It’s often useful to reflect on where you’ve been to inform the path forward. In that spirit, and with this as my final blog post of the calendar year, I thought I’d share a roundup of my 2014 research.
What follows is a sample—some of the research that got me excited this year. Full access is limited to Gartner for Marketing Leaders clients, but I’ve netted out the gist below.
- “Learn from the Habits and Patterns of Digital CMOs” This series of executive profiles reflects off of the patterns defined in Gartner’s digital CMO research (which are also discussed in this HBR article). We talked to senior marketing execs from IBM, eBay, La Prairie, Delta Airlines, Sephora, HubSpot, the Atlanta Falcons, and others. The result are some battletested best practices that you can apply to your own digital CMO evolution.
- “How to Measure and Prove the Business Value of Your Content Marketing Program” Our primary research points to growing frustration with the empirical squishiness of so many content marketing efforts. This prompted us to answer the inevitable question: how do you measure and prove the business value of content marketing? The answer, of course, is that content marketing is a discipline that requires a long-term commitment. But this shouldn’t let content marketers off the hook; the path to transparent and ROI-accountable content marketing is paved with a comprehensive metrics strategy.
- “How Content Marketers Use Visual Storytelling to Engage Audiences” Content marketers have confirmed what has become a fairly threadbare idiom: A picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words. As time-starved audiences reveal a preference for images over text, content marketers must retool to become visual storytellers. But that means more than static images; the best visual storytellers create data-driven visual narratives and interactive experiences. In this research, we explore the state of the art—and the art of the possible.
