Beyond Marketing

How is this (example of French Restaurant of Paul Bocuse)  of any significance and relevance to our B2B demand generation world? To my mind, there is a lesson to be learned about how to make success enduring...

“Agile” describes a deeper trend in business management: to concentrate on a new way of doing business that strives for innovation while minimizing the

hen planning their content marketing campaigns.

The tendency is to think "what shall we give our audience?" when it is just as important to ask "why should they care?"

I am fascinated by the whole psychology of social media: What motivates people to take certain actions, such as overshare the minutiae of their life, or angrily "out" brands on social networks rather than complain directly to them in private, or retweet unproven allegations (and therefore get sued), and so forth?

As well as these inevitable threats there lie opportunities for marketers if they can understand what motivates people to retweet, share, plus one, like and comment on content.

We hear a lot about the word “engagement”, but just what is it? We see that as the point at which customer-focussed content linked to business objectives meets the demands that target audiences want satisfied, be that the answer to a specific question, a general quest for knowledge in a particular field or just purely entertainment.

If marketers can find that sweet spot where their content satisfies consumer demand then they stand a chance at being successful at content marketing. They have achieved engagement

Marketers face a groundswell of exponential technological advancement that promises to change everything from how we market to the type of value we bring to the table. We need to adapt, and adapt now, or watch bots take our jobs.

Don't put all of your eggs in one basket by only focusing on the latest and greatest. Diversify your efforts to and make sure you have a complete marketing strategy.

What is the "Internet of Things" and how will it impact marketing in the future? Read this for some excellent resources and my view.

As part of my IBM training this week, we learned data mining as a tool to manage data and make decisions that build your ROI. How predictive analytics builds your ROI."

Search Engine Optimisation has changed heavily over the last few years which is why I've created this guide.

Content marketing is about attracting the right target audience and getting them to take appropriate action as a result of engaging with your content. Content marketing metrics is about measuring the results.

In this two part post, I’ll cover the rise of influencer marketing as a promising practice for social businesses and how to win the race to seize its benefits.

This first post will detail why influence marketing will enjoy very strong increases in marketing investment from brands in the coming years as they will realize it is a key element of their digital communication strategy.

Influencer marketing is expected to be one of the fastest growing areas of social media in the coming years and a new area of focus for brands engaging in social media marketing.

Some say it is the new Eldorado. Should we be surprised?

Businesses of all sizes are embracing SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service, which is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. With this software delivery model, software and associated data are centrally hosted on the cloud. How does SaaS differ from other cloud models, including the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) models?

A visual experience with infographics, cartoons, and stats from Brian Solis' new book, What's the Future of Business

There's been a lot written - some of it by me - about the stages B2B prospects tend to go through in their buying decision process, and the need to align your your sales and marketing tactics accordingly. Of course, their journey is rarely linear: at any point they can choose to move forwards, revert to a previous stage, put the project on hold, or abandon the journey altogether.

But the stage your prospect is currently at isn't the only thing you need to be aware of when it comes to understand their likely buying behaviour: you also need to understand something about the state of their thinking about what they are trying to achieve, and how they think they might go about achieving it.

"When it comes to lead generation, many marketers aren't sure which are the best marketing tactics to use to provide their company with the largest number of qualified leads"

Relevant customer data and communication approaches are key There’s no denying that customer churn can slow the growth of a company over time. It’s an

Want to increase qualified leads more than fourfold? What used to be a vapid sales pitch is now a quantitative reality – over the past decade, enterprise technology has exploded onto the scene and fundamentally changed organizational processes and management. Departments outside of IT have embraced technology, with Finance leveraging ERP to improve accounting and billing processes, Sales taking advantage of SFA to better connect with and manage prospects, and more recently, Marketing turning to marketing automation to streamline, automate and measure the efforts needed to reach, nurture and convert the increasingly empowered consumer at scale.

Marketing wasn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game.

Your competitor bought a TV commercial, you bought a TV commercial. They bought radio time, you bought radio time. Even if they bought every available second of radio time on one station, you could buy time on another, or go to a completely different medium.

That promoted two good things:

Creativity in advertising. Creativity entertains consumers and forces brands to take a hard look at themselves every few months. This inspires a kind of corporate self-awareness that keeps the best consumer and business brands sharp.Great products. Products with high value get a huge advantage. The same properties that enable great marketing and advertising drive great products: Clear vision, quality, usefulness, and creativity (that keeps coming up, doesn’t it).

Of course, business has always been a zero-sum game, in a way: If you win a customer, that’s one less customer for your competitor. But the competition for actual share of voice plays out in a huge arena where ties are possible. Yours and your competitor’s marketing campaigns might be equally good, and you might win the same amount of business.

Alas, none of this is true any more. Google ruined marketing.

Back before Google, two companies spending the same dollars to market competitive products could win solid marketshare. Not any more.

Well, OK, Google didn’t exactly ruin marketing. It, and other search engines turned it into a nasty, zero-sum game. But saying ‘Google ruined marketing’ will get more people to read and link to this article, which is critical for my company’s SEO…

Looking for a compelling inbound marketing stat? You can rely on this blog post for that.

The changing shape of the buyer's journey has introduced a raft of new issues for sales leaders who are trying to manage sales pipelines and generate accurate revenue forecasts. Prospects are leveraging the internet and business social media to do their research - and engaging sales people later in the decision making process.

In fact, the latest research from the CEB suggests that the typical B2B buying-decision process is 57% complete before a salesperson is even actively involved. By that time, the prospect is a long way down the path of scoping their needs, establishing their priorities, defining their requirements, and short-listing potential solutions

With technical skills such as Java, C++, Python and more in high demand for “Big Data” analytics, it seems like softer business skills such as speaking, writing, planning, leadership, negotiation etc. are falling by the wayside. But the ability to communicate, relate and navigate throughout an organization—so called “softer skills”—are especially needed to propagate analysis and communicate the impact of data-driven decision-making.

In 2012, cloud computing blogger David Linthicum penned a short piece explaining “3 Winners and 3 Losers in the Move to Big Data”.  In the post Linthicum identified one “loser” as data warehouse and BI specialists, presumably because these folks were accustomed to using languages like old-school SQL and supporting “legacy BI” systems.

In the beginning, there were products and services, and some were good. Fewer became trusted brands, but those that did enjoyed unquestioned loyalty supported by a simple yet effective marketing engines built to reach people in mass quantity.

I get pushback from many entrepreneurs and business owners as well as CMOs in larger businesses about the idea of using inbound marketing because they see the investment in people to create content as a barrier.