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Content Marketing is a Juggling Act

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Is your strategy and organization up to the task?

Content marketers need to deliver results in an environment that is constantly changing.

Faced with these constant changes, content marketing can either devolve into a series of reactionary random acts of marketing or take the changes in stride.

The difference comes down to your content marketing strategy and your marketing organization. A solid content marketing strategy lets you keep your eye on the ball and a solid marketing organization lets you keep all of the balls in the air, smoothly juggling the changes happening around you. [Read more…]

7 Steps to Find Your Content Marketing Sweet Spot

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The Content Marketing Sweet SpotYou are ready to take your content marketing to the next level. Until now, you have been producing mostly mid and late stage content.

Your content supports the sales process and effectively communicates the value of your solutions to prospects.

Now, you are ready to use content marketing to raise the profile of your company overall.

Content that drives overall visibility for your company is different. To broadly improve your visibility within your market, you need to focus [Read more…]

B2B Marketers Are Turning Away Prospects

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Staircase and Way Out SignAccording to recent research from IDC, lead generation is a top B2B marketing priority, and in the next four years Sirius Decisions predicts 75% of all registrations will be captured online. (Sirius Decisions actually labels this as inbound marketing, however I use a more limited definition of inbound marketing.)

One of the primary ways B2B marketers capture leads online is asking prospects to register for content. Doing it effectively requires creating content prospects want in a format that is easy to engage with while capturing the information you need.

However, based on recent research from DemandGen Report, marketers are turning away prospects [Read more…]

Why Your Content Sucks!

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If it doesn’t benefit us, entertain us, educate us, solve our problems or advance our causes, we don’t want it. If we find something better, we switch.

Today, our mantra is “What’s in it for me?”

All too often, the answer is “Not much.”

We are flooded with content. This blog post will be one of millions published today. Blog posts and other content are clamoring for attention with [Read more…]

Three Requirements as Marketers, Agencies and Publishers Converge

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In April Crain Communications, the publisher of BtoB Magazine, announced the creation of CrainsSocial, a new marketing services group offering social media solutions to marketers. This is one more introduction in a long line of changes that are blurring traditional roles in the marketing landscape.

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New Research: B2B Content is a Dead End

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Dead End, DeKalb, ILAccording to research from the Content Marketing Institute, B2B marketers are now spending 26% of their budget on content marketing.

What happens when someone downloads or accesses some of the highest value and most in-depth content marketers are offering? Today, many large B2B marketers are putting a stop to the conversation and cutting off prospects ability to continue finding additional information when potential customers get to their best content. [Read more…]

Why You Should Stop Mapping Content Formats to the Buyer’s Journey

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I have had it with “research” about the content formats B2B buyers prefer at each stage of the buyers journey. Multiple B2B publishers are pedaling this misinformation and as B2B marketers struggle with content marketing, it is diverting their focus.

Here is one example from TechTarget:
Content formats mapped to buying stages

eBooks are earlier than white papers which are earlier than virtual trade shows? Yeah, right. Instead of focusing on content formats by stage, marketers need to [Read more…]

Inbound Marketing for B2B: Discussion Recap

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Join #B2BChat on Twitter every Thursday at 8:00 PM EasternInbound marketing is a clear trend in B2B marketing. In fact, Sirius Decisions, a research firm focused on B2B markets, predicts more than 75% of leads will be sourced through inbound channels by 2015.

What are the key challenges to B2B inbound marketing, how does inbound marketing change the type of content B2B marketers need to create and what tools are critical to inbound marketing?

These are some of the questions discussed during #B2Bchat on March 15, and I had the privilege of moderating. Here are my key takeaways from the discussion. [Read more…]

5 Key Elements of Modern Inbound Marketing

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Last week, I made the case for a new definition of inbound marketing, or as Michael Brenner (@brennermichael) called it in the comments, a “call to arms” for inbound marketers.

The new inbound marketing definition: Be found through the recommendation of others and delight everyone that finds you.

As inbound marketing evolves, the components also need to change. Traditionally, inbound marketing has been functionally defined as the combination of search, social and content. However, these components are not enough for inbound marketers to excel in today’s environment.

This is what modern inbound marketing looks like: [Read more…]