9 Marketing Words That Have Lost Their Meaning

Thought Leadership Marketing ComicThe following 9 terms are so overused or misused in B2B marketing that they have lost nearly all meaning. If you are using these terms today, it is time to stop and explain what you really mean.

Otherwise, we may hear you, but we will think you mean something completely different. [Read more…]

Just Say No to Marketing Advice

All Marketing Advice Should Include a Disclaimer

Your strategy is your direction; it should never be prescriptive. The strategy you develop should be unique to your business, an outgrowth of the challenge or opportunity you are facing and the environment surrounding your target audience.

The problem is, marketing advice is prescriptive. It may sound important and be delivered with authority, but it is still prescriptive. Here are examples of marketing advice I have recently come across (or even written): [Read more…]

Remove the Barriers to Strategic Planning in B2B Marketing

As B2B marketers enter the 2012 strategic planning season and begin shaping executional plans, it is important that we get it right. The goal is to create a strategy that survives the full year (and beyond) and gives you a framework for more tactical planning, execution and optimization.

Today, many companies have replaced strategic planning with a set of goals and tactics, without a formalized marketing strategy. [Read more…]

When Measurement Misleads: A Lesson From Triberr’s Downtime

I’ve have been using Triberr for about two months. Last week, Triberr was down for upgrades. All of a sudden, my posts, normally shared by 25 to 30 tribe members, didn’t have any automated support.

What’s Triberr? It’s a platform for forming tribes of bloggers that support each other by tweeting the posts of other tribe members.

Over the last month, the traffic here from Triberr has steadily increased. I was hooked on the numbers and started to see the increasing traffic numbers as success. But it wasn’t my success, it was Pam Moore’s and Michael Brenner’s success. I was simply fortunate to have been invited into their tribes.

Suddenly, despite the warnings I give others, it happened to me. I was focused on the metrics and forgot why I started blogging. I let measurement trump purpose. [Read more…]