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7 Nurture Programs You Need To Have

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Nurture ProgramsDespite the capabilities of modern marketing automation platforms, many B2B marketers still approach nurture with a short term mindset.

Your primary goal is to increase engagement, raise lead scores and pass a more active “lead” to sales as quickly as possible.

The result is often a series of short term “nurture” programs combined with campaign blasts sent sporadically to a huge list of inactive contacts.

Yes, it may be an improvement from when all you had were batch email blasts, but you can and should do so much more today. [Read more…]

Why Good Content Delivers Bad Leads

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Your Leads Are Crap!! [Man yelling at cowering marketer]Congratulations, you are a B2B content marketer.

You have created a great industry blog and library of premium content. You promote your content through search, social, emails, newsletters, even banners.

You are seeing strong traffic, engagement with your blog content and a steady increase in registrations for your premium content.

There’s just one little problem: the leads are crap. [Read more…]

Does B2B Content Marketing Really Help Buyers Buy?

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In B2B marketing organizations, content marketing aims to help buyers buy. Right?

Content marketing provides the information buyers need to determine the type of solution they need, develop internal support for a change, create a short list of providers and address objections, all while positioning your company as a trusted resource.

Wow, that sounds amazing. But is your content really what stood between a prospect and a purchase?

I had the opportunity to speak with Sharon Drew Morgen a couple times recently. Each time I came away thinking we can do so much more. [Read more…]

3 Ways to Fuel Your Marketing Automation Cycle with Data

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Marketing automation is built on the premise of delivering the right communication to the right person at the right time.

Successfully delivering the right content at the right time hinges on data. Data that is provided explicitly by prospects, and more importantly, data that is provided implicitly through their engagement with your communications and content.

This is the virtuous cycle behind the communications in marketing automation. When any element of the cycle falls short, the entire cycle breaks. [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…]