How We Systematically Overvalue Content Consumption

serial-content-consumersLet’s get right to the point. B2B marketers today are not optimizing programs to reach and engage their best prospects.

Sure, we talk about a buyer journey or about carefully mapping content. But at the end of the day, what are we doing? We are scoring leads high if they consume a lot of content and we are optimizing our program to increase lead scores and content consumption.

Who does that mean we are really optimizing our marketing for? Serial content consumers. [Read more…]

How to Solve the Marketing Skills Gap In Your Company

Training-Marketers

A few weeks ago I was talking to Maureen Blandford about marketers, marketing technology, and the need for all of us to move faster.

Our conversation turned to skill sets and the current digital and technology skills gap in marketing today. A thought I had in that conversation has been gnawing at me since: “Today’s marketers don’t have the aptitude for marketing technology.” [Read more…]

6 Ways B2B Marketers Are Falling Short Today

Marketing Roller CoasterAs I came back from the B2B Marketing Innovation Summit, put on by Demandbase, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we aren’t doing enough. That I’m not doing enough.

Sure, marketing is changing faster today than it did yesterday. Blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter how fast marketing is changing! The real question is “how are you changing?”

Here are six areas that struck me. No, they aren’t new. But they are places many B2B marketers, including myself, should be doing so much more. [Read more…]

Top 3 Media Buying Mistakes B2B Marketers Make

Wrong Way -- B2B Marketing Mistakes

Sometimes the best advice and perspective doesn’t come from the public figures we hear at conferences or see quoted in publications. It comes from the people who are hands on, doing the work in a wide range of situations.

Toby HudsonToby is one of those guys. You probably don’t know Toby, but maybe you should. He recently joined Business Insider as the Sales Director for the Southeast, after a number of years with CBSi, parent to B2B technology focused properties ZDNet and TechRepublic (among others). Like many of the people I work with at publishers, Toby works on more programs in a month than many of us work on in a year and that position gives him first hand insight into what is working, and what isn’t, at scale. [Read more…]

One change that dramatically improved B2B marketing results

Slice of a TractorYou can’t rely on your own data.

Your prospects spend the vast majority of their time doing everything except opening your emails, visiting your site or viewing your content.

Despite the magic of marketing automation and the ability to collect information on every mouse movement on every page of our sites, we only get a tiny window into the lives of our prospects. And that tiny window can turn out to be very misleading. [Read more…]

What Online Marketers Know About You

Rubble
According to many in the digital advertising industry, at some point in the future digital marketing will be so targeted that consumers will want to see the ads. Advertising will tell us about the products we want to know about, give us a direct path to the content we need and provide access to discounts on products we want.

How will marketers do this? Data, of course. Information marketers can use to determine what you are interested in. [Read more…]

Stop Being a Transactional Content Marketer

cash register
Free white paper! Free webinar! Free eBook!

We’ve all seen the promotional emails, banner ads and Tweets. It’s Free! It’s Free!

The fine print: we will send you weekly emails with more content you didn’t ask for. We will also give your information to our green sales team and tell them to go close the deal now Now NOW as part of our commitment to make it as easy as possible for you to buy. [Read more…]