Latest News from Ardath Albee

Robotic Email Campaigns Miss the Point

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:33:55 EDT

In addition to learning that lead generation is the top marketing priority for tech marketers, IDC's 2012 Tech Marketing Barometer Study asked them about their perceived effectiveness at lead nurturing. In reponse to the 22% who said they use regular nurturing touches geared to buying stages that include more than email and web-based multi-step campaigns, Kathleen Schaub, VP-research, CMO Advisory...

Can B2B Marketers Become Content Whisperers?

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:30:31 EDT

One of the mandates bandied about lately is that B2B marketers need to become listeners. They should set up listening posts and they must listen first, before launching marketing programs. You're told listening is a requisite for establishing 2-way dialogue and sustaining relationships across the buying process. If you've "listened" to all of this, then you know that listening informs...

Content Strategy Must Reach Beyond Marketing

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Arguably, content strategy is most often thought of as a marketing application. That's a great start, but it doesn't do the practice justice. In fact, that view tends to cause siloed efforts and limit the potential of content strategy. Content is a part of everything a business does in regards to communicating with prospects, customers, and the industries their offerings...

B2B Content Strategy Should Never Be a Wallflower

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:30:06 EDT

A B2B content marketing strategy should never be contained in a silo. First of all, to be literal, a silo is a dugout, cave or shelter for grain. Secondly, it denotes walls and barriers that keep its contents apart from everything else. A B2B content marketing strategy must lead somewhere. It should be based on a continuum that matches the...

Designing Calls to Action for B2B Marketing Content

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:27:12 EDT

During my keynote at the B2B Content 2 Conversion conference on Tuesday, one of the questions the audience asked was about a slide I used when discussing how to create a content flow. To sum it up, I suggested that each "touch" should be based on three components: The question your content will answer for a persona. The answer to...

Marketing Beyond the Chit Chat in Social Media

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:00:00 EDT

I was just reading a post written by Margie Clayman, Myth: Marketing consists of just talking to people (or what is social media marketing?). Margie asked her community the question What is marketing? to begin to get at the premise for social media marketing beyond those vague terms of "engagement" and questioning how just "talking to people" (if that's the...

Changing the Conversation

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:29:50 EDT

When B2B companies develop and implement a content marketing strategy it should be obvious that big change is afoot. Not just for marketers, but for everyone involved in the demand-to-revenue generation process. The most pivotal thing that needs to change in parallel across roles is the "conversation." There are at least 3 types of conversations that will change in the...

Content Marketing: Theory vs. Practice

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:25:24 EDT

Sometimes I think content marketing can be made so convoluted and complex that it's nearly impossible to execute. I've seen spreadsheets and diagrams and lists of things you must do that make my head hurt. And, yes, I know I do this for a living. I'm a B2B content strategist - and dang proud of the work I do. But...

B2B Marketers Need Every-Click Attribution

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:18:37 EDT

One of the beautiful things about digital B2B marketing is the ability to attribute behavior and engagement for prospects across a variety of channels that may be included in our marketing mix. Where things get a bit sticky is determining how attribution figures into revenue generation. For a simple transactional sale, this may be easier as sales cycles are shorter...

Lost the Key to Your B2B Database?

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:25:56 EDT

A database is a beautiful thing — especially if it's built from contacts who've opted in rather than purchased lists. But, the problem I see repeatedly is that once a contact goes in, the database doors swing shut like a steel trap, with B2B marketers never exercising their visitation rights. With the rate of change in the business environment, this...

Viewpoint: B2B Marketing – Evolving or Stuck in the Mud?

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 07:30:00 EDT

There are a few things bugging me that I'd like to air out. Over the last few months, I've seen and experienced some things that make me wonder if B2B marketing is evolving or stuck in the mud and applying old thinking that no longer works in a new context.

What Purpose Do Your Buyer Personas Serve?

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:50:47 EST

In every project I work on, some version of buyer personas are involved. Sometimes I'm given personas (usually "profiles") to work with and sometimes developing them is the first step in the project. Let me tell you that I've seen a lot of personas - or what passes for them. What I have noticed is that there seems to be...

Convince Execs to Convert to Content Marketing

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:27:30 EST

The way marketing has always been done will not produce the results B2B marketers need to grow their businesses today. You know it, you've heard it — haven't we all? The question that remains is often about how to get executive buy-in and support to shift dollars? Many channels and methods that have historically good performance may be slowing, but...

Does Your B2B Marketing Content Address Cause?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:26:41 EST

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...

Why Marketing Content Needs a Point of View

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:52:21 EST

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...

Expectations and Experience are the New Competition

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:51:14 EST

For years, B2B marketers have been worried about competitors' products and solutions. They spent a considerable amount of effort trying to differentiate their features and prove their offering is better than another company's version of something similar. As technology continues to shorten product time-to-market and allow for rapid updates and improvements, it's also enabled marketers to become publishers, applying even...

Marketing Cloud Computing to Non-Believer CIOs

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:16:00 EST

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 he clearly distills exactly why he's not sold on cloud computing. He shares the questions he has and the obstacles he'd need to overcome to change his mind. This kind of stuff is uber helpful to constructing nurturing programs, as topics for blog posts and providing seed ideas for all types of content.

Why B2B Marketers Must Address Status Quo

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:15:53 EST

When I do stategic 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 book 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 situation. We get to that...

The Content Marketing Continuum: Part 1

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:25:15 EST

Online publishing has changed the game. Yes, the Internet changed everything. You've heard it before. But, what many B2B marketers haven't yet grasped is the shift from start and stop marketing campaigns to approaching online publishing as a Content Marketing Continuum. To make this shift, marketers need a framework, not just the ability to publish content. Marketers are under pressure...

Are Shorter Sales Cycles a Wake-up Call for Marketers?

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:47:49 EST

Marketing Sherpa's chart of the week shows the answer to this question. Q. Please select the time period closest to the length of your organization's entire sales cycle, from first lead inquiry to purchase. In the commentary, Jen Doyle states that these results showing shorter sales cycles correlate to the lower deal prices Marketing Sherpa's annual benchmark survey also discovered....

6 Tips for B2B Vendors Becoming Publishers

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:53:38 EST

Judging by the amount of online noise being generated, the idea of publishing content is no longer considered to be an "edgy" proposition for many vendors. But noise isn't going to help you meet your goals. The thing about noise is that we've all become adept at tuning it out. There's just so much of it that we've had to...

What Happens When Inbound Marketing Works?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:54:20 EST

The term "inbound marketing" is getting a lot of play these days as B2B marketers grapple with labels and learning more about how marketing practices are evolving — including the dynamics of content marketing. I'm not getting into what all that means now, but invite you to be part of The Great Marketing Conversation, on January 24th, if you'd like...

The Art of The Ask in Content Marketing

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:53:56 EST

When working on content strategies with clients, the question about which content should be gated always comes up. Content — great content — takes a lot of time, effort and resources to produce. It just makes sense that B2B marketers want people to pay for it with their contact info. Or does it? Regardless of how much has been said...

B2B Content Marketing as Trojan Horse

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:36:54 EST

I sat in on the Content Marketing for Real Marketers webinar, with Joe Chernov and Rebecca Lieb, hosted by #CMI and Joe Pulizzi. Of course there were many great points made, but two of them stood out and prompted this blog post: Content draws 10X more media attention than product launches. Diminishing the brand representation in favor of the story...

Why I Use Mind Maps for Content Marketing Projects

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:28:51 EST

I'm often asked how I manage all the details of complex content marketing projects. My favorite tool for this is Mind Maps. Specifically, I use MindJet. I whipped up a simple example to show you: If I was doing this for real, I'd have the persona where it says Content Map Example. I build my content flows based on questions...

Blogs Provide Versatility for B2B Content Marketing

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:30:07 EST

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...

The Myth of the Magic Bullet for Content Marketing

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:37:34 EST

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...

What Questions Will You Answer for Prospects in 2012?

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:07:00 EST

I love this time of year. The New Year is stretching out infront of us, an open book ready for a story. That story will be fleshed out by the content you create and share over the next 52 weeks. Seems like a long time, but it will go by in the blink of an eye - just like this year. One of the reasons that questions are so important is because they drive the curiosity to find answers. In a best case scenario, the answers to your prospects' questions will be found in your content. So how do you find the questions?

Why B2B Content Marketing Themes Fail

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:23:46 EST

Themes for B2B marketing programs are not a new concept. They're used to "organize" marketing programs and create a rallying cry around a market trend that will (hopefully) drive business momentum. The problem with themes in marketing, as I see it, is that they're used as temporary marketing constructs — generally for the term of a campaign or perhaps a...

Is Gaming Your Customers Okay?

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:49:39 EST

I've had a number of conversations lately with B2B marketers who are becoming concerned with, hmm, let's call it the overzealousness of some B2B marketing practices that are emerging. In the quest to gain what should be earned referrals and testimonials, some companies appear to be pushing the boundaries of ethics and standards by paying for them. A bit of...

The Difference Between Benefits and Features

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:50:00 EST

One of the things I find in working with B2B marketers is that it's so dang easy to reference features rather than benefits in marketing content. Some of this is just because we know so much about our product and solution features. But, it's also because those dang features have a sneaky way of masquerading as benefits. Feature or benefit?...

Redefining Gratification for B2B Marketers

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:54:03 EST

Personalized experiences, relevant content and instant gratification are what we all hope for when we visit our favorite search engine and type in a query. Marketers are people, too, so they also expect these results. But, during a complex B2B buying process, as marketers, we need to redefine what gratification means in the context of our marketing programs. ROI and...

Content Marketing Hubs Deliver ROI

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:43:51 EST

Last week I was part of the panel for the Marketing Superhero webinar hosted by OnPath where we discussed how to create demand generation strategies for 2012. I chose to make my tip about Content Hubs. A Content Hub is a content marketing program that takes full advantage of a bigger content asset to combine lead generation with lead nurturing...

Frequency: All the time vs. at the right time

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:47:00 EST

In the Focus roundtable I participated in last week with Lisa Horner, Lauren Goldstein and Craig Rosenberg, Lisa brought up the term "perpetual denamd gen." This concept is a paradigm shift for B2B marketers that can be a great opportunity or present fierce challenges — sometimes it's a combination of both. The nature of publishing on demand and 24/7 availability...

The Secret to a Longer Life for Marketing Content

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:40:59 EDT

I work with a lot of companies that are limited in their ability to produce enough marketing content. I don't mean just any content, but content that resonates and serves as currency to buy prospect attention and actions. The truth is that the life span for marketing content is usually cut short prematurely. The secret is rather simple, actually. It's...

The What Ifs? that Can Derail a Deal

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:23:21 EDT

We've all read the reports and research that shows B2B sales win rates are in an overall decline. But, it's not just losing the sale to a competitor that companies need to reverse, but the growth in "no decision" being made. CSO Insights finds that "no decision" being made in relation to a purchase has grown from 20% to nearly...

Deliver a Psychic Pizza with B2B Marketing

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:49:37 EDT

Catching up on my reading this weekend, I came across an interview in the AMA's Marketing News magazine with John Goodman, vice chairman of Tarp Worldwide Inc. In case you're not familiar, his firm is the one that discovered the ratio of 5:1 for cost of acquiring a new customer vs. keeping an existing one. He also says that, for...

Are B2B Salespeople Thought Leaders?

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:43:31 EDT

I was reading Opportunity Nurturing: Sending Stuff Isn't Always the Best Solution over on the Openview Blog where Devon McDonald interviewed Trish Bertuzzi, from The Bridge Group Inc. Trish really GETS IT, so I stop whenver I see her mentioned anywhere to see what she has to say. In response to the question: Who should be sending nurturing content, marketing...

A B2B Marketing-Sales Funnel Disconnect

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:43:23 EDT

As most of you likely know, I'm a research fiend. I find it really interesting to learn what marketers think about their work, challenges and achievements. I've read a lot of research in the last few weeks - must be a fall thing - but Marketing Sherpa's Chart of the Week displaying the most challenging marketing-sales funnel processes got me...

Content Marketing Needs More Than Content

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:55:33 EDT

A lot of companies have embraced the idea of content for use in marketing. This being said, there's much more to the practice of content marketing than just cranking out content. B2B companies with complex sales that overlook the strategy and process will find themselves in the weeds in short order. I'm working with a lot of companies who are...

5 Things a B2B Website Must Accomplish

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:36:45 EDT

Seeing that my last post was about a report that showed B2B websites were critical to marketing but not performing up to their potential, I thought I'd share some ideas about what your website must accomplish in order to start climbing that ladder of opportunity. It really doesn't have to be that difficult. After all, a B2B website must serve...

B2B Websites NOT Great At Demand Gen

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:30:00 EDT

A new study on an often overlooked subject is fresh off the presses: Demandbase and Focus.com 2011 National Website Demand Generation Study. The B2B company website is growing in importance as buyers spend more time researching and selecting the information they use during a complex buying process. Demandbase CEO, Chirs Golec, sums up the situation nicely in the press release:...

Prime Your B2B Marketing Mind

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:18:12 EDT

Have I told you that I'm a maniac for B2B marketing eduction? Well, I am. Know why? Because the B2B landscape is constantly shifting. Things change so fast that it's a real challenge to keep ahead of the curve. However, the Real World Marketing Syllabus, presented by Brian Kardon of Eloqua is here to help all of us. The Real...

From B2B Marketing Silo to Buyer Experience

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:30:44 EDT

In reviewing an article in BtoB Magazine, Tech Marketing Budgets Lower Than Expected, I came across this statistic that made me stop and think: "This year, 52% of all marketing program spending will be focused on awareness-building activities, while 48% will be focused on demand generation, according to IDC." The first thing I thought was, Shouldn't all marketing be demand...

Balancing the Demand Equation

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:34:31 EDT

Over the weekend I had the privilege to read Adam Needles' new book, Balancing the Demand Equation. I highly reccommend that you go get your own copy. Adam begins the book with a wake-up call: "Modern B2B demand generation is failing. Seriously." And in many ways he's right. Everything has changed, but marketers haven't kept up. Even if we buy...

Show Quantity the Door

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:39:29 EDT

I speak to a lot of B2B content marketers. It can be exhausting. Not speaking to them, of course, but hearing them talk about all the stuff on their plates. The list of To Dos is overwhelming. I'm truly worried that in trying to adopt the new mandates for continuous content development and distribution that we're going to start seeing...

Why Should I Care?

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:09:30 EDT

If you do nothing else when evaluating the probability that your marketing content will resonate with your prospects and customers, answer this question from their perspective: Why should I care? And make sure it's in the first couple of sentences. Yes, a title that tells them is great, but you have to back it up with the meat for the...

What's Your Website Content Really Saying?

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:59:21 EDT

One of the things that gets forgotten during marketing content developed for website use is the impact of the presentation of the content within the "look and feel" of the web page it will be displayed on. The other is what's in it for the reader. I just looked at a webpage that used the company's name 20 times on...

18 B2B Reasons to Attend Content Marketing World

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 19:04:00 EDT

As I finalize my slide deck for my presentation "Build a Better Experience with Content Marketing" for Content Marketing World, I'm getting really excited to be there. This is the first year that we've had several conferences focused on content marketing: Content Marketing Strategies Conference in Berkeley in Feb was intimate and impactful, Confab in Minneapolis in May was fantastic,...

From Click to Content - What's the Response?

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:18:25 EDT

Clicks are often considered as measurements of B2B marketing success. But have you ever stopped to think about the meaning of a click? How do you know what that click means to the clicker (clickee?). After all, the meaning is attributed by the person who clicks, not the marketer who tallies them up to prove their campaign was successful. The...