What is in your marketing plan? I would guess that you have goals, activities, and dates. These are the basic elements of any marketing roadmap. You create a visualization of your marketing strategy, the work required to achieve it, and when you plan to tackle it. Because it organizes all this information in one place, the roadmap is an incredibly useful tool to clarify and communicate the team’s direction.

Increase conversions. Decrease acquisition cost. This is the constant push-pull for marketing teams. How do you grow the number of people who engage with your ads, while simultaneously lowering the money you spend to do so? And how do you optimize to ensure those folks turn into real paying customers? These are not easy questions. And the problem is that you are too busy buried in the day-to-day tactical work to deeply ponder the answers.

Grab some candles and put on your party hat. There is a birthday to celebrate. The banner ad turns 25 this year — the first online ad went live on hotwired.com in 1994. The click-through rate was an astonishing 44 percent. (Yep, you read that right.) I am sure that most digital marketers today would cry tears of joy to hit even half that number now. 

Marketing teams are falling in love. The object of affection? Agile workflows. A recent study found that 37 percent of marketers have already implemented some form of the methodology. And I can see the appeal. Agile marketing encourages rapid iteration and constant improvement. It is especially attractive to content teams since these folks are continually under pressure to publish, publish, publish.

Personas. Buyer journey. Omni-channel strategy. If you work in marketing, you have likely heard these buzzwords in the last few years. And you most definitely sat through a few conference presenters droning on about the importance of creating “360 marketing campaigns.” But the chatter has died down. Not because these concepts are no longer important, but because most forward-looking teams are implementing integrated marketing into their everyday work.

I always have a stack of “to-read” books on my nightstand. Recently, I finished a biography of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. No matter what you think of the company today, it was amazing to learn how Walton transformed a small-town dime store into a multinational behemoth. This story was full of wisdom about promoting products, connecting with customers, and building a lasting brand — lessons that are relevant to anyone in marketing today.