Ardath Albee

B2B marketing content is most useful when it serves as proof that you understand your target markets and actually know how to do what your company promises via it's products and services. Essentially, marketing content — and the experiences it creates — serves as a test drive of what it could be like to be your customer. Point of view is the perspective through which readers will experience your content (or story). For B2B content, the best way to explain this is that if your content is company focused, the perspective they experience will be you talking about yourself. And that's boring. If your content is focused on their roles and the issues they deal with, they'll experience it much more personally. But they'll also experience your brand's orientation in regards to the issue the content addresses. Marketers must always consider how the content they publish reflec... (more)

Does Your B2B Marketing Content Address Cause?

How deep does your marketing content dive into the problems and priorities your B2B prospects are facing? In B2B marketing, we talk a lot about addressing problems, but quite often we don't talk about what that really means or how to truly help our prospects solve the systemic issues that cause the problems in the first place. This post is inspired by the following point in a list of reasons about why managers struggle on Leadership Now blog. This is reason #9: They Fix Problems, Not Causes. Unless the manager fixes the cause of the problems they encounter, valuable time will be ... (more)

Marketing Cloud Computing to Non-Believer CIOs

Cloud computing is a pretty big deal. It's one of the top priorities for many CIOs. So, it should be a pretty easy process to build a B2B content strategy that helps CIOs make a purchasing decision. Or is it? I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and have a ton of Google Alerts to help me mine for information I use to learn more about the buyers my clients sell to. In my Inbox today was a bonanza of a resource. SearchCIO sent me a link to: Quick take: Why iRobot's CIO doesn't like enterprise cloud computing This resource is a quick interview with Jay Leader, CIO of iRobot, in which ... (more)

Blogs Provide Versatility for B2B Content Marketing

According to the B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report produced by CMI and Marketing Profs, the use of blogs has increased to 65% from 51% in 2010. From an effectiveness perspective, the use of blogs as a marketing tactic increased by a whopping 45% during the last year. This is terrific news! For those of you who haven't yet jumped on the Blogging bandwagon, it's one of the easiest formats for content marketing. Here are a few reasons why: Ease of execution - the tools offer simplicity that even the most technically challenged marketer can use to publ... (more)

The Myth of the Magic Bullet for Content Marketing

I'll just come right out and say it. There is no such thing as a magic bullet for B2B content marketing. This was a question brought up recently during a B2B Year in Review roundtable where I was one of the panelists over on Focus.com. I've been thinking quite a bit about it since then. Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo) posed the question: Why are so many vendors & consultants making it sound as if B2B Marketing (technology, content development, etc.) is simple & should be done in weeks? The simple truth is that none of this is, well, simple. I know this is probably not what you wanted t... (more)