Stating the Obvious

John Hall's new book, Top of Mind: Use Content to Unleash Your Influence and Engage Those Who Matter To You, is getting rave notices.
There's a reason.

The author, CEO of a PR firm, has caught the wave we call influencer marketing, which he describes as a "content utopia" where your marketing messages are published and shared routinely by industry leaders.

This "top-of-mind strategy" can leapfrog your organization "from no online presence to industry domination," Hall claims.

And I'm sure the claim is true. But, for my money, Hall's book is a bust.

He spends most of the 180 pages of Top of Mind stating the obvious. Crack open the book and you'll find a lifetime supply of kindergarten lessons like these:

• "Listen to your target audience; engage and communicate with them in ways they find helpful and meaningful; and repeat."

• "Storytelling and sharing knowledge is a big part of our humanity, and we wouldn't be where we are today without it."

• "Giving someone a gift is a nice way to establish a personal connection."
  

• "The more personalized you can make your audience's experience, the more special and valued you will help them feel."
  

• "To generate trust, you need to create a relationship; for that to happen, you need to open up lines of communication that are honest, meaningful, and authentic."

The greater source of disappointment stems from Hall's goal: it isn't to show you how to leverage industry influencers, but to become one yourself.

That's simply not something most marketers need, want, or are able to do.

Most, I think, are wondering: How can I use influencer marketing to sell more flow sensors, flood insurance, or file-sharing packages?

Hall doesn't offer much specific or practical help here, though he would.

He does sandwich halfway through Top of Mind four "best practices" for executing a "top-of-mind strategy;" but they're pedestrian as can be (set goals, find content, commit to a process, publish and repurpose). And he devotes his last two chapters to "turning your team into an army of thought leaders;" but good luck with that.

Besides, how many more GaryVees does the world really need?

Save your $26.

All the Way

The standard B2B marketing tactics are obsolete, says Evy Wilkins, VP of Account Based Marketing at Traackr.

Disruptors like ad blockers and email filters have outmoded them.

Thank goodness there's influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing works, Wilkins says, because most customers rely on expert opinions  to make buying decisions. 

They find the opinions on social media. 

When you win the love of opinion leaders (who'll parrot your sales-talk on social media), you can again begin to romance customers.

But it takes a change of heart.

"For decades, marketers have been in a rhythm of campaign-based activities," Wilkins says; but "influencer marketing is about long-term relationships that don’t go up and down with budget levels."

Influencer marketing, Wilkins says, is "always on."

You can't woo an influencer, for example, to love your brand for eight weeks, targeting only 30-year-old English-speaking males who work in greater San Francisco.

It doesn't work that way—even when you pay the influencer.

The 3-Minute Guide to List Segmentation

I used to sell health insurance to letter carriers by direct mail (ironic, no?).

I targeted 27 segments within a list of 300,000 prospects, mailing each segment different creative. The individualized sales arguments made in the copy paid off, and more than offset the extra production costs.

So there's nothing new about list segmentation. 

It's high time to stop thinking of your mailings as "broadcasts" and segment your list.

But how?

Here are six tips (they apply equally to postal and e-mail lists):

Scrub your list. Seven in 10 names on a B2B list become outdated within a year, so don't dirty your hands with something unwashed. Send your list outside for a good cleaning.

Slice up the list. Comb through your newly cleaned list and identify commonalities. Slice up the list accordingly. I divided the letter carriers according to the health insurance policies they owned in the past.

Introduce triggers. Identify key events and add fields for them to every record. For example, how many mailings have they received? Have they bought anything? Have they changed jobs or companies?

Create niche content. Tailor sales arguments for each segment. Someone who's bought from you may jump at the chance to save with a "loyal customer discount," while someone who's never bought from you, but has recently been promoted, may be ready to save with a "first-time customer discount."

Keep it simple. Create a manageable number of segments and work with them for a while. Don't invent new segments or second guess yourself every month. Remember, if it isn't simple, it isn't scalable.

Grow your list. Rent highly-targeted prospect names from third parties, to protect your list from "list rot." B2B lists are volatile and decay at a rapid rate.

Doctor, Doctor

Why do 7 in 10 B2B marketers say events are the very best marketing channel?

The answer's simple: ROI.

Events routinely deliver big brands 5X ROI; small ones, 3X to 5X ROI.

"In-person events simply have more impact than all the social media posts and email newsletters in the world," says Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group.

Events allow you to generate leads and close sales; connect with buyers' emotions; expand your community; drive social media engagement and website traffic; and create months' of newsworthy marketing content.

But as importantly, Brenner says, events let you diagnose the cause of buyers' pain.

For inquisitive marketers, chatting with buyers over coffee, recording their comments at conference sessions, or conducting surveys through your event app may be just what the doctor ordered.

"You may discover a problem with your product or service that is the root of unexplained customer churn," Brenner says. Just as likely, "You could uncover strengths you didn’t realize you had."

Uncle Sam Should Damn Spam

US anti-spam law hampers marketers, says email marketing expert Chad White.

The feds agree, and are moving to reform CAN-SPAM.

The problem with the law?

It's lax.

That laxity makes "deliverability overly difficult for legitimate senders," White says, because email providers have to police inboxes.

"If a brand only clears the low bar set by CAN-SPAM, they are pretty much guaranteed to be blacklisted and blocked by inbox providers," White says.

"While on the surface, lax regulations look like an advantage to American brands, it’s really setting them up for failure."

White urges these seven reforms:

• Tighten the deadline for honoring opt-out requests. Marketers, by law, can now stall for 10. But customers want them to honor opt-outs immediately.
  
  
• Dictate how unsubscribe works. Customers struggle with marketers' inconsistent practices; as a result, one in two resorts to clicking the “Report Spam” button.
  
  
• Loosen the definition of "transactional" emails. Marketers should be allowed to send post-purchase emails (such as receipts, thank-you notes, and renewal notices) without be being flagged as spammers.
  
  
• Require CAPTCHA on signup forms. "Unprotected open email signup forms allow spammers, hackers, and other bad actors to use bots to weaponize email," White says. Only 3% of marketers use CAPTCHA on their forms today.
  
  
• Mandate authentication and encryption. Email personalization makes customers vulnerable to phishing. CAN-SPAM could protect them by mandating that senders authenticate and encrypt emails.
  
  
• Require permission. That requirement would harmonize CAN-SPAM with other countries' tougher laws, and keep US marketers out of hot water. Permission is defined as "an expressed or implied consent or existing business relationship."
  
  
• Stipulate that inactivity equals opting out. " CAN-SPAM should recognize that permission expires," White says. "CAN-SPAM should require senders to stop emailing subscribers when they haven’t opened or clicked an email in the past two years."

Is Your Event Profit Proof?

What's the "inconvenient truth" about selling online?

You'll go broke, says blogger Steven Dennis.

"Only a handful of venture capital-funded “pure-plays” have (or will ever) make money," Dennis says.

The rest (including Amazon) operate at below-average margins for the retail industry, amassing huge financial losses year upon year.

Of themselves, free shipping and liberal return policies guarantee these companies will remain "profit proof," Dennis says.

Worse yet: the cost to acquire a customer. When it comes to customer acquisition, web retailers suffer "diseconomies of scale," Dennis says.

"Many online brands attract their first tranche of customers relatively inexpensively, through word of mouth or other low cost strategies," he says.

But then, marketing costs start to escalate.

"As brands seeking growth need to reach a broader audience, they typically start to pay more and more to Facebook, Google and others to grab the customer’s attention and force their way into the customer’s consideration set," he says.

"Early on customers were acquired for next to nothing; now acquisition costs can easily exceed more than $100 per customer."

The higher the acquisition costs, the lower the gross margin on the resulting incremental sales, a dynamic that eventually lands the business in hardship.

Whenever I plan an attendee acquisition campaign for an event producer, I budget the marketing efforts using, give or take a few bucks, the same amount of money Dennis mentions—$100 per attendee.

Want 500 attendees? Plan to spend at least $50,000.

Some event producers balk—How can it cost so much?

But after more than three decades in the event-promotion business, working on events large and small and in a variety of industries and professions, I've found it a real-world rule-of-thumb.

And most producers who spend that kind of money on marketing can, in fact, run a successful event and go home with a tidy profit.

The "diseconomies of scale" only enter the picture when registration fees are low ; or when producers discount and give away registrations; or—the worst case—when admission to the event is free.

Of course, attendees are a necessary evil: without any, exhibitors have been known to complain. But they need not have "negative value" when registration fees are low (or nonexistent).

Attendees can be little ambling profit centers.

How?

Sell attendees livestreaming.

Events are cornucopias of content. When you capture that content on video, you can sell it to attendees for post-event consumption. None of them can be in two places at once, so none can possibly imbibe all the content you offer. What's more, every attendee loves to share good content with colleagues "back at the ranch." Why deny them that pleasure?

And why make your event "profit proof," when it can be enormously the opposite?  "Back-of-the-room" sales of livestreaming come cheaply, because attendees are already in your "store." The gross margin on the incremental sales you make will come at an extremely low rate—almost for free, if you already videotape content for projection purposes, as most producers do.

Want more food for thought? Check out my posts "Conference Planners: There's No Sin in Syndication" and "Just be Willing to Believe."

NOTE: CEIR reports that average attendee-acquisition costs currently range from $14 to $20 per person. But I don't believe the figures are reliable. My own past research, done in the 2000s, showed acquisition costs to range from $68 to $80 per person. CEIR's report, nonetheless, can help any producer get a grip on event-industry spending trends, and is worth studying.

How to Build Your E-list

Serious B2B marketers know e-lists are the way to sway an audience (only face-to-face and telemarketing are better).

But how do you build an e-list?

Pratik Dholakiya, co-founder of E2M, recommends these six steps:

Find your keyword. This step separates the winners and losers. Winners choose a keyword that attracts their prospects; losers don't. Winners chose an intentional keyword, knowing it's probably the one most prospects search with, when shopping on line (mine is "copywriter"). Then, they lace their content with it (copywriter, copywriter, copywriter).

Plan unique content. Prospects will part with their email addresses if you offer content competitors don't. Here, substance always trumps form. Prospects want to learn from you, and don't care much whether you provide an e-book, white paper, video, podcast, webinar, template, spreadsheet, calculator, or quiz. Just be different.

Construct your landing page. Think "tiny house." Short and sweet landing pages work best. Focus on prospects' pain-points and the grievances they harbor about your competitors' me-too content. Be sure to split-test your page, to be certain you've chosen the right pain-points and grievances. (Tip: develop your landing page before you develop your content. You'll discover what you're really selling people.)

Blog, blog, blog. Blogging's pure Google juice. You'll not only drive traffic to your landing page, but entice prospects to request your content. (Tip: write posts that explain why your content differs from competitors', but don't crow about it.)

Hammer your audience. Don't sit back and wait for inbound traffic; send emails, early and often. Keep them brief and include "influencers," as well as prospects, on your list. People like to share good stuff, so you'll accelerate your list-building effort.

Rinse, repeat. This step, again, separates the winners and losers. Winners work at list-building, again and again; losers think "one and done." Pick another keyword and repeat the whole process.

BONUS TIP: Kick-start your list-building effort by renting good prospect lists. We can help you.

Chunky

Small is beautiful.

— Ernst Schumacher

Bevies of experts believe "micro-content"—marcom you mold into "bite-size, digestible chunks"—can counteract customers' growing intolerance of marketing.

I'm not so sure.

If micro means publishing crap, small isn't beautiful.

If micro means posting "rough and ready" videos, small isn't beautiful.

If micro means turning tractati into tweets, small isn't beautiful.

In all these cases, small isn't small: it's only small.

If your sole success-metric is views, micro may be fine.

But if conversions are your bag, better work at it a wee bit harder.

Ruined Your Relationship with Readers?

Has your relentless pursuit of eyeballs ruined your relationship with readers?

I bet it has.

If all you do is dangle click-bait and recycle sales-talk, you're driving readers away―and wasting your chance for romance on the biggest social network of them all, email.

Only value keeps the relationship alive.

Newsletter publisher Inside proves it. In less than a year, the startup has attracted 300,000 readers. Its newsletters garner 40% open rates, 10% click rates.

The secret sauce? Good content.

"We think news on the internet is broken," the company's website says. "Too much writing is optimized and incentivized for traffic and virality, instead of impact and quality."

By focusing on value instead of hits, Inside keeps readers reading. And a happy reader shares her love―causing your list to grow.

So how does Inside do it?

According to Austin Smith, Inside’s general manager:

• Five full-time staffers and 10 freelancers produce all the content for 28 newsletters. Staffers are generalists with multiple beats.
  
• Each newsletter comprises 70% curated content, 30% original. The content is "deep dive," business-only, and written for an advance audience.
  
• Staffers favor stories readers may have missed because other news outlets have ignored them.

Mind the Gap, B2B Marketers

Nurturing leads is as important as nabbing them.

But a lot of B2B marketers, under the gun to generate leads, forget this. They ignore the "Content Consumption Gap," and blitz leads with premature follow-up calls.

NetLine examined 7 million long-form content downloads and concluded it takes 38 hours for a lead to read whatever he requests (C-level leads take 48 hours).

Dubbing the timespan the "Content Consumption Gap," NetLine urges marketers to practice patience and wait at least two days before following up a lead.
"Don't smother content-sourced leads," says NetLine's David Fortino. "Suggest that your sales team wait 48 hours before contacting, to ensure that the prospect is well informed enough to have an educated discussion."

Instead of dialing, Fortino recommends sending leads "a light-touch email:"

Thanks for checking out our white paper. I’ll check in with you in a few days to see what you thought. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions.

Digital Indecency

I imagined the web as a platform that would allow everyone, everywhere
to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate.

— Tim Berners-Lee

Starfleet General Order 1, you'll recall, was the Prime Directive: all personnel should refrain from interfering with the natural development of communities.

Marketers, by cravenly ignoring the web's Prime Directive—to help users share and collaborate—are destroying the medium, says Kirk Chayfitz this month in Chief Content Officer.

Marketers "have failed to see that digital requires a creative approach that is diametrically opposed to the blunt-instrument sales messages of traditional ads," he writes.

As a result, users are demonstrating their "exponentially growing disgust with an industry that has admitted showing little or no regard for people's needs and desires."

They're blocking ads.

Chayfitz prescribes these six rules for restoring "digital decency" to web advertising:

Take responsibility. Marketers must stop blaming agencies; they write the checks.

Do no harm. Ads shouldn't fan users' frustrations. Keep data loads light, don't block content, and don't distract with needless video and animation.

Bust silos. Integrate all digital advertising under one officer.

White-list the sites you want to support. Don't fund fraudsters, charlatans and extremists by running ads on their sites.

Audit. Put the right to audit ad buys in your contracts with agencies. Insist on accountability.

Be useful. Provide users valuable experiences, not repetitive sales pitches. "The dream of digital was always to democratize communication and help make a better world," Chayfitz writes. "Take that to heart."

How 3 Brands Found Their Content Niche

Kara Whittaker contributed today's post. She is a content marketer with Ghergich & Co.

When you think of Red Bull, what do you think of?

You probably associate the brand with its energy drinks, of course. But Red Bull has an interesting backstory that provides key lessons for content marketers looking to make more of their brands.

Red Bull actually got its start in Europe, where extreme physical challenges—biking, hiking, mountain climbing, and sky diving—are already an established part of the culture.

When the company realized it was in the sports, not the beverage, business, it decided to capitalize on that heritage, creating a series of extreme sports events that challenged the stamina of participants.

The events were so successful, the company created an entire division dedicated solely to producing edge-of-the-world content.

It's worked, which is why Red Bull is one of the globe's leading brands—and one of its foremost content marketers.

Content has been part of marketing for more than a century.

When Michelin realized it was in the travel, not the tire, business, it published travel guides; and they gave rise to a what has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon: the Michelin Star rating system for restaurants.

And when GoPro realized it was in the user-generated content, not the camera, business, it leveraged UGC to build a fanatical fan base—and a world-class brand.

You can emulate brands like these by asking, "What business are we really in?"

And, yes, it takes time, testing and chutzpah to find your content niche.

But once you do, the sky's the limit.

Thought Leadership: It's Not What You Think

Content marketing agency Grist asked 200 execs to assess thought leadership. Their responses will surprise you:

• 84% say thought leadership adds value to their roles as executives, and 66% say they count on it to stay ahead of trends. Only 36% say they use thought leadership to gauge the expertise of an author; but 40% will contact an author, if they find a piece worthwhile.
  
  
• 46% want thought leadership that offers fresh perspectives; only 26% want content that's action-oriented. 63% say thought leadership fails when it's conventional; and 58%, when it's unoriginal. Only 31% ever read all the thought leadership they uncover; and only 28% say it actually influences their decisions.
  
  
• 63% prefer short (800-word) articles; and 57% prefer short (300- to 500-word ) blog posts. Only 45% will read 1,200-word pieces; and only 28%, 4,000-word pieces. Only 26% will devote attention to videos; and only 25%, to podcasts.

So how can you please executives?

• Create thought leadership content that's provocative, original, forward-looking, and issue-oriented. Execs don't need one more post on "10 Ways to Modernize Your [Fill in the Blank]."
  
  
• Avoid not only stale, but fluffy topics; and shun sales-talk. Create content your industry's leading media outlets would reprint.
  
  
• Don't just record (as in videos and podcasts). Write. And write short.

10 Years a Blogger

Chris Brogan's advice—to make blogging the bedrock of your social media outreach—spurred me to start blogging 10 years ago.

In those years, I have learned to:

• Post early (8 am) and often (cadence counts).
  
  
• Niche.
  
  
• Write short. (If you value readers, don't smother them.)
  
  
• Be honest, and never surprised your most popular posts are the most heartfelt.
  
  
• Think "Progress, not perfection," but edit five times.
  
  
• Stay open for inspiration (and realize most sources are off line).
  
  
• Accept that you're not Mark Twain, Seth Godin, the Dalai Lama, or even Vito Corleone.
  
• Outpost.
  
  
• Remember Mama said there'll be days like this.
  
  
• Don't try to explain why you blog to your family.
  
  
• Get used to silence.

What's the Right Content Mix for B2B?

Apps. Blogs. Case studies. Digital tools. E-books. Events. Games. Graphs. Infographics. Newsletters. Photos. Podcasts. Presentations. Reports. Quizzes. Videos. Webinars. White papers.

What's the right content marketing mix?

Begin with the essentials:

Blogs. The Number 1 source of leads, says Search Engine Journal. Without a blog, your strategy's spineless.

Events and webinars. What's better than blogs? Three of four B2B marketers say events. Webinars are a close second. A single event can pack more punch than 100 blog posts.

Newsletters. Newsletters help you keep customers, and keep prospects interested. Weekly is the best frequency, if you can manage it.

Videos. Six in 10 decision-makers visit a brand’s website after watching a video, according to Inc. And four in 10 contact the company.

White papers. White papers trumpeter your authority, essential to persuading customers to buy from you. 

Case studies. Case studies provide social proof, equally essential to persuading customers.

E-books. E-books can gather repurposed blog posts. They offer an outlet for dazzling design work, inviting to readers turned off by other formats.

Other content. Apps, digital tools, games, graphs, infographics, photos, podcasts, presentations, reports and quizzes are all just icing on the cake.

Admit You're a Hack

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative,
original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

— David Ogilvy

Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, wants you to believe storytelling is hack work.

"I’m absolutely on board with storytelling as a content marketing device," he says. "But just because you understand story arcs and can riff on Joseph Campbell doesn’t mean you’re now Francis Ford Coppola or William Faulkner. Content marketing is a job, not an art form."

I suspect Baer doesn't know that Faulkner, with over a dozen dependents to support, wasn't above sports writing, travel writing, and movie scriptwriting (he's credited for, among other films, The Big Sleep).

But I get Baer's point: marketing's kind of storytelling ain't art-making; it's hack work.

"I see more and more content marketers straying from this perspective," Baer says, "thinking that they are newfangled hybrid players, straddling the line between fine art and commerce. They are not.

"The only job that content marketing has is to create behaviors among target audiences that benefit the business. Content must prod behavior, or it’s a useless exercise."

Or, as my agency's website says, "“It’s not creative unless it sells."

Is Succinct Extinct?

You can argue for long-form content 'til you're blue in the face.

You're still wrong.

In 1647, the Jesuit Baltazar Gracián explained why:

Don't be a bore.

The man of one business or of one topic is apt to be heavy. Brevity flatters and does better business; it gains by courtesy what it loses by curtness. Good things, when short, are twice as good. The quintessence of the matter is more effective than a whole farrago of details. It is a well-known truth that talkative folk rarely have much sense whether in dealing with the matter itself or its formal treatment. There are that serve more for stumbling-stones than centerpieces, useless lumber in everyone's way. The wise avoid being bores, especially to the great, who are fully occupied: it is worse to disturb one of them than all the rest. Well said is soon said.

Write for readers, not Google.

Magazines against the Wall?

A near-impenetrable wall once separated editorial from advertising.

But with ad-income in decline—and without hope of turnaround—magazine publishers are capitalizing on their editorial prestige to create new revenue streams, says Ryan Derousseau in Folio:

• Readers of New York trust its writers' recommendations about what's worth buying. So the publisher has started to rake in dough from affiliates via outbound links in the articles on its website. Whenever readers click to a partner's website, money changes hands. The publisher's policy: to plug only products "the editors or writers stand behind.” Affiliate revenue is growing 40% a month, and has inspired the publisher to open pop-up shops at festivals.

• The Atlantic has become advertisers' digital agency, exploiting its advantage in measuring readers' clicks. Besides audits, the publisher creates and runs entire content-focused, multichannel campaigns for advertisers. The campaigns can include sponsored pieces of original journalism. The in-house agency is the fastest growing division of the company. It expects its revenue to rise 32% this year.

• Time is licensing its portfolio of brands to retail outlets. Readers can find kitchenware, bed linens, rugs and other merchandise in stores that are branded Real Simple, People, Food & Wine, and Southern Living. Licensed products sold in Dillard's have grown to 110 in two years.

Does monetizing readers' trust in these ways endanger that very thing?
Probably not.

Audiences are so used to paid sponsorships, they give them no thought.

Nobody turned off the last NCAA Tournament because every other player's jersey has a Nike swoosh. James Bond's Omega watch didn't prevent Skyfall from becoming a box-office smash. Mentions of the Peninsular and Oriental Company in Around the World in Eighty Days didn't stop Jules Verne's novel from becoming a classic. And Esquire readers ate up David Ogilvy's take on oysters for Guinness.

Demand Gen Demands Focus

Lead gen (scattered) differs from demand gen (focused).

Demand gen identifies your best prospects, hooks them with content, and converts them into buyers.

It takes focus to pull it off, says Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group.

Here's Brenner's formula:

Step 1. Target your prospects and offer them premium content and giveaways through a variety of channels. Test e-books, white papers, infographics, videos, podcasts, free trials, and free apps. Test influencer marketing at this stage, as well. "With every download, sign-up or other customer action, you’ll gain insight and have a better idea of which segments are interested in what and why," Brenner says.

Step 2. Help prospects form an intimate connection with your brand. For this, try Webinars, contests, and events. "This tactic serves to invite the customer into a more committed brand-customer relationship."

Step 3. Now that you’ve identified your best quality leads, customize your marketing communications. "Hopefully, you’ve managed to collect some extra customer info along the way with survey questions and feedback requests to help firmly establish your buyer personas and clearly understand each segment’s pain points," Brenner says.

Step 4. Keep the customized content flowing. "It is the tailored, worthwhile content that will convince your vetted leads to follow you along until a purchase is made." Don't forget the continue testing different offers.

Step 5. Engage and delight your new customers through social media and email. Make sure they know about your new products, promotions, and content. "Meanwhile, your inbound marketing is working on gathering your next pool of prospects, ready to be identified, evaluated, thinned, and segmented."

Concentration is key.

"This approach does require a concentrated, ongoing effort to stay focused on your quality leads and customer retention," Brenner says. "But, as the nurturing process continues, relationships build, bonds thicken, and your pool of the highly qualified swells."

Collateral Damage

Until the autopsy results come in, we can only guess why Steve the Security Robot drowned this week in Washington, DC.

May he Rust in Peace.

Automation—including marketing automation—is only as good as the weakest link in the process.

The weak link in marketing automation is content.

Marketers go to all lengths to create pretty logos, websites, blogs, banner ads, brochures and tradeshow booths, but allow marketing automation to sully their brands.

They program Mark the Marketing Robot to:

Annoy prospects. They program Mark to assume a form-fill means the prospect welcomes one or two cloying emails every single day for 20 days. Trust me, she doesn't.

Confuse prospects. They program him to send long-winded, self-absorbed emails that spew largely irrelevant product features. They never bother to communicate a core—or convincing—value proposition; only a lot of sales-talk.

Offend prospects. They program Mark to send emails with click-bait Subject lines, unproven or exaggerated claims, typos, grammatical errors, and pointless and presumptive closes.

It's no wonder so many CMOs struggle with marketing automation.

It's the content, stupid.