Why SEO Is The Key To Successful Marketing
Everyone uses a search engine! And yet, not everyone in marketing understands the difference between SEO, PPC, metatags and keywords. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. I know it can be confusing but…
To be a successful marketer today, you need to understand how to show up in the search results of your buyers’ search engine activity. To do this you must understand keywords and content and how they interact with each other to gain that coveted top spot in the search engine results.
This is not just about being a successful marketer. This is about driving real business results in the form of traffic to your website, getting more consumers of your content and ultimately to obtaining more paying customers…
The Traditional Marketing Playbook Is Dead!
Are you tired of being badgered by sales people before you are ready to buy?
In some organizations, the primary role of marketing is simply to help sales make a deal.
How do you help them make a deal? You negotiate amazing offers like price reductions and special financing. You create flashy sales collateral. You book fancy events and cold call to get them appointments.
Now I’m NOT saying we should stop supporting sales or that we should stop helping them to close deals. And I’m not sure traditional marketing is dead, but it ain’t what it used to be. So here are some facts to help support a move to an Inbound Marketing strategy…
The Future of B2B Marketing: It’s Social
The Future's So Bright
I received a question on twitter yesterday from Billy Mitchell, Senior Creative Director at the MLT Creative agency: he asked me “What is the future of B2B Marketing?”
This got me to thinking. I’ve already published my B2B Marketing predictions for 2011 and while I think I captured a good mix of new and traditional issues, I realized that one thing was missing: a common theme. And so this led me to the conclusion that the broader future of B2B Marketing is Social! But what does that mean…?
A B2B Marketing Manifesto?
The folks at Velocity Partners think that this is a great (and a scary) time to be a B2B marketer. So they’ve written a manifesto (reg. required) to prove it. The eBook offers a call to action for all B2B marketers to take a different path from the traditional “tried and true” marketing practices of old. The manifesto also makes a “plea for ambition.”
Setting aside the common discussions about tactics and channels like social media, the web, or email, they claim that the new age of B2B marketing is about a whole new mindset because we live in a new world of buyer behaviors with completely new ways to address them.
B2B Marketing Predictions For 2011
Whenever I start to see Thanksgiving turkeys flying out of the grocery store and Black Friday ads start to appear, I know it’s that time of year to prognosticate. So here is my list of B2B Marketing Insider predictions for 2011.
2010 was the year social media moved from cutting edge to mainstream (right?). And what a wild ride it has been. While some have predicted the consolidation of Twitter and Facebook or the demise of Foursquare, I am sticking to the practical topics most B2B Marketers I know are talking about:
Enjoy A Demand Funnel Cocktail
I was recently asked by the good folks over at Focus to participate in an exciting project and the first edition of the “Book of Funnels“. The challenge was this: put all your thoughts on the marketing and sales funnel into one page and use a picture to tell your story.
I have to admit that this project was a lot of fun. At the time, I was leading a large online demand generation program and had some thoughts about the state of the marketing and sales funnel. And I agree with Craig Rosenberg at Focus, that “every organization should make the effort to depict its revenue funnel on one page. It serves as the basis for your sales and marketing strategy.”
The New Marketing Accountability
The most popular posts on B2B Marketing Insider over the last few weeks have a common theme: accountability and The Role of B2B Marketing . You can review both How To Align Marketing With Sales and Marketing Leads: Quality Vs. Quantity for more detail on the emerging need for marketing to drive real sales and to quantify efforts.
Late last week, I responded to a post by my new friend Adam Needles, VP Marketing of Left Brain Marketing. In “Revising Our Demand Generation Definition as B2B Marketers” Adam does an excellent job of thoroughly putting a call to action out to all marketers that demand generation needs to be end-to-end. He also asks us to be accountable to results. I told him that I almost stood up and clapped. I was so excited, I thought I should recount my response here.
The Role of B2B Marketing
What Is Marketing Acceleration?
What is marketing acceleration and why is it even worth discussing? In the larger context, acceleration refers to the increasing pace of change. In B2B Marketing, we are experiencing an unprecedented amount of upheaval in what defines our success. We not only need to be fast, we need to get faster. We need to be speed racers.
While we are being impacted by the rapid rise of social networks and the use of mobile technologies to connect business professionals, we are also being asked to produce more with less. More leads. More sales. Greater awareness. Less money. Less People. Fewer tools.
Integrating Social Media and Search
Social media as a B2B Marketing technique is an evolution of the marketing tools that preceded it: organic search engine marketing and paid search advertising. But combining these techniques can provide tremendous uplift in results and ROI.
My sister blog B2C Marketing Insider recently ran this article called Where Search Meets Social: Integrating Social Media into Organic and Paid Search Can Generate Exponential ROI written by Kent Lewis, President and Founder of Social Media and Marketing agencies Anvil Media and Formic Media. The article has become one of the most popular we have ever done. And so with the author’s permission I am summarizing it here for our B2B audience.
