By Ardath Albee 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 ... May. 16, 2012 10:33 AM EDT |
By Ardath Albee 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... May. 13, 2012 05:30 PM EDT Reads: 273 |
By Ardath Albee  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... May. 7, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 357 |
By Ardath Albee 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 somewh... May. 2, 2012 03:30 PM EDT Reads: 239 |
By Ardath Albee 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 con... Apr. 26, 2012 06:27 PM EDT Reads: 140 |
By Ardath Albee  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... Apr. 23, 2012 04:00 AM EDT Reads: 613 |
By Ardath Albee 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 th... Apr. 5, 2012 07:29 PM EDT Reads: 161 |
By Ardath Albee 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... Mar. 29, 2012 02:25 PM EDT Reads: 120 |
By Ardath Albee 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... Mar. 22, 2012 07:18 PM EDT Reads: 429 |
By Ardath Albee 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 ... Mar. 13, 2012 04:25 PM EDT Reads: 299 |
By Ardath Albee 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 hav... Feb. 27, 2012 05:50 PM EST Reads: 133 |
By Ardath Albee 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 met... Feb. 20, 2012 02:27 PM EST Reads: 416 |
By Ardath Albee 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 t... Feb. 14, 2012 05:26 PM EST Reads: 177 |
By 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 i... Feb. 12, 2012 03:52 PM EST Reads: 420 |
By Ardath Albee 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 sho... Feb. 6, 2012 02:51 PM EST Reads: 274 |
By Ardath Albee  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... Feb. 2, 2012 07:16 PM EST Reads: 1,086 |
By Ardath Albee 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... Jan. 31, 2012 07:15 PM EST Reads: 158 |
By Ardath Albee 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 sh... Jan. 29, 2012 03:25 PM EST Reads: 181 |
By Ardath Albee 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 cy... Jan. 24, 2012 07:47 PM EST Reads: 115 |
By Ardath Albee 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 ... Jan. 22, 2012 12:53 PM EST Reads: 534 |
By Ardath Albee 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 T... Jan. 18, 2012 03:54 PM EST |
By Ardath Albee 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. O... Jan. 15, 2012 06:53 PM EST Reads: 218 |
By Ardath Albee 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 launc... Jan. 12, 2012 06:36 PM EST Reads: 214 |
By Ardath Albee 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 bu... Jan. 8, 2012 07:28 PM EST Reads: 250 |
By Ardath Albee 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 t... Jan. 5, 2012 03:30 PM EST Reads: 125 |
By Ardath Albee 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... Dec. 31, 2011 04:37 PM EST Reads: 291 |
By Ardath Albee  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.
On... Dec. 28, 2011 08:07 PM EST Reads: 861 |
By Ardath Albee 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 mar... Dec. 26, 2011 02:23 PM EST Reads: 218 |
By Ardath Albee 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 pus... Dec. 17, 2011 06:49 PM EST Reads: 244 |
By Ardath Albee 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 snea... Dec. 8, 2011 06:50 PM EST Reads: 244 |
By Ardath Albee 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 r... Nov. 25, 2011 04:54 PM EST Reads: 252 |
By Ardath Albee 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 c... Nov. 20, 2011 07:43 PM EST Reads: 217 |
By Ardath Albee 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 ... Nov. 13, 2011 03:47 PM EST Reads: 300 |
By Ardath Albee 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... Nov. 2, 2011 07:40 PM EDT Reads: 141 |
By Ardath Albee 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 ... Oct. 31, 2011 02:23 PM EDT Reads: 172 |
By Ardath Albee 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. kee... Oct. 23, 2011 12:49 PM EDT Reads: 232 |
By Ardath Albee 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 re... Oct. 18, 2011 07:43 PM EDT Reads: 160 |
By Ardath Albee 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... Oct. 14, 2011 11:43 AM EDT Reads: 209 |
By Ardath Albee 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 i... Oct. 10, 2011 07:55 PM EDT Reads: 246 |
By Ardath Albee 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... Oct. 5, 2011 05:36 PM EDT Reads: 702 |
Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist of her firm Marketing Interactions, helps companies with complex sales increase and quantify marketing effectiveness by developing and executing interactive eMarketing strategies driven by compelling content.
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