“ Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” — Seth Godin

Content marketing works. No, it’s not just the flavor of the month. It’s also what I’ve experienced first hand at Apptio. Content marketing has driven an ever-increasing percentage of leads, pipeline, and wins for us over the last two years.

We’re now taking the next step in scaling our content marketing investments: Building out a Global Demand Center.

In this post I look at why and how we’re making this happen.

What is a Global Demand Center?

The Global Demand Center is a marketing team that’s responsible for campaign strategy, program architecture, digital marketing…

1. When Marketing is Strategy: This article from the Harvard Business Review Magazine theorizes that the center of gravity for competitive differentiation has shifted from means of production (upstream) to marketing (downstream). A fascinating and provocative read.
2. Digital Marketing and Analytics: Two Ladders for Magnificent Success: A great blog post from Avinash Kaushik about the importance of evolutionary growth in both digital marketing and analytics, and how they relate to each other. Must read.
3. 5 Lessons in Effective Copywriting for Nurturing Emails from Ogilvy & Bird: Lessons in writing great nurture emails from the master, David Ogilvy.

Some years ago when I was on the Microsoft Visio team, the General Manager there once started a team meeting by presenting his operating principles. These principles gave an insightful glimpse into this leader’s values and also how he had come to rise so quickly through the ranks at Microsoft.

As I build a content marketing team at Apptio, I’ve been thinking about my own operating principles. The 7 principles listed below are what I shared with my team a few weeks ago, and I figured I’d share them with you as well:

1. Get things done. Practice the art of…