Michael Grover

Content marketers rally behind the banner of producing ever more excellent content marketing. Without a doubt, excellence has rightly become the baseline. But excellence, in and of itself, doesn’t guarantee a first-page ranking in Google. Nor a viral share in social media.

...The confluence of internet infrastructure, truly useful web-based publishing applications, and web search enabled the company to popularize a shift in the marketing eco-system paradigm.

It makes perfect sense: instead of carpet-bombing your market with interruptive messaging, create the content that will attract the people you want to reach. Create good content, the argument goes, and the people will find it...

How is your martech stack working for you? For the uninitiated, a martech stack (or marketing technology stack) is the set of technologies that marketers use to perform various marketing activities. How you collect leads and nurture them along the path to becoming a customer are just some of the activities that are handled by a martech stack.

For many growing companies, the martech stack can be a frustrating conglomeration of different tools brought in as needs emerge, sometimes with overlapping and competing jobs and almost always disconnected from each other.

In one experiment into the value of randomness, Ellevate showed three groups of consumers the same movie trailer. One group was told it was randomly selected from a set of 100 trailers. Another group was told the trailer came randomly selected from only 10 options. A third group was shown the trailer and told that a marketer had selected the trailer. Who reported more satisfaction? Consumers preferred the trailer when it was one of 100 choices vs one of ten. Lowest satisfaction? You guessed it, the one that was chosen by a marketer.