B2B manufacturing and professional services companies can tap into a huge competitive advantage if they embrace modern marketing. The changing state of B2B buying has been well-documented. One of the more dramatic changes is an earlier and greater reliance on conducting web-based research prior to reaching out to a salesperson. The pace of retiring baby-boomers
Read MoreSince 2011, I’ve spent considerable time researching and testing social media marketing in a business to business context. Initially, I treated social media as another marketing channel, like email, to distribute content, whether educational or otherwise, to individuals. A communication channel to reach an audience. The goal was two-fold: (1) grow the social audience (e.g.
Read MoreCustomer acquisition or B2B demand generation is a high priority marketing activity to help a business grow successfully. Among many challenges, the ability to determine what steps are required to develop an effective demand generation program is difficult. Although there exists a boundless supply of tactics available, less information exists focused on strategy and more
Read More52% of B2B companies consider “extending marketing’s influence across the buying journey” as a top priority, per a new study by Madison Logic and Demand Gen Report. Other key B2B priorities highlighted in the study were: analyzing & understanding attribution metrics on account-based ROI Measuring & understanding specific account engagement These priorities skew towards
Read MoreB2B manufacturing companies tend to downplay the role of marketing. Instead, sales play the dominant role. Historically this made sense. Salespeople beat the pavement, knocking on doors and building relationships with potential buyers. It wasn’t difficult to collect or buy a list of potential buyers and send a field sales person out to visit them. Even attending
Read MoreA recent Demand Gen Report uncovered the top priorities for B2Bmarketers in 2018. The top two demand generation priorities for B2B marketers for 2018 per a DemandGen Report are: Focusing on lead quality over lead quantity Improving conversion rates and campaign results Excellent priorities. Let’s break these down. Prioritizing lead quality is more indicative of marketing tech advancements
Read MoreThe most successful B2B companies are buyer-first. What does this mean exactly? These B2B companies know who their buyers are, what their pain points and goals are, how they seek information and evaluate options and how they make buying decisions. All critical and actionable insights driven by the collection and analysis of data. In today’s
Read More“When you look at Google Trends data, inbound marketing is still a highly searched term, while demand generation is searched much less frequently. But conversations with CEOs and CMOs show businesses are much more interested in a proactive demand generation methodology than an inbound methodology.” An interesting observation from the team at Square2Marketing that draws
Read MoreGenerating high-quality leads is the number-one challenge for B2B marketers.” [source: (IDG Enterprises] This statement begs interpretation, the least of which is how one defines “high quality.” Are marketers not engaging the right audience? Are they not converting qualified leads into “higher quality” opportunities (SRLs)? Who’s assigning quality? What’re the criteria? Generating “high-quality” leads, whether
Read MoreFiguring out where to allocate precious resources is challenging especially when there are a large number of options. In many circumstances though, a little bit of data and some quick marketing math can help provide some reasonableness to your decision making. Let’s look at some data on search engine optimization (SEO) as a marketing channel where your company
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