The Best Marketing Advice We Heard This Year

By and large, marketers are really sharp folks, known for their keen abilities to keep up with trends and articulate powerful ideas. These attributes make leaders from this field indispensable sources of insight in a fast-changing business environment.

As a host of Live with Marketers, LinkedIn’s award-winning virtual talk show, I have the privilege of conversing with many of these insightful and inspiring leaders on a regular basis, as we unpack key topics and offer guidance for fellow practitioners.

We’ve been producing new episodes each month, and they’re all available on-demand. So if you missed out on any installments of Live with Marketers in 2021 and want to catch up, here’s your chance. We’ve compiled some of our favorite sound bytes of the year in the highlight reel below:

Keep scrolling for a rundown of every episode from January through October, along with standout quotes and tidbits that stuck with us.

Live with Marketers in 2021: Top Advice from Experts and Influencers

January: Cashing in on Creativity

In this episode, Tyrona Heath was joined by fellow B2B Institute leaders Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg for a data-driven exploration on the impact of powerful creative, which can help businesses generate 10-20X more sales. 

“Performance marketers are speaking like CFOs and they're getting bigger and bigger budgets. Brand marketers don't sound like CFOs. Brand marketers sound more like astrologists. So we're all talking about brand purpose, brand personalities, looks and feels, voice and tones ... You need like an MBA from Hogwarts just to understand what brand marketers are saying, let alone how their work contributes to the bottom line.” - Peter Weinberg

February: Full Funnel Marketing Myth

In this episode, I was joined by data scientist Christopher Penn and Marketing VP Kathleen Booth to collectively dispel some of the most pervasive and problematic myths about the modern marketing funnel. 

"Performance marketing is what you do after you establish the relationship. Okay, we have a relationship, I've given you value, can I ask you for something in return. It's not just something where you can say, ‘Hey, let's get married!’ That typically doesn't end well." — Christopher Penn

"In my experience, across multiple companies, if you just have a paid campaign aimed at the bottom of the funnel — meaning convert for a demo, opt in for a free trial, set up a call with our sales team — if that's all your paid ads are promoting, you're not going to have a successful strategy. It isn't going to work." — Kathleen Booth

March: The Business of Executive Thought Leadership

More than half of professionals (56%) say that a business executive’s presence on social media positively influences their purchase decision, while fully two-thirds say they are more likely to recommend a company or brand if they followed a company executive on social media. Clearly, this is an important area of focus for modern business leaders. I chatted with TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden and my content colleague at LinkedIn Amber Naslund for a practical discussion around executive thought leadership, including examples and measurement approaches.

"B2B being pushed to digital-first has really created a lot of competition for time and space. To stand out requires more than just producing useful information, because there's just so much of it out there ... People don't necessarily trust or believe brands, but they do believe and trust people. To put faces on these faceless organizations, thought leadership can be really instrumental at creating respected voices that you can actually connect with." — Lee Odden

"Sometimes thought leadership organizationally is owned by a brand team, or even a corporate reputation or PR or comms team. And then there's the demand and paid media side of the house that sits very separately. Realistically, those teams need to come together and have conversations about this, because I look at thought leadership as a layer that underpins all of those things." — Amber Naslund

April: The Scientific Laws of Growth in Marketing

Business growth is not random. It is governed by an immutable set of rules and guiding forces. By understanding them, marketing leaders will be better positioned to use them advantageously. In this episode, Tyrona was once again joined by Jon and Peter for an analysis of three scientific laws of growth in marketing:

• "The Majority Out-Market Law" and why to prioritize "out-market" buyers who pay future cash flows
• "The Mental Availability Law" and why 99.9% of companies have a brand awareness problem
• "The Double Jeopardy Law" and why customer loyalty is largely a myth

“A lot of the research into churn makes it clear that churn is a natural process that is out of your control. It might mean someone lost their budget, or the product was bad. Those are things that marketers cannot control. Marketers can control customer acquisition, so they should focus on that.” — Jon Lombardo

May: Building Your Startup Brand

It’s a popular time to be an entrepreneur. The number of people starting businesses surged to a 13-year high in 2020. In light of this trend, we invited Obility’s Danielle Hickey-Duhon and Weave HQ’s Felix Baca onto the show to discuss the building blocks of B2B success for young companies, and how to navigate the top challenges faced by startups: telling your story, better understanding your prospects, and acquiring customers.

“A great way to get your business kicked off is to be concise and direct, especially if you're a startup in the world. Prospects are given a lot of choices online, and they need your brand to tell a story that they can understand and relate to quickly." — Danielle Hickey-Duhon

“I love really simple tools. I like tools that help me know what's going on with pixels and tracking. I think that's one very important element that you cannot forget as a marketer: you have to be able to track your impact.” — Felix Baca

June: Post-Pandemic Brand Building

How have the fundamentals of brand-building changed in the wake of a massively disruptive global event? As I explored in this episode with LinkedIn’s Callie Schweitzer and Paul Ko, the workforce impact should not be overlooked by marketers. Job-switching intent has spiked and a war for talent is underway. Those who are savvy enough will capitalize on new commercial opportunities.  

"Many people put off any job changes, and any sort of natural attrition we were likely to see over the past year and a half completely subsided, so there's all this pent-up activity. All of this means there's a huge opportunity in terms of brand loyalty, in terms of rethinking employer priorities, and all of this change is driving tumult in the labor market." — Paul Ko

July: The Changing Marketing Jobs Landscape

With the aforementioned tumult in the labor market, we decided to shine a light on the marketing profession specifically, tapping into LinkedIn’s uniquely informative first-party data and insights to get a handle on which marketing jobs are most in-demand, how pros can strategically upskill, and what the future of remote work looks like. Joined by a pair of my brilliant female colleagues in Tequia Burt and Connie Chen, we also tackled the critical matter of gender diversity in the new world of work.

“What we saw pop in our data was that social media and paid search skills are high-priority, and the most in-demand. I feel like because adults are online more than ever, and they're using their social media apps more than ever, it increases the importance for social media marketers to reach them where they're at on those channels." — Connie Chen

“The good news is that we're seeing more women than ever in management and the CMO role. The only problem is that there isn't much racial diversity.” — Tequia Burt

August: Champions of B2B Creativity

Following up on our earlier research around the impact of powerful creative, Tyrona and Co. took a deep dive on how to develop five-star creative, and how to overcome organizational barriers that prevent the necessary investment for creativity to thrive. Marketing execs Dean Aragón and Kirsten Allegri Williams joined to share their expertise and viewpoints.

“Creativity is equivalent to effectiveness. It's not just creativity because we want to be cool or fashionable or trendy or go viral. We want to be effective. And in the end, that's why we're in business, we want to succeed. You cannot succeed without engaging the humans at the heart of your business, and that requires creativity." — Dean Aragón

“We're trying to reach so many people within our buyers, we want to be able to relate to them on a one-to-one level. Really the path forward in order to take the guesswork out of the creative and content strategy is to use a high degree of experimentation. What that means is not just an A/B test once in a while, but a continuous innovation cycle that informs on a regular basis.” — Kirsten Allegri Williams

September: Overcoming Livestream Fatigue

As in-person events disappeared, many brands turned to live-streaming as a way to maintain direct visibility and engagement with their communities. And I mean many: we found that LinkedIn Livestreams increased by 89% since March. In a space that’s becoming much more crowded, how can marketers find new ways to stand out and energize viewers? I teamed up with Stephen A. Hart and Goldie Chan on a search for new best practices.

“This year I've switched at least a portion of my content plan for my personal brand over to livestreams, and that has definitely increased engagement. What I've noticed is when I do my very focused, build-your-brand livestream series, I'm getting these great questions about branding, that then of course I can use to create other content." — Goldie Chan

“If you confuse, you lose. The more defined your audience is, the more clear you're going to be in speaking just to that group of people, while understanding that you're going to repel everybody else. You have to be okay and comfortable with that.” — Stephen A. Hart

October: Equity Everyday

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is good business. But despite the bottom-line benefits being well documented, it seems that progress on this crucial front has been slower than it should be. In this latest episode, Tyrona was joined by Georgetown University Law Center associate professor Jamillah Bowman Williams as well as CMOs Jon Evans and Cristina Jones for a candid conversation around enduring DEI obstacles and how to overcome them in pursuit of an “equity everyday” culture.

“If you're constantly proving your worth based on how much improvement to the bottom line your identity is creating, it can be very dehumanizing.” — Jamillah Bowman Williams

“If you're a content creator, you're a culture creator. If you're trying to reach the broadest audience, why are you parking your multicultural marketing in a corner and not funding it?" — Cristina Jones

Monthly Wisdom for Modern Marketers

It’s been a tremendous pleasure to bring you all of these vital voices and perspectives in marketing, and we look forward to continuing it with new episodes through the end of the year and into 2022.

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