As a journeyman marketing writer, my job is to simplify stuff. It often works like this: I go into a meeting. My client invited a number of others because they really know the product and the market. These are experts. After the handshakes, card swaps and small talk, I go into listen mode. My digital [...]
6 Steps to Turn Your Online Lead Generation Into Lead Nurturing
Sales leads are the cornerstone success point to any business-to-business (B2B) industry. If you know when someone is looking to buy a product or service that you offer, you can contact them directly, pitch your service, and spell out their return on investment to secure the sale. However, too much focus is placed on these [...]
5 Ways to Deliver B2B Marketing Content that Sells (Without Sabotaging Sales)
Guest post by Carmen Hill, Social Media and Content Strategiest for Babcock & Jenkins, an integrated B2B marketing agency in Portland. Could giving away too much great content actually sabotage sales? As unlikely as it sounds, this is exactly the concern that recently came up in a discussion about B2B content marketing. There’s always a [...]
B2B Social Media: 4 Ways to Sell the Value to Management
Guest post by Eric Schwartzman, coauthor of Social Marketing to the Business Customer, the first book devoted exclusively to B2B social media communications. He has been conducting monthly social media training programs since 2006 and works as an independent online communications consultant to businesses, the US Military, government agencies and nonprofits. When it comes to [...]
Demystify Content Marketing with Content Rules
The intermediary is dead. We don’t need to rely primarily upon the media or some other conduit to communicate with our prospects and customers – we can do it ourselves. Eventually, every company is going to have to think of itself as a TV station and a magazine. Telling your story and answering customer questions [...]
Rocket Content – Your B2B Secret Weapon
Guest post by Ian Greenleigh, the Social Media Manager at Bazaarvoice – the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications. He also blogs at Dare to Comment. There’s no doubt about it, those of us tasked with enterprise-level B2B marketing have some incredible hurdles to overcome. The business decision makers (BDMs) that have [...]
Destroying the 7 Myths of B2B Social Media
B2B social media is one of the most nettlesome of all social media marketing topics. There are plenty of half-truths and misunderstandings about what, where, why, and how B2B social media works (or doesn’t). I tried to dispel the most common B2B social media myths in this Webinar for Genius.com and Focus. Destroying the 7 [...]
19 Top Takeaways from B2B Forum
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum in Boston. As usual for MarketingProfs‘ events, it was a superlative, intimate mixture of excellent speakers and smart, eager attendees. For me, the highlights were the presentation by Sandy Carter of IBM on their use of social media, [...]
