticipate bottlenecks that could arise, and where contingency plans might be helpful.
Have a great week getting back up to speed, and we’ll see you back here next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
o/b/o Team MessageUp
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Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Jan 04, 2023 - Commit to a Year of Authenticity in Your B2B Content Marketing
Dec 28, 2022 - Reflections on a Year of B2B Content Marketing (2022)
Dec 21, 2022 - Always Talking Money: Calculating Return on Investment for your B2B Content Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that you might enjoy and find helpful:
What is a RevOps Approach? Why Should it Matter to Manufacturers?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) has decidedly tech-y origins but as Greg Linnemanstons at Weidert points out, successful industrial companies take a disciplined approach to aligning many other functional areas of their business, so why not their go-to-market teams?
15 Ways the B2B Influencer Marketing Industry is Changing [Infographic]
Here's a nicely presented infographic by Lane Ellis at Top Rank Marketing, summarizing findings from their latest B2B Influencer Marketing Report. With 79 percent of respondents agreeing that B2B influencer marketing is set to grow in importance over the next year, their full report may be deserving of your attention.
5 Highly Underrated Industry Trends for B2B Content You Shouldn't Overlook in 2023
As Kate Wolters of Flowmesh writes for BizCommunity, there are numerous B2B content developments to consider, such as neuromarketing and micro-influencers, but many of them are being over-thought. She highlights five simpler content trends to keep in mind as we sprint toward 2023.
2023 is a Pivotal Year for B2B Marketing—Are You Ready?
Dee Blohm, senior vice president of marketing at Anteriad, writing for Forbes Communication Council, expects 2023 to be a big year for B2B marketers. She recommends they take their lead from B2C industries with long purchase cycles, such as luxury retail, travel, real estate, auto, and financial services. This might include tapping into proven B2C tactics such as conversational marketing and ungated content. Above all, collecting lead information shouldn't get in the way of a great experience.
One Step…
This week’s actionable step encourages you to hit pause (even though it’s only the first week of January) to review your goals through a bottleneck-spotting lens and identify where continency plans might be needed.
Take a blank sheet of paper (or a new spreadsheet) and list the content marketing goals you’ve set for 2023.
If you haven’t set goals yet, I highly recommend taking the time to do so—companies that run their marketing without clearly set and documented goals are generally much less successful than those that invest the effort.
Across the top of your page, create headings for each of the key resources that will contribute to hitting the goals. Then, put check marks in the appropriate resources columns for each goal that will draw upon them.
Identify any resources that could represent a bottleneck if goals overlap or more is required from them than the base case anticipates. Make a separate list of potential constraints, capturing them as “if this and this happens then resource X will become a bottleneck” statements.
Finally, flag the constraints that you consider most likely to occur for contingency planning—a separate exercise that will require more time and is likely to involve a wider group.
This exercise will bring a valuable reality check into your planning process, helping you to avoid unwelcome crunches or missed targets.
And, if you don’t foresee any resource constraints, congratulations! You can charge ahead with confidence.
Until Next Time
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