Archive for the ‘Marketing’ CategoryMore on marketing best practices . . .Thursday, September 29th, 2011 With the launch of The Marketing High Ground, I was interviewed by the editors of DemandGen Report. Our discussion covered a variety of topics. I’ve captured excerpts of the interview based on specific topics of interest and thought I would pass them along. Benioff Ushers in the “Social Enterprise” at Dreamforce 2011Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 There were several key announcements by Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, at this year’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Over 45,000 people attended the event while 35,000 streamed it live. It was the first time I had to wait in line to cross Howard at Fourth to get to the keynote. The theme of the conference was the “social enterprise” – showing how social media and new collaboration tools are changing the way we do business. According to the Salesforce.com press release issued on August 31st, the social enterprise leverages …”social, mobile and open cloud technologies to revolutionize companies’ relationships with their customers.” Here is a quick summary of a few of the announcements made during the keynote that sales and marketing professionals will find of interest. All offerings are scheduled to be available in late 2011.
Vendors Role Evolving Into Content PublishersMonday, June 6th, 2011By guest blogger, John Love. I attended a webinar a couple weeks ago on content marketing entitled “Stay Relevant: Map Your Interactive White Papers to the Buyers Journey” featuring Tom Pisello, Chairman & Founder, Alinean Inc. The presentation started with a number of statistics to build credibility in white papers as a viable and engaging offer for prospects. And indeed they made a good case here (I’ll let the presentation speak for itself). The webinar was really to promote “interactive white papers,” which are dynamically customizable documents based on a quick survey – e.g. the examples might change based on industry, role, company size, location, etc. I wasn’t particularly impressed by those, but as with all such presentations, there were a couple nuggets that I thought were valuable and worth sharing.
To me, all of this is very consistent with the very definition of marketing, which is two parties with something that the other values entering into a process of finding each other and discovering the mutual benefit of doing business together. Vendors need to take the lead by openly sharing valuable information and educational content to no only build credibility but also trust. About the author: Charlene Li on the Social Media Evolution and RevolutionThursday, May 5th, 2011Charlene Li, CEO & Founder, Altimeter Group, coauthor of Groundswell and author of the newly-released book Open Leadership, spoke at the Northern CA DMA club last week. Here are some highlights from her presentation entitled “Social Media Revolution and Evolution” in which she shared her social media expertise from three different perspectives: past, present, and future. Past: Coherent Strategies Preview “The Marketing High Ground”Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011Download an excerpt — The Marketing High Ground If you are interested in the best practices surrounding persona development, drafting crisp positioning statements, and crafting messages that are relevant and meaningful to your persona, you’ll want to read The Marketing High Ground. Available in May 2011 on Amazon.com, this book is the essential playbook for B2B marketing practitioners. Outcome Selling Takes Customer Centric Selling to the Next LevelTuesday, March 15th, 2011 Are you doing the right things? Are you doing things right? Selling methodology and selling systems need to adapt quickly to accommodate changing business strategy. Product management priority should focus on portfolio responsiveness, where the portfolio is your collection of product, services and solutions. Marketing’s magic of messaging must adapt to changes in buying patterns and market needs. Sales can often be a bottleneck between the multifaceted vendor portfolio and the complex customer world. (more…) Marketing with Video: What’s the Story?Monday, January 31st, 2011Kathy Klotz-Guest gave a very educational and entertaining presentation at the NorCal BMA Marketing Strategy Roundtable last week. The topic: “What’s the Story with Video Strategies?” Kathy is founder of Powerfully Funny whose mission is to help organizations improve their innovation efforts, marketing and communications through humor, playfulness, and fun. As a marketing strategist and storyteller, Kathy specializes in helping her clients craft compelling stories to educate and drive awareness among their prospects and customers. Recently, Kathy conducted a study of 130 B2B and B2C businesses to identify best practices for marketing with video. The study was sponsored by the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR.ORG). Here are the key take-aways from the study and her presentation, which focused on three areas: content, integration & distribution, and measurement. A seat at the leadership tableThursday, January 27th, 2011What does it take for a marketer to earn, then command, a seat at the leadership table?  A new book by Mike Gospe, coming Spring 2011 This is a good question that challenges many marketers. Traditionally, certainly in Silicon Valley, companies are founded by technologists. When executive staff members are added, engineering, operations and sales leaders are often added long before a marketer. And who can argue success when a company’s products continue to sell without the aid of a marketing leader? The irony with this approach is that its success is likely to be short-lived. According to Brian Gentile, a well-known marketing leader and CEO of Jaspersoft,
Kick Down the Sales Silo WallsTuesday, November 2nd, 2010 What? Sales helping Marketing? That’s not the way we generally think of the marketing-sales relationship — We expect that marketing’s role is to help sales sell. Well, yes, that is marketing’s primary responsibility, but the relationship isn’t strictly one-sided. There are a number of things sales reps should be doing to improve the quality of Marketing’s deliverables. Why is this in Sales’ interest? First of all, sales people are in conversations daily with customers. The knowledge that they obtain can be key to the success of marketing’s communications, because the audience for most of marketing’s deliverables is, after all, customers. Who knows them better than Sales?! But that knowledge is more valuable if Sales shares it with Marketing, where it can be used in many ways: A Day in the Life of a CIOMonday, October 11th, 2010At last week’s TechTarget ROI Summit in San Francisco, Marilou Barsam, SVP of Client Consulting and Corporate Marketing at TechTarget, shared the results of a Spring 2010 survey of what TechTarget calls the “hyper-active researcher.” Key findings from the 1,700+ survey responses were that these buyers spend the majority of their research time online and nearly 33% are planning 4-6 IT projects within the next year. On the panel during her session was the CIO of a financial services firm. This individual represents the persona of the “hyper-active researcher” and shared with a packed room of B2B marketers how he approaches his role and prefers to interact with vendors. This CIO is always on the lookout for the next solution to move his company forward. During a typical day he: |
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