By Francis Moran
Everywhere I turn these days, it seems that content marketing is being touted as the latest must-do for business-to-business technology marketers. And there seems to be considerable angst over how to do it properly.
“Content marketing is a fairly new concept that many marketers are struggling to figure out,” said a post yesterday on business2community.com. In the post, author Rachel Foster reported on a recent survey of LinkedIn’s B2B Technology Marketer’s Group that asked, “Can you use one word to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B marketing today?” A word cloud of the more than 1,000 comments so far clearly shows ROI to be the dominant concern, followed very closely by content.
In a similar vein, in a round-up earlier this month of the biggest B2B marketing disruptions of 2011, Michael Brenner of B2B Marketing Insider said, “People have been talking about content marketing for at least a couple of years. But in 2011, it really seemed to hit its stride.”
I could cite several additional examples, but I think you get my point. According to a large swath of the B2B braintrust out there, content marketing is the greatest new thing, and we’d better all get aboard.
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By Alexandra Reid
With the rise of social media, today’s B2B sales landscape is more complex than ever before. There are hundreds of social media channels. Within them, a vast number of conversations are taking place, from short greetings to passionate discussions about businesses and their products, new social and technology trends, even what people had for breakfast.
The process of digging through these conversations, uncovering qualified leads, developing them into prospects and closing sales through social media is becoming even more complicated as revenue cycles shorten and large sales become less frequent in a struggling economy.
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By Bob Bailly
Has evolution prepared humans to live in the world we have created? Was Desmond Morris correct when he pointed out that, “Man’s biological equipment is not strong enough to cope with the unbiological environment it has created?” Has our transition from hunter/gatherer living in a cave to cosmopolitan businessperson living in a luxury condo been as smooth as we’d like to think?
In my last post, I postulated that humans prefer to live and work in a tribal setting and promised to explore the nuance of this from a modern business perspective. Today’s focus will be on the role of leadership.
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This week marked the one-year anniversary of our new blog. We thank you for being with us and participating in our conversations, which covered a whole host of technology marketing issues.
Last month, we offered new counsel for startups from startup founders themselves. Screenreach, Host Analytics, CommentAir, Genevolve and NanoScale all weighed in on the specific issues that all entrepreneurs should be aware of, including the importance of strong teams, ways to overcome the status quo, how to ensure your product meets a specific market demand, attracting a flagship customer, and how to bring to market a compelling product that is protected by a rigorous intellectual property strategy.
We also explored the benefits that could come from industry and academia working together, what an IP coordinator should know and tribes in a techno world. Of course, this list just scrapes the surface. Read ahead for more.
January 3: When selling yourself as faster and cheaper is no longer enough: Part 2 by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 10: Putting your assumptions to the test by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 18: Wanted: Partners willing to take a leap of faith by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 23: What an IP coordinator should know: Are we getting value for our money? by David French
January 25: Dealing with the devilish details by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 30: Preparing for a major offensive by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 31: You really can achieve great things when industry, academia work together by Jason Flick
And on a related note…
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By Francis Moran
This blog was launched one year ago yesterday.
On February 1, 2011, we officially re-striped our long-standing inmedia Public Relations blog to indicate that I was evolving — pivoting would be the verb if I was a tech startup — my consulting practice. While the (now) 13-year-old technology PR agency I founded in the heat of the dot-com and telecom bubble in the late 1990s would and does continue, I wanted to spend more of my time tackling the higher-level marketing issues with which every B2B technology company must grapple. “For too long now, I have been painfully aware of just how dimly acquainted technology is with marketing,” I wrote in that first post a year ago, and I set out to change that.
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By Francis Moran
