B2B Marketing
Southwest’s ‘Why’ Fail
How Southwest Airlines forgot about its higher purpose at a critical time. It sucks when a brand you love lets you down. It’s like when you find out an athlete you’ve rooted for all your life cheated. You feel like a schmuck for saying how great they were. That’s what ...
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Marketing Lessons From King Gillette
What modern marketers can learn from Gillette’s business model. My Polish/Czechoslovakian genes didn’t bless me with an overabundance of facial hair. Although I’m not going to challenge Grizzly Adams at The World Beard and Moustache Championships, I do require razors to shave my beard on a regular basis. I stopped ...
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Employer Branding: What It Is and Why It Matters
Numbers don’t lie. Having a strong employer brand is a must-have for growing companies today. I’m a stats guy. I’ll flip through a box of baseball cards and read the backs for hours to find trivia to impress my friends. For example, did you know that Kirk Gibson had 12 ...
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The Unnaturals: What Roy Hobbs Can Teach Us About Marketing
Marketing is hard. Here’s what to do about it. Roy Hobbs was born to play baseball. In the 1984 film The Natural, a young Roy was playing catch with his dad on their Iowa farm when his father offered some sage advice. “You got a gift, Roy. But it’s not ...
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Let Your Voice Guide Your Brand
What companies say is just as important as how they look. In 1976, two college dropouts started a computer company out of one of their childhood homes in Los Altos, California. In true startup fashion, the garage was used to assemble the company’s first products. Their first computer sold for ...
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VP of Sales and Marketing, VP of Marketing and Sales, or Neither?
What Seinfeld taught me about sales and marketing job titles.
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5 Hacks for Choosing Engaging B2B Blog Topics
Content marketing, and blogging in particular, is a relatively easy and low-cost marketing tactic that can be well worth the effort—if you can get your target audience to engage. Blogging can help establish your organization as a thought leader, convert leads to customers, increase website traffic, and even attract qualified ...
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B2B Marketing is (Not) Boring
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is boring, analytical, and hopelessly left-brained. That’s been the conventional thinking in the advertising world for years. If you’re mostly analytical and methodical in your thinking, you’re said to be left-brained. If you tend to be more creative or artistic, you’re thought to be right-brained. Mötley Crüe ...
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You’ve Got E-Mail: Implementing B2B Marketing’s Most Popular Tactic
B2B marketers rely on email marketing more than any other marketing tactic, according to the latest Sagefrog B2B Marketing Mix Report. It’s not surprising given that email marketing is also cited by marketers as a top source of leads (second only to referrals). In fact, the ROI on email marketing ...
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How to Use Nurturing to Turn Leads into Customers
The business-to-business (B2B) buying cycle can last months or longer, particularly if the capital outlay is significant. While patience may be a virtue, it’s not an effective sales strategy on its own. To convert leads into customers, you’ll need a documented marketing communication (marcom) plan that includes tactics for nurturing ...
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Measure Your Marketing to Find Qualified Leads
“What gets measured gets done.” It’s a popular business adage, and for good reason. The practice of setting measurable goals has proven effective, time and again, at compelling people and organizations to move initiatives forward.
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Marketing to Multiple Decision Makers? Start with Buyer Personas.
In contrast to much consumer buying, the business-to-business (B2B) buying decision is rarely made solo. Larger purchasing decisions typically involve multiple people within the organization, each with individual motivations and needs. Having a deep understanding of your audience is critical to creating marketing strategies and tactics that lead to customer ...
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