I started looking at this image and compared to my own journey over the last 10 years and saw a lot of similarities. Being focused on helping companies market to the IT buyer, I wondered how would this impact my clients' ability to market their solutions when the "evolved employee" is their "evolved" buyer. First off, here's the complete image: Assuming this image to be accurate for the tech buyer, there are a few things marketing needs to consider: A greater sense of "what's

You spent an entire month working on a survey, only to find the result are nowhere near what you expected. It's not uncommon, and it's completely avoidable. Everyone wants that juicy stat they can use to garner attention from buyers, the press, and investors to justify their existence. And one of the best ways is to simply ask your target audience about the realities of the problems they face, their ability to solve those problems and how your way of solving the problem fits

Since the response for my "5 Elements of a Great Whitepaper" post was tremendous (nearly 600 views in just 3 days on LinkedIn), I though I'd follow up by covering another challenging piece of content marketing - the webinar. The webinar is another staple in the tech industry - it's an opportunity to learn about business challenges, hear what other companies are doing to solve them and to see what solutions exist. But it's not as simple as send out an email and have a webinar

In one of my previous lives, I spent well over a decade working in IT building and architecting networks, supporting users and spending weekends in server rooms doing migrations. It gave me some unique perspective in marketing and evangelizing tech solutions because, at some point in my career, I was the buyer. That perspective helped me realize that approaching, marketing, and selling to the tech buyer was a bit different. And even some of the approaches I used, say, 10 year

Whitepapers are a staple in any tech companies content arsenal as a lead generation tool. But, sadly, many just sit on the company's website and are never fully utilized. If a whitepaper is to have an impact in the buyer's journey, there are a few elements about your next whitepaper you need to consider when using it to generate leads. 1. The Title The title is probably the most critical aspect of your paper. Here's why. First off, if it doesn't catch the attention of the (p

If you're like most companies, you already have some kind of content marketing strategy, a blog, some whitepapers, social media presence, videos (and more) - all in the name of trying to engage the buyer along their journey. So what should you be doing next? We all know the marketplace has changed. It's not a buyer's world, so what do you need to add to the mix to improve the effectiveness of your content strategy? Here are three things leading edge marketing teams are doing

While the only real test of your content marketing is whether your company is seeing a return on the investment, it is helpful to see how you fare against the industry. A recent survey commissioned by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs asked over 1200 B2B marketers about the state of their content marketing efforts. Here are some highlights. Everyone's doing it... Or are they? One of the most interesting results was that 93% of those surveyed said they'r

I have yet to meet a VP of Marketing or CMO yet that has told me “we have enough content.” Based on the fact that you’re reading this article, you’ve already admitted your company lacks the proper content. And content marketing is the lifeblood of most organizations. Long gone are the days of simply saying “bread for sale”; today’s marketer needs to have blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, videos, and more, all telling prospective buyers why they need bread, what kinds of bre

The tech industry relies heavily on webinars as a marketing medium. They have the potential of engaging far more than a blog or a webpage, and, if done properly, should demonstrate the value of a product far better than just reading about it. But, should a should a webinar be more than just a webinar? A webinar is really nothing more than another piece of marketing content in a particular medium - albeit a central piece of content, given the amount of time, energy and resou

With so many technologies in place to track a buyers browsing habits, assets downloaded, visits repeated, and follow them literally just about anywhere on the Internet, how does marketing succeed in simply providing personalized content, rather than coming across as just plain creepy? You know - creepy. As in "I know so much about you and I've been watching you for awhile. I watch you when you surf on the Internet. I know your favorite web pages and how you like to visit only