“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one” – Haley Marie Craig, 7 Phrases You’ve Been Misquoting

Sometimes, you don’t need to be a specialist – just someone who’s flexible enough to weave between disciplines and bring the strengths of all.

A full stack marketer.

These are marketers who have knowledge and experience of all aspects of marketing, from social media and video to user experience and content. It takes a lot of dedication and consistent learning to become one, and it’s often hard to find someone who has that wide of a spread of knowledge.

So, if you’ve ever wanted to brush up your marketing skills, know what the pros and cons of a full stack marketer are, or wondered why you’d bother to hire a non-specialist in the first place, keep reading this post. I’ll cover all of that, plus give a list of helpful resources which can get you started on the track to gaining that knowledge for yourself.

Let’s get started!

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Have you considered that your marketing process could be broken?

Marketing is the engine of growth driving your business, and making sure this engine is well-oiled and optimized for maximum efficiency goes without saying.

Your marketing plan must be well-organized, robustly structured, and efficient. For this to be true, you need to begin with the process behind the vision and make sure that is working at 110%.

In the absence of a tried and tested process that is fine-tuned to the needs and goals of a particular company, the untamed beast of marketing will waste time, money, and resources, and will fail to deliver any meaningful return.

Why is it, then, that so many businesses leave the marketing process as an afterthought?

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The best techniques and technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t know how to use them. Annoyingly, with it being so new, it’s hard to tell what machine learning marketing use cases there are to base your efforts on.

In other fields, the breakthrough tech is being used in medical diagnoses, spam filtering, fraud detection, translation and more. All you need is some inspiration to get started with your own uses.

That’s why this post exists.

I’ll cover, in detail, the key ways machine learning is affecting marketing, and how it can be used to handle some of your business process automation, provide actionable data insights and predictions, and even win $1 million on Jeopardy.

Before that though, if you don’t know what machine learning is (or want a refresher), check out our other posts on the topic below:

• An Introduction to Machine Learning in Business: Analyzing Your Success
• 6 Useful Applications of AI & Machine Learning in Your Business Processes

Let’s get started.

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Marketing is such a vital part of how we do business. So many of us do marketing-related roles, yet how many of us have really read up on the fundamentals? Not enough.

That’s why we’re going to look at some texts from across the marketing field which can help sure up our knowledge.

From advertising to PR, SEO to content, it’s all related.

As a follow up to our wonderfully received article cataloguing the 45 best sales books, we’ve decided to break down the world of marketing literature for you too!

We have some old classics like Scientific Advertising, some newer classics like Blue Ocean Strategy, and a number of this year’s must reads!

Some of these books will put you inside the mind of the customer. Others will transport you into the realm of strategy. Many of the books listed will go super specific into technical approaches.

There’s something for everyone!

Check out our Process Street list of the 31 best marketing books below!

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The following is a guest post from Reuben Yonatan. Reuben is the founder of GetVoIP – an industry-leading business comparison guide that helps companies understand and choose a VoIP system for their specific needs. Follow him on Twitter, @ReubenYonatan.

We at GetVoIP have gone through a lot to get to the point we’re at today. For those of you who don’t know us, we highlight the top VoIP providers and offer shoppers an alternate way of learning more about each vendor.

However, it’s not that easy to be taken seriously in this hyper-competitive space.

There are plenty of websites people can visit to get advice on business software; they can even just go to a provider page to get reviews. But, many of those websites are too promotional to trust. We pride ourselves on being transparent with our customers and helping providers reach out to as many people as possible. This leaves many of our competitors wondering how we even make money, but that alone says enough about why we’re coming out ahead.

In order to be taken seriously by the providers we cover, we have to show them how committed we are to their products by constantly brainstorming and optimizing every level of our business model.

If we don’t have a solid process, our leads will go to someone else that does.

Here, we’re going to break down three internal changes we have made to our marketing workflow which helped us help providers spread their products and services to even bigger audiences.

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It feels like certain areas of tech are booming at the moment.

Everyone and their nan seem to be incorporating the blockchain into their startup pitches, voice interface devices are sweeping the globe, and chatbots are popping up left right and center.

It feels like part of the rise of chatbots is predicated on the long term potential behind the idea of a smart assistant who can effectively communicate by chat. But the reality of a proper AI assistant is still some distance away.

Nonetheless, chatbots have real world uses already. For some use cases, chatbots are proving to be an effective and affordable alternative to previous practices.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What are chatbots good for?
• How KLM boosted customer interaction 40% with chatbots
• What we do at Process Street with Intercom’s chatbot features
• How to set up a simple chatbot with Chatfuel
• 7 chatbot tools to check out today

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One problem dominates the field when setting out to write a listicle.

They’ve been done to death, and a lot of us are sick of them.

From Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post to Bustle and beyond, thousands of lists are published every year, the majority of which are not exactly high-quality.

People see lists and have been trained to think “clickbait”. That’s what this post will help to avoid and prevent.

Read on to find out:

• What a “listicle” is
• Why they are so popular (to read and write)
• How to plan a listicle in 6 steps
• How to write a listicle in 5 steps

Enough talk – let’s get to it.

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“Why didn’t they see this coming?”

I had just learned of yet another company catastrophically failing to understand their audience. Who thought it would be a good idea to host an AMA after your company was involved in one of the biggest financial scandals in modern history?

Then it hit me. Every team makes silly mistakes. It’s all down to forgetting to ask yourself some basic marketing questions.

While this post was originally going to be reviewing Getting Goosebumps by Bryan Adams and Dave Hazlehurst, the examples and theories they pose in that book (which is well worth a read) are perfect for demonstrating how easy it can be to avoid marketing disasters. All you have to do is keep asking these questions to form a coherent strategy with no nasty surprises.

But enough rambling – it’s time to learn how to avoid marketing disasters!
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The following is a guest post from Forster Perelsztejn. As content marketer, Forster gathers sales data at Prospect.io in order to deliver powerful and insightful advice to salespeople. Check out his Top 10 Cold Email Templates Based on 3,327,652 Emails Sent! and connect with him on LinkedIn.

An essential part of my job at Prospect.io is to help customers craft cold emails that actually get replies. Why is that? Because cold email brings business in!

Yet, you’d be surprised at how many of those emails are poorly written. Most of the ones I get are a cringefest even though they were sent by professional salespeople. For that reason, I feel it’s essential to spread the word about cold email best practices.

Use this 10-point checklist below to optimize your sales emails to make it more likely you’ll get results. After all, only around 1.7% of cold emails get a reply…

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In 2016, Process Street went from using a basic Bootstrap theme to a custom-branded website, complete with a logo change and full aesthetic overhaul. We did it to avoid looking dated, and to make the site consistent with our app.

Like many startups, we focused on building a great product first, and rightfully overlooked the importance of a brand until the time was right.

A brand is the often low on the list of startup priorities. Startups develop in a fast-paced, cutthroat environment and are concerned primarily with attracting early users as beta testers, building disruptive products, and iterating based on feedback. Tech is a mercurial industry; many companies start out with a solution to a problem that could be adopted by everyone from individuals to large corporations.

Over time, by stabbing in the dark and following growth over all, a tech startup could find itself with a brand that doesn’t match its product. That’s something we grappled with in 2016, and it’s something even big tech companies come up against every couple of years.

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