You are here: Home / Archives for B2B marketing

Is Marketing Strategy Out of Favor?

By 4 Comments

wooden wagon wheelDoes this sound familiar? “We know our budget doesn’t let us do this right, but we need to do what we can.” No wonder marketing doesn’t have respect in so many organizations! You can’t meet your goal, so you “do what you can”? For any other group in your company, this would be completely unacceptable. For marketing in many organizations, it is almost expected.

The result too often is a series of random acts of marketing. One marketing activity that makes sense on the surface, but without complementary components, simply doesn’t deliver what it could. A single solitary activity (or even two or three) that do not surround the audience, that do not deliver and reinforce your message, that are not part of a larger cohesive story, are just random acts of marketing. [Read more…]

Five Reasons Lead Generation Is On Its Last Legs

By 21 Comments

A quick definition. Lead generation, for purposes of this post, is collecting registration information for content, in order to build a marketing database or deliver leads to telemarketing and then on to sales.

Delivering leads for sales drives today’s B2B marketing organization. According to a study from Fusion B2B on 2011 B2B marketing priorities, lead generation is the single top priority of B2B marketers, at 26%. By comparison, awareness only captures 7%, near the end of the list. B2B marketing is all about lead generation.

But lead generation is breaking, and if your marketing relies heavily on lead generation, it will slowly break too. Here are the five things breaking lead generation today.

[Read more…]

Stop Advertising and Give Them Content! [The Numbers Prove It]

By 4 Comments

We all want to get more than we give, it is simply human nature. We don’t overpay at Walmart out of the goodness of our hearts. Likewise, we don’t pay attention to advertising that doesn’t give us something of value in return, either discounts, entertainment or information.

I could launch from here into the value of developing personas to ensure advertising is delivering value. And it is true, understanding your audience is critical. But instead, below are real results comparing an ad unit to other elements of the page.

[Read more…]

Has Your Passion Been Lost In Your Marketing Process?

By Leave a Comment

Tomatoes in Seed Starting AreaI had not spoken to Lisa in a year, and only a handful of times ever. So imagine my surprise when Lisa greeted me and then said “you grow Momotaro tomatoes, right?”

Wow, that is making a connection. That is what relationship marketing should be about. Connecting on a common interest and common passion. That passion is what B2B marketing is missing. As personal relationships in your business are replaced by machine-personalized communications, your passion has been lost.

Lisa, who runs Our Little Farm and Nursery, a small local business that sells, among other things, vegetable starts, immediately found something we have in common, and she is passionate about it. In the spring, she grows more than 100 tomato varieties alone for sale as starts at their small farm and local farmers markets. Her passion is clearly reflected in what she does.

In B2B marketing, you build relationships around [Read more…]

Selling your Lead Generation Content

By 4 Comments

Fan of cashYou have committed to content marketing, you have invested in creating content, and your website has turned into a veritable content hub. At every turn, you offer related content to entice a registration and get someone to opt in to to your drip and nurture program. You have enough traffic, but you need more registrations to fuel your nurture program.

What you really need is a new mindset. Your content is not free. You are selling it for contact information.

[Read more…]

Do You Need to Stop Measuring Marketing?

By 2 Comments

Measure - 191/365

Measurement Love

I’m a bit of a nut for measurement. In fact, I spent the first eight years of my career focused on improving and applying digital marketing measurement.

I believe everything needs to be measured. But just maybe, we should stop measuring for a moment. Measurement has gone too far, expectations of measurement are too great, and measurement has clouded our judgement instead of informing it.

These days, all to often measurement has become the purpose, not a tool. One thing I learned in those first eight years [Read more…]

That’s John Doe to You

By 3 Comments

When marketers ask for information, we lie. In fact, an older Knowledge Storm survey published by Marketing Sherpa showed only 38% consistently provide accurate phone numbers and nearly half don’t even provide an accurate company name. We lie for a reason, and if marketers want us to stop lying on registration forms, they need to give us reasons to stop.

Here are a few of the reasons people have shared with me recently when asked why they lie on registration forms:

  • I register for information, but get a barrage of emails and phone calls.
  • Most of the content is useless, I’m not giving up my information for that.
  • I don’t want to be contacted.
  • Why would I give them my real information?

Marketers are facing an uphill battle. Many objections to registering are about what happens after we register, before we know what an individual marketer will do with the information we provide. Marketers have some marketing to do, they need to change our behavior, starting by changing our perception.

For marketers that embrace putting the audience first, the solution is easy. [Read more…]