Gartner’s 2025 marketing priorities research lands in a familiar place: CMOs are being asked to do more with less, prove more with imperfect data, and grow businesses that often have no appetite for the kind of investment growth actually requires. The priorities Gartner surfaces are real. But reading them without commercial context turns a useful…
Customer education is the practice of giving buyers the knowledge they need to understand your product, make a confident purchase decision, and get genuine value from what they buy. Done well, it shortens sales cycles, reduces churn, and compounds over time in ways that paid media simply cannot replicate. Most companies treat education as a…
CMO mental health is deteriorating, and the industry is barely talking about it. The role carries enormous commercial accountability with limited authority, constant scrutiny from boards who often misunderstand marketing, and tenure short enough that many CMOs are already managing their exit before their strategy has had time to land. This is not a wellness…
Voice of customer can be used to improve products, sharpen messaging, reduce churn, and identify the friction points that quietly kill conversion. At its most practical, it is a structured method for collecting what customers actually think, then using that information to make better commercial decisions. Most businesses collect some form of customer feedback. Very…
CMO job descriptions are, in the main, works of fiction. They describe a role that no single human could perform, in a timeline that no sensible business could deliver, with a mandate that no board has actually agreed to grant. If you have ever read one and thought “this sounds too good to be true,”…
A customer engagement framework is a structured approach to managing how a business interacts with customers across every stage of the relationship, from first contact through retention and advocacy. Done well, it replaces ad hoc touchpoints with a deliberate system that connects marketing activity to measurable commercial outcomes. Most businesses don’t have one. They have…
ABM marketing consultants bring specialist expertise and a faster setup, while in-house teams offer deeper context and longer-term institutional knowledge. Neither is universally better. The right answer depends on where your pipeline is, how complex your target account list is, and whether your organisation has the internal discipline to run ABM without it collapsing into…
Customer lifecycle analysis is the process of examining how customers behave at each stage of their relationship with a business, from first purchase through to lapse or churn, so you can make smarter decisions about where to invest, who to target, and what to say. Done properly, it tells you which customers are worth acquiring,…
Hiring a freelance marketing consultant for strategy work is straightforward in theory: find someone with relevant experience, agree on a scope, get a strategy. In practice, most engagements underdeliver, not because the consultant was wrong for the job, but because the brief was wrong for the problem. The companies that get the most from freelance…
Segmentation best practices come down to one discipline: dividing your addressable market into groups that are meaningfully different from each other, and meaningfully similar within themselves, so that your positioning, messaging, and channel mix can be calibrated to each. Done well, segmentation is the foundation of every go-to-market decision you make. Done poorly, it is…
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