The Disconnect Between Marketers and IT Buyers

Great article from MarketingProfs, "The Disconnect Between Marketers and IT Buyers." Lots and lots of good charts all pointing how marketers still need to better align their content creation plans with the actual needs of IT buyers.

Five B2B Marketing Trends to Watch

MarketingProfs, always a good source of innovative essays on marketing, posted a good article that reviewed the coming trends in marketing.

Here is a link to the post along with a quick outline...

http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/11767/five-b2b-marketing-trends-to-watch?adref=nlt100113

Trend No. 1: Employee Advocacy and Social Selling

Trend No. 2: Content Marketing

Trend No. 3: Mobile and Consumerization

Trend No. 4: Big Data

Trend No. 5: Agile Marketing

This last trend is something that I think marketers have been wrestling with. Many companies are having trouble dealing with a faster business tempo.

Being an agile B2B marketer means that you still need to adhere to the same core principles of strategic marketing, but you also need to act in a faster, more collaborative and responsive way. New and adaptive automation technologies are essential to acting fast, being responsive, and scaling. Social marketing is essential to staying informed and being relevant to your target audience. Be flexible, understand your customers, and act quickly!

Go and read the whole article...it's worth your time.

Why Asking Sales What They Want Is NOT Sales Enablement

A very good read on how to engage with the sales team and methodically determine how marketing can create the content that best improves the sales cycle...

Why Asking Sales What They Want Is NOT Sales Enablement - MarketingProfs

Basically,

1. Define Sales Activities

2. Identify the Coordinating Goals

3. Create an Activity Map

4. Perform a Materials Analysis

But click through to read the whole article...

Top Five Marketing Posts for November

It's Movember! Although I am not growing out a mustache, I am, however, getting a great deal of amusement out of my friends attempts to grow theirs. You all know who you are...lol

As always, here are a few marketing related articles that I thought I would share with you...

(Oh, and congratulations to President Obama. Now, do the grand bargain with Congress, so we all can move on and get to work.)

8 Social Media Numbers that Will Rock Your Business, by Eric Schurenberg, Inc

Here is a good line: “Personal data is the oil of the digital age”


25 Best Blogs 2012, by Time

Great list! I added seven of these to my RSS reader.


Email Marketing: 6 tactics on combining content and email strategies, by David Kirkpatrick, MarketingProfs

They are:

1. Understand that content is a vital part of email marketing 
2. Make the blog the hub of all content 
3. Use internal resources to create content 
4. Mine incoming email for content 
5. Mine outgoing email for content 
6. Repurpose content

5 Lessons From the Best Example of Content Marketing Ever?, by Jay Baer, Convince and Convert

A very good case study on a McDonald's content marketing program.


Content Plays Critical Role Throughout Tech-Buying Cycle, by MarketingProfs

Measuring Influence

I found this post by Roy Young on MarketingProfs (How Many Are You Reaching and Who Are They?) that I found interesting. I talk with a lot of marketing professionals about public relations. Often, the subject of measurement or benchmarks arises. Most often, the discussion revolves around traditional PR output like releases, case studies, placements and analyst reports. However, I always tie a proposed PR campaign to a company's sales goals, profitability target or overall valuation.

To me, whether or not you achieve the business case is the only true measurement of the effectiveness of a public relations campaign. Anything else smacks of insider navel gazing.

Now, marketers have spent a lot of time quantifying paid media for good reason. It's much easier to generate good data for a media buy or a direct mail campaign. It's easier to make a direct connection between one's actions and the movement of the needle. Certainly, one of driving forces behind the massive investment in online advertising over the past few years, has been the huge reams of data it generates.

However, as the online advertising machine bumps up against user generated communities, it becomes harder to draw a cause-effect relationship. As Roy says,

...for emerging media, you may have to be satisfied with qualitative measures of impact. At least for now. After all, if you have two readers of your blog, and those two readers have the first name of Steve (Balmer and Jobs), your blog may be far more influential than another blog on technology with thousands of readers.

Food for thought on a Monday morning!