Buyer Personas have become the latest buzz for B2B marketers; you either love them, loathe them or fall somewhere in between. Mostly, from what I’ve seen, where marketers fall on the scale between love and loathe has to do with a couple of things: Quality and depth of the persona Knowing what to do with […]
The post B2B Personas: Not Just for Buyers appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
When I do strategic planning workshops with my clients, we get into a lot of discussions about buying stages. Anyone who’s followed me for a while or read my books knows that I always start very early in the process with the stage of Status Quo. My definition of status quo is the buyer’s current […]
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Buyer personas, built well, take a concerted effort to produce. While only 44% of B2B marketers say they have buyer personas, 83% of these marketers say they are only slightly or somewhat effective at using them. What a colossal waste of time, effort, and investment. The whole point of creating buyer personas is to use […]
The post How Personas Keep B2B Marketers From Playing “Guess Who” with Content appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
I interview a lot of people during buyer persona projects. This includes representatives from product development, customer service, sales teams, marketing professionals of various flavors, and, of course, customers and prospects. The thing that continues to astound me during internal interviews is the lack of knowledge about how buyers get here. In other words, what […]
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Earlier this year, Ascend2 asked B2B marketers how successful they considered their use of marketing automation. Only 25% said they were very successful, yet 91% of them agreed that marketing automation was very important to the overall success of their marketing programs. Top obstacles cited include the lack of quality content (40%) and the lack of […]
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B2B marketers wax prolific about the concept of engaging their buyers and customers with content. But engagement isn’t really the end goal, commitment is. People who engage with your content are interested in the topic at hand. An audience that is committed is dedicated to embracing what you have to share with them and acting […]
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In this excerpt from my book, Digital Relevance, I discuss the need for marketers to re-discover the beauty of conversation and how it translates into more relevant online engagement with buyers and customers. Conversational competency is a content marketing application that drives social relevance. “Social relevance is based on conversational competency. Rather than a broadcast […]
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You’ve likely heard it. The silence in the forest of your content as not even a light breeze rustles its leaves with engagement. It’s been reported that the majority of marketing content is never used – especially not by salespeople. Why not? A variety of research has pointed to the inability of salespeople to find […]
The post How Sales Enablement Results in Higher ROI for B2B Marketing Content appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
Companies undertake operational reorganization for a variety of reasons. Whether to catch up with a business landscape that changed faster than forecast or perhaps to take advantage of a clearer path to regain growth potential or even to recover from a major setback, the reasons can be many. What is becoming apparent is that reorgs […]
The post Keeping Your Content Marketing Rhythm during a Reorg appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
I recently wrote an eBook, The Brand Advocate Persona, about how to harness the power of personas to turn customers into brand advocates. [A big thanks to Influitive and Cintell for producing it!] It occurred to me that perhaps the concept of the brand advocate persona might not be enough to convince you of its […]
The post Building the Case for Brand Advocate Personas appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
Content marketing for B2B companies is now an established route to market. It works when done well. But the problem is that it’s often not done well—not nearly as well as it could be. The result is fragmented experiences that leaves buyers and customers frustrated and disengaged. Here are five missteps I’m seeing with B2B […]
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Content marketing isn’t about creating and publishing more content; it’s about creating relevant, lasting relationships that result in profitable outcomes for your company—from awareness to advocacy. But, as in many things in marketing, “more” has gained a foothold. More leads, more content, more channels, more marketing functions, more marketing technology, and so on. “More” has […]
The post Shift from More to Better for a Marketing-Driven Customer Journey appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
The formation of a content marketing organization should result in individual roles that are beautifully synced. At least that’s the gist of how Jason Miller—who’s in charge of leading global marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions—phrased it in a recent presentation about how LinkedIn combats the chaos of content marketing at scale. There are a number of factors at […]
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Only 12% of B2B marketers rate themselves as “very effective” at delivering a great customer experience. No, that’s not a typo. It’s a finding from the 2016 B2B Customer Experience Benchmark Report from Kapost. The report defines customer experience as: Customer experience encompasses each interaction between a customer and brand across channels (social media, website, […]
The post Great B2B Customer Experiences Require Customer-Centric Marketing appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
Corporate Visions recently surveyed more than 400 B2B organizations to find out how one statistic is creating challenges at the intersection of content strategy, sales enablement, and lead conversion. The result is its State of the Conversation Report. The survey was based on the impact of this buzzworthy stat that surfaced a few years back: […]
The post The State of the B2B Conversation: Disconnected appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
Nearly all B2B companies are using content marketing to attract and engage buyers. We’ve been doing this for quite some time. But getting it right is still a struggle for a majority of companies. This is because we haven’t formalized content marketing as a strategy or built sufficient process, workflow, and collaboration around its execution. […]
The post The Value of Content Operations for Committed B2B Marketers appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
Using content for marketing in B2B companies has caught on with a fervor that continues unabated. And, even though only a small percentage of B2B marketers say they are consistently effective with it, most of them will produce more content next year. It boggles the mind that we’d keep doing more of something that we […]
The post The Problem with Scale for B2B Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
The difference between a drive-by view and a meaningful engagement with your audience is based on the perceived value of the experience—by the audience. Unfortunately, customer experiences are often defined by the experience we want our customers to have, rather than those they expect and need to have with us. This happens because B2B marketing […]
The post 3 Pivots B2B Marketing Strategies Need to Create Compelling Experiences appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
If you know me, you know I’m all about creating and using B2B buyer personas to drive content marketing strategy. I’ve created more than 400 buyer personas over the last four or five years. When built with both qualitative and quantitative data they can help marketers transform the performance of their content marketing programs. There’s […]
The post A B2B Buyer Persona is Not an Island appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
One of the biggest values that come with content marketing operations maturity is the ability to say “no” to ad hoc content demands. As B2B marketers have adopted content marketing, many have found themselves on the hamster wheel of content production. Volume has become the rallying cry, rather than purpose, meaning, and experiences. Part of […]
The post Content Marketing Operations Halts Random Acts of Content appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
I was interviewing a client’s customer a few days ago for a persona project and something he said made me stop and think. What he said can be paraphrased as: If there is no buzz about your company online, I won’t consider your product as a viable choice. For context, this is a B2B SaaS […]
The post A Lack of Customer Advocacy Could Make B2B Buyers Walk Away appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
Pushing product: it’s what B2B companies have been doing for years. Even if we say we’re putting the customer front and center, usually we’re not really walking the talk. We have all these meetings and mandates about what the company wants to accomplish and rally our teams to create strategies and execute tactics to achieve […]
The post The Value of ABM Goes Beyond Marketing appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
In a previous post, I shared a four-step process for creating in-depth B2B buyer personas. In this post, I’ll discuss how the details of a buyer persona inform a content marketing strategy. With the wealth of information gained during the process of determining buyer personas, you can now create the nine components for each persona. […]
The post How to Apply a B2B Buyer Persona to Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
The intent to expand content marketing strategy and tactics is in every B2B marketing survey. B2B marketers plan to create more content, spend more on content marketing, increase the number of channels for content distribution, and add more technology to their marketing tech stack. Yet content marketing effectiveness continues to decline, even while spending goes […]
The post Content Operations: Waiting is Costing You appeared first on Marketing Interactions .
As our ability to collect data grows, so do the different ways we can measure content performance. With that said, what I see most is that B2B marketers tend to stick to traditional vanity metrics rather than doing the work to rethink what we’re measuring—and why. Email metrics are a great example. For years, we’ve measured […]
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Text messaging in business is often thought of as purely transactional. It’s commonly used for password verification, appointment reminders, package delivery updates, service appointment arrival times, coupons and promotional offers—all of them transactional communications. But SMS messaging can have much more impact as a conversation. Most transactional messages are push messages sent out based on […]
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