FEATURED ARTICLES
At the top of my list of books-to-read this Fall as you plan for business success in 2025 is “Stop Starvation Marketing” by Christine Slocumb. This is a must-read if you are a B2B solution provider in life sciences, technology, or any space characterized by long sales cycles, high-investment solutions, and complex business relationships. It will change how you think about and do marketing, and the results you achieve by following Chris’ advice will be astounding
Is Your Business Dying Because Your Marketing Is On A Starvation Diet?
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Put Some Icing On Your Marketing (Cake) Plan!
Icing is a big attention-getter when it comes to cakes. Who doesn’t enjoy scanning all those cakes in the bakery showcase? And the icing is often the initial differentiator. Consider the icing to be the paid media part of your marketing plan.
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What Have You Baked Into Your Marketing Plan?
Developing an annual marketing plan is like baking a cake! Once you get all the ingredients in place, including all the resources and budget, and begin executing, it’s hard to undo. Imagine going back to the CFO for more budget because you left out some key ingredients.
TRAILBLAZER INTERVIEWS
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Blazing New Markets With Jennifer Kingsley
Jennifer Kingsley, Chief Commercial Officer at VintaBio, shares the exciting challenges of introducing innovative solutions in the complex world of cell and gene therapies.
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Toyna Chin, Rebranding At The Global Level
My guest, Toyna Chin, Global Marketing Director at Novotech, unpacks and simplifies the complex work of leading a global rebranding strategy.
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Demystifying Data Analytics With Vasudha Khanaparpkar From Grant Thornton In The UAE
Data analytics is one of the fastest evolving tools available to business leaders to help them make better decisions and B2B marketers to understand the complex buyer's journey. Visudha simplifies the complex.
GUEST CONTRIBUTORS
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When creating your customer persona there are two main camps that organizations fall into. Those that have customers and those do not have customers or at least very few. If you fall into the group with customers that is great, but it still does not mean you are finished, in fact it could be the recipe for disaster.
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Business-to-business sales professionals are no strangers to innovation. The last decade has seen a shift to Zoom meetings, the rise of hyperscale data vendors, and modern RevOps. The days of smiling and dialing and wining and dining aren’t over, per se, but things are markedly different. Enter the next disruptor: artificial intelligence and ChatGPT in particular.
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Today it seems that every business is engaged in some sort of content marketing initiative, which means that in addition to pitching products or services via traditional marketing methods, companies also are producing content to help inform, educate and even entertain their audiences. But because there’s some confusion about what content marketing actually is, many businesses aren’t as effective as they could be in their content marketing efforts.
TRAILBLAZER SHORTS
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VintaBio seeks to engage a complex target audience with its content marketing strategy. It does so by including lots of credible data that builds trust with potential clients.
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Jennifer describes their fixed-bed, handheld bioreactor that is at the center of their innovative solutions to developing and manufacturing viral vectors for cell and gene therapies.
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Jennifer Kingsley has spent most of her career on the business development side of the buyer - seller equation. Now she often finds herself in the buyer's seat and shares insights on what really matters.
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Customer-Centered Content Marketing - Part 2
It is important to understand that potential buyers are on a journey to solve problems, not necessarily buy something. If you want to be considered as a solution provider, you must be a helpful participant in their problem-solving journey, the entire journey.
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Customer-Centered Content Marketing Part 1
Here is the problem that many of us have. We define the B2B buyer’s journey in three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. And we define awareness as when a buyer becomes aware of us and our solutions. We then develop content strategies focused on our own products and services which is what buyers seek in the late stages of their journey. We miss the opportunity to build trust with buyers when it is most critical. What we need is a content-marketing strategy that is aligned with the real buyer's journey.
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The Real Buyer's Journey
The single force that has disrupted the way B2B solution providers market and sell is also the most critical to business success, buyers. As buyers discovered and embraced on-demand, digital content to help them solve problems, not make purchasing decisions, they pushed long-held B2B marketing traditions aside, rendering them obsolete.
FYB METHOD
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Life Science Connect, the parent company of Follow Your Buyer, has had a front row seat for the past several decades for the evolutionary transformation of the buyer's journey. Here is what we learned!
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The single force that has disrupted the way B2B solution providers market and sell is also the most critical to business success, buyers. As buyers discovered and embraced on-demand, digital content to help them solve problems, not make purchasing decisions, they pushed long-held B2B marketing traditions aside, rendering them obsolete.
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Here is the problem that many of us have. We define the B2B buyer’s journey in three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. And we define awareness as when a buyer becomes aware of us and our solutions. We then develop content strategies focused on our own products and services which is what buyers seek in the late stages of their journey. We miss the opportunity to build trust with buyers when it is most critical. What we need is a content-marketing strategy that is aligned with the real buyer's journey.
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
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Icing is a big attention-getter when it comes to cakes. Who doesn’t enjoy scanning all those cakes in the bakery showcase? And the icing is often the initial differentiator. Consider the icing to be the paid media part of your marketing plan.
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS & REVIEWS
At the top of my list of books-to-read this Fall as you plan for business success in 2025 is “Stop Starvation Marketing” by Christine Slocumb. This is a must-read if you are a B2B solution provider in life sciences, technology, or any space characterized by long sales cycles, high-investment solutions, and complex business relationships. It will change how you think about and do marketing, and the results you achieve by following Chris’ advice will be astounding
Is Your Business Dying Because Your Marketing Is On A Starvation Diet?