The Peanut Butter & Jelly of Modern Marketing Ever been the new kid in a new place? If so you no doubt remember that semi-nauseating mix of un-dashed optimism, the adrenalin blasts that come with blazing new trails and the gnaw of the unknown on the psyche – all roiling around in brain, heart and gut in search of an action plan.

If you’re like me in these situations … you clamor for something familiar.

I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

It soothed the soul and set the following in motion.

You and I both suffer through marketing in the modern world filled with tools, tips & twists of phrase about “delighting customers” and other such platitudinal garbage that sounds so wonderful.  We also know that cute language, a rat’s nest of software and a “5 things you can do …” blog post all do very little separately or even McGyver’d together to help us “delight” who we should be: our sales team and the CFO.

What proof do you have that what you do each day actually results in a bottom-line contribution to the companies where you work?

This is the roiling nausea I mentioned. Hang in there.

Our Nausea has a name: ROMI

It should come as no surprise that we came up with an acronym for our nausea … ROMI or Return on Marketing Investment. The nausea persists given the fact that the only way you can get a true handle on what you’ve spent and if it actually yielded any return is if all technology, tactics and talent are used to a accomplish a common goal.

If you’re in marketing that goal better be investing in finding prospects, giving both prospects and customers information in the time of need on how to prove their value at work and then keeping them out of your sales team’s hair until that person wants to buy something you sell.

True to form, we as marketers have overthought this endeavor and given names to each stage or even the tactic du jour with qualifiers like Inbound Marketing (Search, PPC, Social outreach, blogging, etc.) Content Marketing (the information we share with prospects) Event Marketing (where we try to meet prospects and Vanna White our wares) Email Marketing (but a single tool available to share information using list we have or purchase that hopefully contain people who want to hear from us) Direct mail marketing (the non-digital dinosaur that we seem to fear but secretly know its massive clutter-busting power).

Still nauseated? Me too.

The Cure for Marketing-induced Nausea: Quit Slicing & Dicing

Here’s your Modern Marketing PB&J … Stop dissecting everything you do and stitch it all back together.

This togetherness is vital not only in how we execute as marketers but how we speak about marketing to others – particularly our colleagues in sales and finance. Subtitles for players on a marketing team led many of the sales guys and gals I worked with to ask me: “How many of them are you and what do all of you do other than cost money?”

That need to always justify your existence is all the more reason to stop carving out our little specialties.  Let’s not divide and fail. Let’s unite and conquer instead. We are all marketers with one goal. To grow the lead funnel and qualify potential buyers that sales can then close.

With that being the case, I joined forces with Digital C4 last month as the head of the demand generation practice to unite these marketing functions under the same roof:

  • Content creation
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Social distribution of information and other the top-of-the-funnel exercises
  • Demand Generation strategy, execution and optimization to turn prospects into purchasers.

I’m more excited than I have ever been professionally at this moment because I am now part of an agency that is built in the way a marketing organization should function within the companies we serve. Together.

Digital C4 is poised like few agencies are today to help clients create a perpetual demand generation engine of inbound tactics interwoven with outbound marketing tools like a marketing automation platform.

With the engine built, we are poised to help you pack the top of the funnel via your existing lists, SEO of your existing web properties or downloadable assets, online campaigns and buyer-centric content development. Then we’ll help you flow it through your marketing automation platform so it serves as the ultimate qualifying or nurturing machine that has proven to yield a higher quality lead at a lower cost.

This is my promise to you solely and our promise to you as an agency.

Let’s get to work.

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Photo credit to ironypoisoning.