Inbound marketing and account-based outreach are not competing philosophies. They solve different problems at different stages of the buying cycle, and the brands that treat them as an either/or choice tend to underperform at both. The practical question is not which one to choose, but how to allocate resources across the two so each reinforces…
The Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025 shows marketing budgets holding at around 7.7% of company revenue on average, down from the highs of 9-11% seen in the early 2020s. The headline number gets plenty of coverage. What gets less attention is what sits underneath it: where budgets are being cut, where they are quietly growing,…
Marketing customer needs means understanding what your customers actually want, not what you assume they want, and building your go-to-market activity around that reality. Most brands claim to do this. Very few do it well enough for it to show up in their commercial results. The gap between “we know our customer” and genuinely acting…
At American Express, the CMO holds direct authority over a marketing budget that runs into the billions. That authority is not ceremonial. It covers brand, performance, customer acquisition, loyalty, and product marketing across multiple business units and geographies. Understanding how that budget authority is structured, and why it matters, tells you a great deal about…
Conversation intelligence tools turn recorded calls, chat transcripts, and sales interactions into structured customer data you can act on. The best platforms do more than transcribe: they identify patterns, flag objections, surface buying signals, and feed insight back into your go-to-market strategy in ways that a quarterly survey never will. If your customer intelligence still…
KPIs for outsourcing full marketing operations are the contractual backbone of the relationship. Without them, you are paying a retainer and hoping for the best. With the right ones in place, you have a clear line of sight from agency activity to business outcome, and a defensible basis for every conversation about performance, scope, and…
Customer retention is the part of growth strategy that most marketing teams underinvest in because it doesn’t feel like marketing. There’s no launch, no creative brief, no campaign to celebrate. But retaining a customer you already have is almost always cheaper, faster, and more commercially valuable than acquiring a new one. If your retention rate…
The most important KPIs for B2B digital marketing campaigns are the ones that connect marketing activity to pipeline and revenue, not the ones that are easiest to pull from a dashboard. That means prioritising metrics like marketing-qualified leads, cost per opportunity, pipeline contribution, and sales cycle velocity over impressions, clicks, and engagement rates. Most B2B…
Strategic market and customer intelligence is the information a business uses to make decisions about where to compete, who to target, and how to position itself. When that intelligence is stale, incomplete, or built on assumptions nobody has questioned in years, every downstream decision, from budget allocation to messaging to channel mix, is built on…
Identifying customer needs is the process of systematically uncovering what your customers actually want, as opposed to what you assume they want. The methods range from structured qualitative research to behavioural data analysis, and the most effective go-to-market strategies combine both rather than defaulting to one or the other. Most companies do some version of…
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