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Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Monday, June 6th, 2011
 By 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. (more…)
Tags: Alinean, content marketing, JLC Marketing, John Love, mapping content to the buyers cycle, Tom Pisello
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Charlene 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
It’s amazing to think of the global impact social media has brought in such a short period of time. It was only in May of 2007, four years ago, that the Facebook platform launched. Now with 650 million users, Facebook is easily on its way to 1 billion! The iPhone App Store launched in July 2008, less than 3 years ago. How did we get by without the 350,000 apps now available?
(more…)
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
Download 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.
Tags: leadership, Marketing High Ground, messaging, personas, positioning statement
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Tuesday, 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…)
Tags: customer centric selling, Forrester Research, outcome selling, Sales, sales enablement, Scott Santucci
Posted in Marketing, Sales | No Comments »
Monday, January 31st, 2011
Kathy 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.
(more…)
Tags: BMA NorCal, Kathy Klotz-Guest, Powerfully Funny, video
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
What 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,
Eventually this model, driven by the engineers and salesmen whose roles were never designed to understand and target complete markets, always runs out of steam.
(more…)
Tags: High Ground, leadership, Marketing
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Tuesday, 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:
(more…)
Tags: customer based selling, marketing-sales relationship, sales cycle, sales strategy, Social Media
Posted in Marketing, Sales | No Comments »
Monday, October 11th, 2010
At 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:
(more…)
Tags: B2B marketing, cio buying process, content marketing, customer based selling, Integrated Marketing, Marilou Barsam, personas, product comparisons, techtarget
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Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
I attended a great DMA Northern California presentation yesterday by Ayush Agarwal, Head of Products at CoTweet. The topic, “What’s Twitter Up to Next?” Here’s a brief recap…
In the last two years, Twitter has grown from 500,000 to 145,000,000 users. Each day there are 350,000 new signups, 80 million tweets and 14 million new followers.
According to Ayush, “if you have a business, you have to have a social presence so you can be where your audience is.” It’s important to monitor what’s being said about your company and your brand and be proactive in engaging with prospects and customers in a two-way dialog. He thinks of a company’s brand as the sum of all of the conversations about it.
Twitter has made several enhancements recently, including these new features:
(more…)
Tags: cotweet, DMA Northern California, promoted trends, promoted tweets, Twitter, verified accounts
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Monday, August 23rd, 2010
This is a good question. One that can lead to confusion and consternation if the role isn’t clearly defined at the outset. I had the opportunity to attend a conference hosted by the Product Realization Group last week. Often, but not always, this role falls on the shoulders of someone in product management or product marketing.Rob Bisaillon, director of new product introduction at Verigy Memory and Application Specific Test Systems Division, offered a few success factors regarding the NPI process, and insights into the most effective product launch bosses.
Rob’s list of Key Success Factors included:
(more…)
Tags: integrated marketing campaign planning, launch, launch boss, marketing strategy, new product introduction, NPI, product strategy
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