Building Content

By Michelle Etherton, The Partner Marketing Group

Marketing is extremely challenging in our global economy, along with the decision of where to focus your company’s $$ from the countless approaches. The Partner Marketing Group’s 2014 Technology Marketing Survey combined feedback from a variety of VARs, ISVs, and other technology providers and shows where your peers are concentrating their efforts and where the trends are leading.

The second section of the survey (page 5) depicts the biggest challenges in inbound and outbound marketing – areas where business are having the most trouble “figuring out” how to do right on their own.

It is interesting to see that the LEAST challenging scores (#4 and #5) in both inbound and outbound marketing were given to #4: ‘Converting the leads to opportunities’ and #5: ‘Capturing the leads’. It appears that after marketing has done its job to put the lead on the hook, partners feel comfortable reeling them in on their own.

Conversely, one of the HIGHEST ranking challenges for both inbound and outbound marketing is ‘Building powerful consistent content over time’ (#1 for inbound and #2 for outbound). This could be a result of the fact that 83.3% of the respondents of the survey don’t have internal resources – people or expertise – to create content. One of the hardest parts of any marketing campaign is coming up with unique ideas that are industry-specific and a majority of businesses choose to outsource in this area.

Learn more about these challenges in the 2014 Technology Marketing Survey, as well as approaches your peers are using to combat them in the remaining sections.