How to Use Marketing Forecasts to Improve Your Strategy

Forecasting for the Future

In addition to working at Salesforce, Mathew Sweezey is also a self-titled “marketing evangelist.” He recently authored the book, “Marketing Automation for Dummies,” which was published by Wiley in 2014. Mathew is regarded as one of the most trusted minds on the future of marketing and does speaking engagements around the world on the subject.
In addition to sharing his predictions for upcoming trends in the new year, Mathew also offers his sage advice on how businesses can prepare for such adjustments. He says that with the rise of marketing automation, many companies have not had to adjust best practices in order to see improved results. That window is closing, he predicts, as companies will be forced to change best practices in order to keep up with the rate of growth many companies are seeing as a result of their ability to evolve alongside marketing automation.
Mathew also emphasizes the importance of adjusting one’s perspective to seeing behaviors rather than personas defined by job titles. This simple adjustment, he believes, will change how much content you create as well as how you do it.

In This Episode

• Forecasting the marketing trends of 2016
• How to adjust best practices to keep up with evolution of marketing automation
• The importance of moving your content creation from waterfall planning and execution to agile
• How to keep 70% of your content from going unused
• The future of distributing content responsibility across departments, influencing every stage of the buying cycle
• Why IT is crucially important to your marketing department

Quotes From This Episode

“If you have that data breached, that can be one of the largest negative experiences that your business could ever create for a consumer, buyer, or potential buyer. They say it takes four years to overcome or to get out of the goodwill debt that a data security breach causes.” —@msweezey

“These business personas and this idea of branding are historical ideas that come from the days when we thought that what we physically show people creates the brand in their head. And that’s not the true thing in the world that we live in. The experiences and the things that they experience are the things that dictate the brand. And experiences are no longer just simply visual. They’re auditory. They’re tactile. They’re all kinds of things.” —@msweezey

“People need to realize that anything with a URL technically is content. There’s so much content that other people create. An example is a retweet. We all click on retweets. It’s specifically stated that that person did not create that content, yet we engage with it. Consumers do not demand that we are the sole creator of the content. They enjoy us helping them find new things. They don’t care who creates it.” —@msweezey

Resources

• Mathew Sweezey’s Twitter
• Mathew’s LinkedIn
• Mathew’s Website
• Taulia’s Video Marketing Campaigns

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Mathew wanted to do everything, “When I was in my young teens I wanted to be a professional mountain bike racer. As I got older I wanted to be a professional bass fisherman. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian.”
He admits that marketing was never a dream of his, which he claims is far from unique, “If there is anyone who ever said, ‘I want to be a B2B marketer,’ God bless them. But I do not think that person exists. I think we all ended up here for various different reasons.”
But he has hope for the future, “In the future we won’t say, ‘I want to be a marketer,’ or, ‘I want to own brand.’ I think it’ll all be the same and I don’t think there’ll be that difference between B2B and B2C like there was in the past. And I think it’ll bring a whole new type of people that will grow up saying, ‘I just want to be a marketer,’ and what that means is exactly what we do rather than being siloed out between B2C and B2B. Hopefully some kid will want to be that.”