FEATURED ARTICLES
Sales and marketing dysfunction can boil down to not having understanding or empathy for each other’s job.
- How To Get SMEs To Play For Your Content Marketing Team
- What Should We Write About? Advice For Choosing The Best Content Marketing Topics
- Are You Measuring What Matters?
- Are You Managing Your Technology Or Is Your Technology Managing You?
- Applying B2C Predictive Analytics To B2B Marketing
- Sales Follow-Up: Where B2B Content Marketing Goes Wrong
- What To Do With Those Content Marketing Leads
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Marketing Do's & Don'ts When B2B Trade Shows Return
A global pandemic meant B2B marketers couldn't spend money on in-person events for many months, but will they continue to think outside the box when the temptation returns?
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The Risk Of Confusing Thought Leadership With Selling
B2B buyers engage with – and find immense value in –thought leadership content, but only when marketers focus on helping during the early stages of the buyer’s journey (not on selling).
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Navigating To Better Results With Your Content Marketing Strategy
A lot of B2B companies who have been executing content marketing strategies for a while tell me they feel a little lost and they’re not sure where to go.
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The Best Content Marketing Can’t Outperform Bad Sales Follow-up
A perfectly executed content marketing strategy won’t lead to more revenue unless sales follow-up is existent, effective, and consistent.
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Content Marketing: Four Essential Elements
There are four things every B2B marketer needs to know and understand to become a successful content marketer. Learn and master these first.
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Who Is Your Marketing Campaign Serving?
Your buyers purchase what they need to purchase when they need to purchase it (not when you decide to run a campaign). So why do B2B marketers structure almost everything they do around campaigns.
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The Value Of Audience Access
Being a successful B2B marketer hinges on getting your content in front of an engaged audience of your buyers.
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Write For Someone, Not For Everyone
Developing accurate buyer personas and tailoring content might sound easy, but it’s arguably the most difficult – and the most important – part of the content marketing process.
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The Power Of "What If" Questions
Questions come in many forms! They can be multiple choice, open and closed ended, leading and mis-leading, funneling, and probing. My favorite are “what if” questions!
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Think Like A Publisher
If you are part of a B2B organization that delivers complex solutions that require a long-sales cycle, stop spray-and-pray and think like a publisher.
GUEST CONTRIBUTORS
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When you create content for your business, do you stop to think what the goal is? Many people think they need to create content for their business, yet they don’t know why. They are busy drafting a blog post or thoughts for social media, but they lack a plan. Or, if they have a plan, they don’t have a clear objective around what they want their content to accomplish.
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The digital age has completely changed the game in business, data, and the world. Information, knowledge, and data are now so accessible, the biggest challenge is no longer finding it, but keeping data organized and ensuring the knowledge is credible and information is sound.
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Marketing is about managing priorities—there are so many things you could be doing, so it's crucial to focus on what matters most. Your marketing operations should be like a Swiss Army Knife: ready to employ whatever tool or strategy matters most at any given time, and then quickly pivoting to what's next.
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The global pandemic has seen virtual events quickly become the norm for eventgoers to safely connect with other experts in their field. This online shift has required some adjustment for event organizers and participants alike, and as we reach the two-year mark from the beginning of the pandemic, it's clear that virtual events are not going away. One global survey found that 94% of organizers are planning for virtual events in 2022.
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At the start of 2020, Google announced the end of third-party cookies support in the Chrome web browser. Since then, the date has been pushed back to the end of 2023. But that doesn't mean marketers shouldn't be thinking about this now. For brands and the advertising industry, the magnitude of this change is huge.

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What Do B2B Buyers Want?
What do B2B buyers want? The obvious answer, they want to buy something. Not so fast! It depends on where they are in their buyer’s journey. And for most of that journey, they don’t want to buy anything?
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Generating Big Business With Ease
At the same time the transportation industry was experiencing a record number of bankruptcies, Ease Logistics grew their revenue to more than two-times greater than their projections. How did they do it? According to Alisa Alvich, Marketing Manager at Ease, they delivered and communicated innovative solutions that go beyond their core transportation service, not only to their customers but also their community. She refers to it as new age marketing.
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Controlling Your Destiny: One B2B Company’s Story Of Continuous Improvement And Digital Transformation
Studies seeking to reveal what’s on the minds of business leaders nearly always include a large helping of digital transformation. Businesses of all sizes, types, and in all markets are undergoing digital transformations. Let’s face it, the entire world is transforming digitally.
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How One Small Marketing Operation Does Big Things By Asking “What If” Questions
Like many of us, Janette Buechler, Director of Sales and Marketing Communication at Pharmatech Associates, a USP Company, was encouraged to use her imagination during her childhood, but perhaps with a little twist. Janette recalls playing a game with her grandmother called What If. They would propose what if questions to each other to stir their imaginations.
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There Must Be A Better Way!
Hayato Nakamura recalls the excitement he experienced when he reported for his first job out of college with a Fortune 500 company. His onboarding consisted of being walked to an office cubicle containing only a desk and a phone. He was handed a printed lead list and instructed to begin smiling and dialing. It wasn't long before his bliss melted away and the grind set it in. There must be a better way, he thought. Good news, there is!
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Thought For The Week—What’s Your Favorite Flavor Of Social Media?
When it comes to your company’s social media presence, it’s like walking into a Baskin Robbins, the choices are numerous, they offer samples, and they’re all delicious. We happily agree to a demo and before we know it, someone is asking us if we’d like those two scoops of LinkedIn Premium in a cup or cone?
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Outperforming The Competition With An Underdog Attitude
We love underdogs. Remember when the US hockey team earned a gold medal with an astonishing defeat of the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics? Or how about the perennial underdogs, AFC Richmond, coached by our favorite uber-optimist Ted Lasso.
TWO MINUTE TIPS
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Red Rocks Amphitheatre is an architectural wonder. And it was built mostly by hand during the Great Depression. Amazing things can be accomplished during times of difficulty.
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In the early stages of our buyer’s journey for technology solutions, we’re learning about the problems it can solve, and we begin forming our expectations around our own problems. But it is easy to lose track of our initial outcomes on the way to making a buying decision.
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Building a lead follow-up process around the principle of speed alone is a big waste of time and money.
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Have you ever considered the questions your buyer has for you? Not the FAQs, but the real questions!
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I recently purchased a new mountain bike from REI, a US-based outdoor gear company that knows how to consistently deliver a great customer experience. They do so by meeting the buyer where they are and helpfully guiding them along their journey.
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Questions come in many forms! They can be multiple choice, open and closed ended, leading and mis-leading, funneling, and probing. My favorite are “what if” questions!
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For much of my life I thought innovation was reserved for inventors and creative types who turned their own imaginings into useful things. Then Steve Jobs transformed it into a business model by innovating around the customer experience.
NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE
- 05.25.22 -- What do B2B buyers want?
- 05.23.22 -- Thought for the Week-A Lesson from Red Rocks Amphitheatre
- 05.18.22 -- Creating Your Own B2B Predictive Revenue Model
- 05.16.22 -- Thought for the Week-Are you managing your tech or is your tech managing you?
- 05.11.22 -- So You're Thinking of Working with an Agency
ENGAGEMENT ENGINE
A framework to fueling sustained growth by linking marketing with market opportunity via long-term, strategic thinking. This deep-thinking exercise will guide and refine your content marketing plan. Download the Engagement Engine worksheets today and get started.