Renee Yeager says, “Delivering engaging, relevant content is the name of the game right now in marketing. Interestingly enough, as marketers center their efforts and investment on content-driven activities, most struggle with content creation. According to a 2015 study by Content Marketing Institute, 54 percent of B2B marketers and 50 percent of B2C marketers cited “producing engaging content” as a top challenge. This has been a consistent trend for the past five years. Like many aspects of marketing, content isn’t typically something you win with right away. A test and measure approach... [...]

Mark Eardley says, “In our B2B marketing guidebook Business-to-Business Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide, published by Penguin Random House, my co-author Charlie Stewart and I write, “The purpose of B2B marketing is to attract and retain profitable customers.” The first step toward achieving that goal is to know who influences buying decisions—and then win their sale-creating trust. The first of this short series of articles offers straightforward guidance on how to… – Identify the buying-decision influencers in your market. – Define how your offering contributes... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “B2B marketers are hungry for information about marketing dashboards and lead generation, according to recent research from Bombora. The Surge Report was based on an analysis of the content consumption behavior of visitors to 2,500 B2B websites (4 billion monthly interactions). The researchers examined which content topics were being looked at compared with established benchmarks. Each topic was assigned a Surge Score of between zero (not trending) to 100 (highly in demand). Marketing dashboards are the hottest area of interest with B2B marketers, garnering a Surge Score... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “For B2B demand marketers, media has until recently been synonymous with impressions, maybe clicks and hopefully, leads. Historically, marketing pros have turned to media companies to generate awareness and create demand. The focus over the last several years, however, has shifted to: “Impressions are a bonus; I expect leads.” Moreover, the definition of a lead and how it’s generated varies widely. Leads are good, especially when they engage with your brand(ed) content. Well, the bar and expectations are being reset. The next evolution is being driven by B2B marketers’... [...]

Peter Isaacson says, “We’re all competing to capture the attention of our best prospects and customers, and, let’s face it — that’s no easy feat. We’re bombarded daily with information from all sides and individually choose to let in what we care about in the moment and block out anything that just creates overload. With research and buying habits from our personal lives bleeding into and influencing our professional lives, there’s a battle for attention that’s getting tougher to fight every day. Just like we disregard a commercial on TV or an ad in a magazine due to its lack... [...]

Valerie Levin says, “In the last century, the world saw a massive revolution of innovation. Beyond modern marvels such as digital advancements and the evolution of the smartphone, artificial intelligence is gradually changing society and how people navigate their lives. Machine learning is gradually being integrated into nearly every aspect of life. It’s already used in machine translation, email spam filters, ATM check depositing and facial recognition – and that’s just what an average person uses day-to-day. Predictive intelligence is making businesses more efficient, effective... [...]

Steven Casey says, “So this makes it official: the rite of passage for every new analyst. My first research report, How Self-Service Research Changes B2B Marketing, has just been published. I covered the premise of this report in my first blog post — but I’ll summarize it here again: multiple Forrester surveys have shown that B2B buyers strongly prefer to conduct their own research, without ever speaking with a sales rep. Forward-thinking B2B marketers will embrace this change and enable the customer-directed research journey with self-service technologies such as contextual help solutions... [...]

Callie Hinman says, “Smart marketers know Google AdWords is an essential part of a strong B2B marketing strategy. Since Google searchers are actively looking for either pertinent answers or solutions, marketers can quickly capture their attention and convert them to leads with search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns—as long as they take the right approach, of course. Neatly Organize Your Keywords and Ad Groups One of the most critical elements of your SEM campaigns is the organization of your keywords. Here are the best practices to create ad groups: 
Group keywords with similar themes:... [...]

Laura Ramos says, “Have you ever wondered about the tactical challenges B2B marketers (like you) face across role responsibilities like building brand/awareness, generating qualified demand, nurturing leads into qualified sales opportunities, enabling sales/channel partners to better close business, and expanding current customer relationships? Or how your practices around technology adoption, process change, modern marketing skill development, and sales alignment compare to peers? If you tell us — we will tell you more in return. Many of you read our blog and research, or talk to... [...]

Jeffrey L. Cohen says, “If it’s Friday, it must be my day to create some content. Marketers are busy planning, creating, optimizing, and analyzing, and for many of us, creating content is just one of many things on our to-do lists. We’ve all seen the stats that reveal B2B marketers are spending more time, budget, energy, happy hours, hackathons, and puppy time on content. But to what end? It’s great to have that fabulous piece of content to attract readers (or more often than not, downloaders), but what happens next? Those big download numbers you’ve been getting don’t count for much.... [...]