B2B Marketing, Digital Media and Marketing Strategy
Many B2B marketers look to content marketing as a key part of establishing thought leadership. However, companies frequently expect the same content marketing program to capture contacts or leads as well.
The problem is, registration and thought leadership are at odds with each other. Thought leadership requires your point of view to be broadly distributed and recognized across a peer group, where it can drive discussion and shape opinions. [Read more…]
Google makes approximately 500 search algorithm changes a year. Looked at another way, Google averages two algorithm changes every business day. Wow.
Many of these changes, like the well publicized rounds of Google’s Panda updates, are designed to remove ways companies have found to game Google’s search results. So how do you keep up with all the changes Google makes?
Focus on the one thing Google is focused on. [Read more…]
Marketers have a huge blind spot when it comes to nurturing and lead scoring. It does not matter if you have built a sophisticated lead management and nurturing system, driven by content consumption, engagement and response. Your blind spot is there.
The problem is, you only see how people respond to your content and your offers. You only see what is happening on your own properties. Your blind spot is all the time potential prospects spend on competitor sites, on editorial properties, on topical blogs or discussing with peers.
The current trend in digital media is to move online advertising to trading desks, ad exchanges or real time bidding platforms. These platforms provide access to enormous pools of advertising inventory and allow media buyers to cherry pick their exact target audience, based on a wide range of audience data available for targeting.
However, for enterprise B2B marketers, these approaches are not mature enough to broadly support demand generation marketing. The challenges these platforms continue to face are access to sufficient high quality inventory and access to data appropriate for targeting company sizes and roles.
Published market research differs on the relative importance on audience and context, however the research I have seen does not align with the typical B2B marketing audience experience.
The problem: consuming traditional B2B content used for demand generation requires a significant time commitment. Taking the time to dive into a whitepaper or watch a webcast imposes a major time requirement. [Read more…]
“Why do you want my email and phone number again? So your sales consultant can contact me? No thanks, I’ll pass.”
Most B2B marketers are still fixated on capturing registration data, and no wonder. The marketing automation machine lives on a diet of email and your sales process is built on the telephone.
The problem is, your buyer’s process is not built on your email or your phone. According to research, buyers only engage with companies directly during the last 40% of their research process.
When you insist on registration, you are in effect telling prospects:
Content Marketing should provide valuable information to your market at large and to prospects at each stage of the buying process. Ideally, your content is easily discovered, naturally making you and your content a resource.
But how do people find your content? Is it through search and peer recommendations (which are increasingly connected), or will they only find it in their inbox?
Here are the signs [Read more…]
Create a personalized dialogue with each prospect at every point in the sales process!
This sounds like a pitch for marketing automation. While the result is valuable, it is not a dialogue. Here are some of the characteristics of this “dialogue” marketing has created with automation:
Real conversations need to come back into marketing communications. [Read more…]
Thought leadership is a common marketing topic, but unfortunately thought leadership is not a common outcome of marketing. Part of the problem is that thought leadership marketing has lost all notions of actual thought leadership.
Gartner defines thought leadership marketing as “the giving — for free or at a nominal charge — of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.”
The problem is, knowledge of what a product or service can deliver or its differentiation does not establish real thought leadership. [Read more…]
This post was sparked by a spirited, and at times emotional, debate during the #bizforum chat on Twitter yesterday evening. Thanks to @samfiorella for instigating and @chieflemonhead, @MaureenB2B, @PrashSabharwal and @josepf, among others, for a spirited discussion.
B2B buying is complex because the products are complex. Evaluating B2B solutions is hard, and the final decision is not made with absolute knowledge it is the right decision.
I submit as Exhibit A: the numerous regrettable ERP and CRM investments that have been made by large corporations.
In B2B, buyers are incredibly knowledgeable, but they simply cannot be certain. To confidently proceed, they must believe they are making the best decision. At its heart, it is an emotional decision. [Read more…]
If B2B marketing isn’t dead, it is changing very quickly. But the real change isn’t the marketing, it is how marketing has evolved in response to the evolving buyer.
The biggest factor driving the changes in today’s buyers is the accessibility of information technology has enabled. This change has turned demand creation upside down. In the past, your prospect held the budget cards and you held the information cards. Through the sales and negotiation dance, the cards were slowly revealed one at a time, with you and your prospect jockeying for advantage through the entire process. [Read more…]