Does content marketing mean all companies always publish as much content as they create?
What should companies pioneering a new solution do differently?
What is most important in the middle of a Content Marketing arms race?
Answers here.
There’s a new breed of infographics in town. Slick graphics purporting to inform, but practicing 3 types of deceptions. Here’s an example and what to look for.
Read more →The recently published 2011 Demandbase B2B Website Demand Generation Survey Results highlighted 5 findings from its survey of 100 B2B marketing and IT professionals.
But what I found most interesting was what their data revealed but they didn’t highlight: 2 dirty secrets of content marketing.
To highlight these conclusions, I converted Demandbase’s results into graphics.
Read more →Mark Twain, sadly, failed abysmally as a business man. He invested in innovative products that would ultimately be hits, but bet on the wrong people. Perhaps his many failures led to this critical insight.
Read more →Let’s face it: paid advertising – banner ads or PPC – has been a huge failure for most B2B companies. The ROI has been pitiful.
But retargeting ads are dramatically different. They change the cost of customer acquisition so radically, they make paid advertising worth a second look.
But I’ll warn you, retargeting ads are being miscast as Lead Gen campaigns, when they are really Lead Capture and Nurture campaigns. They play a valuable role, but boost the effectiveness of rather than replace other lead gen initiatives.
Here’s what you need to know.
Read more →Today, at the Marketing Sherpa conference in Boston, Brian Carroll (author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale) listed the most common tactics B2B companies pursue to increase lead generation, then he cited the one B2B companies rarely address, though it often offers the highest return.
Here’s the list, the exception, and a cautionary tale of how and why one of my clients was surprised to find out how poor their expensive prospect database was.
Read more →When marketing techniques like inbound marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing are on a hot streak, they are promoted as if they have equal value to all B2B companies.
Some B2B companies get burned investing too much in these tactics, then protest that these tactics don’t work for B2B companies.
The truth is, their value in terms of helping produce leads or driving prospect awareness and interest is proportional to the number of prospects you target.
Here’s how to size up how much of your time and budget should be spent on these investments.
Read more →B2B marketing is a little like kayaking in the everglades. You don’t have signs to let you know the exact right route. Deep experience elsewhere doesn’t always help in the current situation. Plotting your course by interpreting the moves of others can mislead you. You can spend a lot of time testing the wrong channels before you find the right one.
Read more →So your B2B company invested heavily in social media marketing, and the results were underwhelming to say the least. Were you incompetent or just unlucky? The fact is, you might have been doomed from the outset – you just didn’t realize it.
If you haven’t already experienced this pain, here’s how to avoid being lured into relying on social media when it’s not appropriate.
Read more →Inbound marketing is great. Done well in the right situations, it can be a cost-effective way to reach new prospects.
But it doesn’t work for everyone. Some companies that should be focused on outbound marketing are deceived into thinking that inbound marketing is working for them when it’s really not.
Here’s an example of how this happened to one company, and what you can do to avoid a similar fate.
Read more →B2B companies are in the midst of a content arms race. That makes it all the more important to judiciously decide what content to make freely available and what to keep behind registration forms to motivate prospects to engage with your salespeople. Here’s how to approach this issue.
Read more →Ryan Caldwell wrote a great blog post The Lazy Man’s SEO : Building Content That Matters on Search Engine Journal. Here are my key takeaways and a link to the post.
Read more →