you to everyone that attended MassTLC’s sold out Sales and Marketing summit
“Building a Lean, Self-Perpetuating Marketing Machine” on April 4, 2014. The day started off strong with the sun
shining brightly at the UMASS Boston campus – finally!
Two guest bloggers provided terrific overviews of
the event. Michael Gerard, CMO at Curata
penned the first
post with key takeaways across each session at the summit. Links to
the keynote presentations can be found on the Curata blog as well as here for David Skok’s slides and here for the SiriusDecision slides.
In
addition, the day also consisted of a marketing technology fast pitch. Ten companies were given 90 seconds to pitch
the audience on their marketing and sales technologies. There was no winner as it wasn’t a contest
but the audience walked away armed with information on some of Boston’s latest
new technologies to help them solve their sales and marketing challenges. Check them out: Assembla, Black Ink,
Bluetrain.io, Brainshark, Evergage, Epsilon, Proximate, Quant5, V.I. Labs,
Vsnap
Alan Belniak, who presented the content strategy workshop along with Jonathan
Burg from Apperian writes the following
about his session:
Hacking, Modern Marketing, MVP and Serendipitous Virality… call it what you like. The way successful products go to market today
has little to do with accident and much to do with the approach before the
product hits the virtual shelves.
Speakers
such as David Skok, Brian Balfour, Damian Roskill, Heather Loisel, Michael Yaffe and Justine
Jordan all shared examples and tales of what they done as part of the front
lines of product and marketing, strategy, and entrepreneurship. It’s never easy. There is no silver
bullet. But there are some things that
are repeatable. I’m hopeful my
colleagues shared their slides so you can get a sense of the great discussion
that led up to this workshop.
where does content fit into all of this?
Smaller companies rarely have tons of extra cash lying around for a huge
paid media push. And even if they did,
that’s a temporary boost that’s often fleeting.
What’s a company or product to do?
useful, interesting, relevant content that gets viewed, downloaded, shared,
commented on, and generally advances a suspect or prospect through the
marketing funnel by befriended them and aligning content with their needs.
that’s it? Great. Off to the races, then!
you talking to? To whom do they
listen? What keeps them up at
night? Will podcasts work for them, or
maybe just blog posts? Or neither? What
content do you already have that you can use?
Will they be consuming the right content at the right time for the right
reason? How much? How often?
are the kinds of questions you need to answer to develop your content marketing
strategy, and that strategy needs to align to your funnel.
are the questions, and more, that Jonathan Burg and I set out to ask and help
answer in our 90-minute workshop/audience participation session of the
summit. The slides are below for your
download and use, complete with the handouts during the exercises.
all, it was a great session. There was
some good information sharing from the tables as we walked around, as well as
when we surveyed the audience for the brave souls willing to share their
stories.
from the workshop? If not, we’d love to
see some of your reactions below. Sound
off either way in the comments below.
and marketing community sponsors, Dassault
Systemes, Evergage and SiriusDecisions for helping us host a
valuable day for marketing and sales executives throughout the state.
can be reached at @abelniak on twitter or Google+
Ed Jennings, CMO at Veracode is hosting and discussing Driving
Pipeline; Where Sales & Marketing Meet. If you would like to join us and need the
passcode, please email christine@masstlc.org. This meeting is exclusively for CMOs/VPs of
Marketing of technology companies.
We are also launching a new demand gen peer group for heads, directors and VPs of demand/lead generation at technology companies. Email me if you are interested in participating.
