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

It's the given constant frustration in every B2B company: Marketing needs to give really good leads to sales so sales can pick up the phone, ask "Wanna buy?" to a resounding "Yes" from the buyer, Right? But the reality is Marketing delivers leads of a variety of types at an equally varied levels of quality to a Sales team that has been given the expectation of converting every single one to sale. It just sounds like it's not going to work. And often, it doesn't. So, Marketin

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

From Fast Company Too many tech companies I've worked with focus their marketing energies on telling buyers what they do. The problem? It's nothing more than a boring list of features that doesn't engage the audience. The idea of storytelling is all about using a story to get them to become emotionally connected. The brain is wired for stories - it's the very reason movies as a medium have withstood well over 100 years of success with no end in sight. We love a good story. A

So you posted a blog article, no doubt spouting out some magnificent thought leadership that will change the way the industry thinks about the need for your product. And then, like most companies, you do nothing else with it. Why? That's some really great writing and content! My guess is you have no strategy of what else to use blog content for. Here are a few useful ideas of great uses for blog content. Email Marketing - Not everyone who is a prospect or customer is hitti

When implementing Marketing Automation, one of the inevitable questions becomes "are we going to use lead scoring?" It's an intrinsic part of leading MA platforms such as Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot. If you're not familiar with it, lead scoring allows you to place value on actions, assets and even frequencies of activity and produce a "score" to define which prospects are engaged and which are not. While I'm a believer in lead scoring, I don't always feel it's the best fit for

From Content Marketing Institute Most of you are heads down, pumping out content and creative, bringing in leads, even doing some analysis, but it's not as effective as it could be. Jay Hidalgo breaks down three processes that every marketing team should find time to do in order to improve the quaity and effectiveness of their work. I'll spoil the article a but with the list: Develop a buyer persona. Define the buying process. Develop a content framework. The most important

It's the great debate - For a B2B-focused business, how often should you post new content to your blog? Once a day? a week? a month? It's a great question that doesn't have a simple answer that fits every marketing organization. If you over blog, you potentially fal into a category of too much content with too little value. If you under blog, you look like no one's home and are not relevant to their concerns. It's a balancing act that requires some real thought. Here are a n