Customer obsessed
Apple has become the largest and most profitable company of all time by relentlessly focusing on their customer over all else. John Gruber laments that in the long-term their customer-focussed values may be threatened by their shareholder's focus on short term profitability. If Wall St's influence wins out it will be a loss for customers, Apple and ultimately shareholders.
Intel on how they have embraced iterative, in-market experimentation practices in order to develop innovative new products that align with customer needs.
The next time someone asks you who a millennial is, show them this helpful chart from investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Data-driven
In order to demonstrate business value from your content marketing you need to go beyond simple measures such as page views and shares. An excellent approach is creating a PR scorecard for your earned media derived from your content. The scorecard combines prominence, visibility and quality metrics.
LinkedIn discusses the need to build their own end-to-end A/B testing platform, XLNT.
Google analyzed 50 Fortune 100 brands on YouTube and measured the impact against "brand interest." They found that 65% of the YouTube campaigns analyzed drove a 13% average lift in unaided brand searches.
Channels
Ben Thompson draws similarities between the Verizon purchase of AOL for for $4.4 billion and Facebook's instant articles to inform the future of digital advertising. Thompson posits that the key to future advertising will be large-scale networks like Facebook and Verison tracking individuals across an omni-channel purchase funnel.
A simple check-list of 25 procedures that will optimise your site's SEO efforts for 2015.
Marketing technology
CMS Wire published a white paper on the top trends in web CMS for 2015. Amongst their list is modularised solutions that can adapt to a companies' changing work-flows, personalisation that integrates with content an Digital Asset Management (DAM), the shift towards branded communities and omni-channel content distribution.
Trends
The Havard Business review outline four leadership styles of the best CMOS. The list includes being customer focused, running marketing as a closed-loop discipline, being social and being visionary.
A gigantic and extremely helpful list of pricing strategies. Each strategy is founded in pricing psychology principals.
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