Case Study: How Genwi gained market traction with prospect surveys
Case Study: How Genwi gained market traction with prospect surveys The market for marketing technology is hot, expected to generate $32 billion in 2016 for companies providing solutions. But with almost 1,900 marketing technology companies across 43 different product categories,…
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Realigning sales funnel assumptions
Realigning sales funnel assumptions Is it time to discard the traditional sales funnel? A newly published Harvard Business Review article, “What Salespeople Need to Know About the New B2B Landscape,[i]” by Harvard lecturer Frank V. Cespedes and Gartner research VP…
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From Relationship to Engagement
From Relationship to Engagement Forget about customer relationship management; these days it’s all about the customer experience, some say. No, forget about experience, it’s all about customer engagement, others argue. Whatever you call your customer marketing management effort, you can…
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The Trust Imperative
Research from Forrester last year reveals that B2B buyers are frustrated by what they perceive from vendors as an utter lack of understanding regarding their business context. Instead, buyers lament that vendor communications are too narrowly focused on their own…
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Enticing B2B Buyers – Starting with Simon Sinek’s “Why”
Simon Sinek’s hugely popular TED Talk, How great leaders inspire action (over 21 million views to date), has considerable implications for marketers who want to craft content that entices loyal buyers. Central to Sinek’s approach, is the knowing and communicating…
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2015’s Best of the Web Marketing Trends – Connecting with People
One thing becomes clear when reading across the multitude of prognostications for 2015 marketing trends: 2015 is set to be the year of ‘humanized’ marketing. It’s about marketing efforts that are more accessible, personable, genuine, and sharable – that is,…
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Customer education – Empower your B2B buyer and make your brand look good
Faced with too much information and too many choices, customers and prospects can be easily overwhelmed, even to the point of decision paralysis. The job of B2B marketers is to demystify the complex and help buyers make sense of the…
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Using Survey Responses to Drive Customer Engagement
Here’s the logic: customer engagement is predicated on establishing connections, which in turn are predicated on effective communication, and effective communication begins with listening. As the influential psychologist Carl Rogers famously said, inability to communicate is a result of a failure…
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Personal Engagement Maximizes B2B Lead Campaign Impact
In our zeal to maximize the advantages of the latest marketing technologies, we sometimes do so at the expense of the human element. It’s people, with all of their definition-defying emotions, personalities, and quirks that we need to make connections…
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Using Customer Insight to Drive C-Suite Leads
Customer insights are vital for creating differentiated and focused messaging that resonates uniquely with your target audience in today’s crowded marketing channels. All too often, we adopt a seemingly rational content approach, only to wonder where the logic failed when…
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Improving the Quality of B2B Lead Generation
The largest hurdle to improving the quality of the lead-gen process is ensuring marketing and sales are on the same page. Traditionally, these two entities have been wholly separate organizations, seemingly working towards the same goal. However, in reality the…
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6 Technology Marketing Steps to Increase Target Account Engagement and Sales
In his recent Forbes article You’re Doing It Wrong: Demand Generation, Patrick Spenner* lays out a strong argument to suggest that marketers who focus on individual decision-maker personas may be doing more harm than good. The crux of Spenner’s argument rests…
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B2B Content Marketing: Reduce the Burden of Your Buyer’s Journey
While communicating with a wide audience is easier than ever before, somewhat paradoxically, actually connecting with them in meaningful ways is becoming ever more difficult amidst the growing morass of online content. Unfortunately, quantity of information in no way equates…
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B2B Content Marketing: Making the Most of Your Blockbuster Content
A successful B2B content marketing strategy isn’t just about generating great content – although that’s key. It’s also about deploying focused and targeted content in a comprehensive and deliberate manner where your audience can find it when they need it. …
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4 Rules for Better B2B Content Marketing
The Internet has revolutionized much of life as we know it. Sharing information and engaging in critical conversations has become more direct, immediate, and yet infinitely more complex. Consider the more sophisticated B2B purchases, for example. The purchase process has…
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For B2B Marketers WOM Trust Trumps All
Consider this: you’re a B2B buyer in need of a complex technology solution. Your inbox has several emailed offers from various vendors, only some of which you’ve scanned over with a healthy dose of scepticism regarding their product or service…
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The Future of Marketing is About Trust
Admittedly, I don’t get a lot of the new world of communication. I notice my brother putting a post on Facebook about the status of his bathroom renovation, and instantly there are 31 “likes.” Huh? What are they liking? Why…
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Going Beyond Thought Leadership to Commercial Insight
As B2B marketers, we know that truly connecting with prospects in a meaningful way requires connecting with them on an emotional level. Content based marketing employs just this strategy by creating messaging which resonates, identifying timely and relevant issues that…
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Improve Sales and Marketing Efficiency: Find the Right Decision Maker
When attempting to sell a technology solution to a targeted account it’s clearly imperative to know who has responsibility for the system, process or application that you are trying to support or replace. Spending sales time to investigate the right…
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Using Social Media to Accelerate Sales
As part of our latest B2B survey of senior enterprise marketers, we asked, “How has social media changed the buyer’s journey?” Overwhelmingly (65%), respondents answered that social media has accelerated the sales cycle – see chart below. How has…
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