3 Takeaways from the Inbound Marketing Summit for Market Researchers

I spent two days this week at the Inbound Marketing Summit and have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.  As an avid podcast/webcast viewer, I am not sure how much new I learned (except the brilliance of unmarketing’s Scott Stratten), but as someone who works in the market research, and more broadly professional services industry, I had three big takeaways.

1. As an industry, most marketers in the professional services world are behind the times.  Marketing today needs to not only support sales, but bring in leads and play an active role in engaging buyers, partners, and potential employees.  It is no longer enough to simply put out an e-newsletter, stand in your booth at some conferences, and make up some pretty collateral.  Smart marketers are producing regular sharable content, participating in discussions, and using their position as a company learning post.

2. Corporate marketers are talking about measurement, but not market research.  Granted this was a conference about Inbound Marketing, but there was lots of talk about marketing data and algorithms but virtually no talk about market research.  There are so many trackable data points available to marketers that market research data is only one input.  Smart market research firms are integrating multiple data sources to tell a complete story.

3. Content is king – and market research results are a great way to build it.  As consumers get more and more savvy, corporate marketers are using market research data as proof points for their value propositions.  As market researchers, there is a need to balance telling the “right story” with the “story the client wants to tell.”  In most cases, these are one in the same but before engaging in any project for marketing/PR use it is really important to set the right expectations with the client so there are no misunderstandings once the data comes in.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for this blog, I'm learning more trying to expand my own NPO. I'm just a college student trying to give back :) Thanks these are great marketing tips.
October 14, 2010 at 9:01 PM
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