The Digital Transformation of McGraw-Hill’s Textbook Business

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Chris Marjara, the CMO of McGraw-Hill Education. McGraw-Hill Education has been publishing print textbooks for 125 years. Today, the company provides e-learning digital technology solutions to educators. Chris, who has spent 20 years marketing software solutions, was hired by McGraw-Hill to lead the marketing team through this business model transformation. With 5,000 employees in 44 countries, this is no easy task.

In our first segment, we dive straight into one of the bigger challenges of the task Chris faced: the overall marketing budget and how budget planning works with a job this big. Chris outlines how to secure budget for new marketing initiatives from skeptical executives and, in turn, how to generate a return on the marketing initiatives quickly.

Next, Chris discusses how to leverage analytics to accurately measure the effectiveness of the marketing budget and show the value your CMO needs to see to continue funding your marketing initiatives. We also take a look at how to detect poor performing tactics to reallocate the budget toward stronger performing tactics.

In our last segment, we recap our discussion and send our listeners off with immediate tactics they can apply to their company’s marketing budget strategy.