I just read three interesting marketing-related articles at www.strategy-business.com: 

The interesting thing that I got out of these articles was how aligning marketing activities to the agenda of driving growth for a company seems to have been a foreign concept to marketers in the past. However, now that online advertising makes it easier to see the relationship between advertising (costs) and sales (revenue), it is becoming easier to track Return on Investment (ROI) per marketing activity.

In addition to the above ROI comment, some of the suggestions the articles gives to be a great leader in marketing are:

  1. Use technology (think Service Oriented Architecture to integrate systems and data) to merge disparate systems/data and apply analytical skills to help determine new product positioning, channel strategy, pricing, and communications for your products
  2. Get some cross-functional expertise so sales and financial efforts in your company can benefit from the insight gained
  3. Provide strategic leadership for the business based on where products or a marketspace can go
  4. Bring customer awareness to the rest of the company, which is enhanced by all of the data gathered online
  5. Merge "above the line" advertising (TV, Radio, Print, and Online) with "below the line" marketing (promotions, sponsorships, events, public relations)
  6. Leverage the digital world (web, mobile, podcasting, etc.) and merge it with customer preferences already tracked in your CRM system to create entertaining and branded experiences or information for your customers.
  7. Use this personal relationship via your branded entertainment/information to create loyal customers.
  8. Continue to merge commercial entrepreneurship, technological competence, strategy skills, and consumer sensitivity and become an architect of your company's growth agenda (hopefully your company has one!).