In her session at Content Marketing World in September, Crayon’s CMO Ellie Mirman will cover the fundamentals of competitive analysis and how it should shape our content strategies. We wanted to learn more about Ellie’s views on efficient operations, agile marketing, and finding the ‘white space’ just waiting to be colored in. What are your main areas of focus and key priorities? Each type of program launch – from an ebook campaign to a customer advocacy program – can serve a variety of goals. Each program rollout should include a planning phase where the goals, action items, and milestones, are set out at the start. I’m a big proponent of transparency across the business around the company’s key priorities and metrics. And every marketer – from the CMO to the brand new junior marketer – should be able to explain how their efforts are connected to the company’s #1 metric. You’ll be speaking at CMWorld about ways we can look to our competitors in order to improve our content strategies. Evaluating your competitive content landscape allows you to understand the context for your content marketing so that you can use your time wisely and create content that will stand out and succeed in a crowded content market. This can allow your content to go a lot farther with less effort.
Upon opening up one of those giant boxes of Crayolas, you’ll find 120 crayons inside. While some of the colors are similar, none are the same — if they were, what would be the purpose of including both in the pack?
Marketing intelligence firm Crayon encourages companies to think in these same terms, with a mission to “help businesses track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside their four walls.” In order to ensure your organization remains unique and indispensable, you need to keep a close eye on all the other players in your field and maintain clear points of differentiation.
In her session at Content Marketing World in September, Crayon’s CMO Ellie Mirman will cover the fundamentals of competitive analysis and how it should shape our content strategies. This intel, she posits, will not only help eliminate redundancies and overlap with others, but will also illuminate opportunities to break new ground and offer distinct value.
We wanted to learn more about Ellie’s views on efficient operations, agile marketing, and finding the ‘white space’ just waiting to be colored in. She was kind enough to answer our pressing questions.
What does your role as Chief Marketing Manager at Crayon entail? What are your main areas of focus and key priorities?
As CMO, I lead the marketing function at Crayon, spanning everything from content to demand gen to product marketing to branding and everything in between. A lot of what we do involves educating the market about how to tackle competitive and market intelligence.
What are the biggest mistakes you tend to see in marketing program launches? How can they be avoided?
The biggest mistake I see is not thinking through the goals of the launch itself. Each type of program launch – from an ebook campaign to a customer advocacy program – can serve a variety of goals. Without articulating the aim of each program, you lose the needed direction for the campaign and won’t know if the campaign was a success.
Each program rollout should include a planning phase where the goals, action items, and milestones, are set out at the start. Then, at the end of the campaign (or at least a pre-defined checkpoint), there should be a recap phase where the team reports on the results and does a retrospective on what worked and what didn’t. This helps marketing teams be a lot more intentional about their efforts and make the best use of their most important resource: time.
In which ways can marketers better align their efforts with bottom-line metrics and measurement? What are the easiest and quickest wins?
I’m a big proponent of transparency across the business around the company’s key priorities and metrics. Marketers – and every other employee – should be in tune with these priorities and metrics so that they can align their efforts with what matters to the business. Too often, I see teams get stuck in the weeds of engagement rates or…
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