There’s a brand new book that’s making waves in the B2B marketing community. Balancing the Demand Equation, by Adam Needles, addresses the strategy and tactics needed to succeed in modern business to business demand gen.
Adam Needles is the Chief Strategy Officer at digital demand generation agency Left Brain DGA, and for our upcoming #B2Bchat, we’re joined by the author as he answers questions related to B2B marketing, demand generation, and his hot new book. Join us this Thursday, October 5 at 5:00 p.m.! To learn more, be sure to follow @abneedles and @b2b_chat.
(Update: Two lucky #B2Bchat participants will receive a free copy of Adam Needles’ new book, Balancing the Demand Equation!)
Here are some of the questions we’ll cover:
Q. How is the role of B2B marketers changing within their organizations?
Q. What are the biggest problems faced by B2B marketers today?
Q. How do you define “demand generation”?
Q. What are the different buyer types?
Q. What do you mean by “demand process integration”?
Q. How can you best market to inactive buyers?
Q. Content marketing… examples of a company that has nailed it?
Q. Which B2B case studies would you recommend?
Q. What are people saying about your new book, Balancing the Demand Equation?
“Dear B2B Marketer: Your world is changing, and here’s the field guide that shows you precisely how to adapt.” - Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs and Co-author of Content Rules) on Needles’ new book.
Email marketing and social media marketing – two core marketing channels – were born approximately a decade apart. And among most B2B marketing organizations, social media and email are still handled as two separate entities.
Chris Hosford, in his recent article in BtoB Magazine, points out that social and email interactions depend on each other much more than is commonly acknowledged. Should there be a stronger push towards the convergence of social media and email as it relates to customer and prospect communication? What are the best ways to leverage the two mediums in tandem?
Join other B2B marketers for a lively Twitter chat on Thursday, September 8 (5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern) as we dive in to the following questions, and more!
Q. Do you collect social profile info for your customers/prospects?
Q. Does your email audience expect you to communicate with them via email?
Q. What are the best ways to get your social media audience to opt in to email communications?
Q. What are the best tools for bringing together social and email communication?
Q. Why are social media and email traditionally treated as silos?
Q. For the B2B marketer, what are the similarities between email and social media?
Q. Does an opt-in mean the same thing in social media as with email?
Here are some of the gems I found in the 70-page paper and which I cover in the video above.
Define targets for each of your marketing campaigns as you plan them. Consider setting a ‘best possible outcome’, ‘worst case scenario’ and ‘most likely outcome’. Express these targets in terms of number of leads, amount of incremental revenue to be generated, or in terms of anticipated ROI.
Keep 10% of your marketing budget for ‘Marketing R&D’. Experimentation can lead to new best practices. Acknowledge that you are experimenting with some of your programs and detach those from revenue targets.
Don’t Measure Just for the Sake of Measurement. Before you invest time and resources in measuring a data set, you should know what you would do if the answer turned out to be X or Y.
Define Distinct Stages in your Customer’s Buying Cycle. Especially in B2B, with longer sales cycles, you need to acknowledge the fact that there are several stages in the buying cycle. Marketing’s work will not only generate leads, but also help move leads forward through these stages. This requires fixed definitions – understood across the marketing and sales organization – based on business rules.
Measure Flow, Balance, Conversion and Velocity of Leads. Once you have lead stages defined, the following metrics will be most important: Flow (# of people entering the stage), Balance (current inventory in that stage), Conversion (% of names, on average, that make it from the previous stage) and Velocity (time it takes, on average, to complete the stage).
Aim to knowing the answers to these crucial questions: What would be the expected ROI if your marketing budget increased by 10%. What would be the impact on sales closed? Alternately, what would be the impact on sales if the budget was decreased 10%? Questions like these test marketing’s maturity.
This paper is a must-read for marketing executives that are aiming to improve their departments’ efficiency and accountability.
Okay, so you’re sold on the value of having a blog for marketing purposes. In fact, as a B2B marketer, you have probably been at the blogging game for three or four years now.
But how have social media changed the way you blog? Are you getting everything you can out of your corporate blog? What are the latest tips and tricks needed to turn your blog into the backbone of your content marketing strategy? Do your Twitter and Facebook followers read your blog?
We’d like to hear from you in our upcoming live Twitter chat, June 23, 2011. Follow the #B2Bchat Twitter stream starting at 5:00 p.m. Pacific where we will discuss Blogging in the Social Media Ecosystem.
Questions will include:
Q. How do you come up with good topics to blog about?
Q. How often should you blog?
Q. What are the most useful blogging plugins?
Q. Should your blog content feed into your social channels, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn?
Q. How would you describe a good blog commenting strategy?
Q. What are the best ways to leverage existing blog content with social channels?
“Being good… is different than being worth talking about.” – Andy Sernovitz
Imagine you are tasked with, or involved in, a major purchase decision for your company. Where do you go to for information? Whose advice do you seek and which recommendations carry weight?
As marketers, we understand value of word of mouth. Word of mouth is in our nature, and it’s powerful. How can we harness the opportunities before us to generate buzz, positive word of mouth, and new business referrals?
In our upcoming episode of #B2Bchat, we’ll look at B2B marketing as it relates to influence and word of mouth. Questions will include:
Q. What are the best ways to identify influencers in your industry?
Q. Do referral programs work? How?
Q. Brand advocacy: is it different in B2B?
Q. How can you (ethically) turn influencers into brand advocates?
Join us for the one-hour session, June 2 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Eastern where we dive into the topic of Marketing to Influencers!
Why do companies pursue content marketing, and how are they doing it? A new Infographic from Marketo and ColumnFive Media reflects the growing importance of content marketing, and gives us some insight into the specific tactics being used today.
Here are some of the highlights:
Companies with over 1,000 employees use an average of 9 content marketing tactics. Some of the most popular include social media, articles, newsletters, case studies and blogs.
54% of marketers use Facebook to distribute content.
The two biggest challenges when it comes to content marketing are: producing engaging content (36% of respondents) and producing enough content (21% of respondents).
B2B marketers allocate approx. 26% of their total marketing budgets to content marketing
The data for this Infographic came from Marketo’s Content Marketing Cheat Sheet and the 2010 B2B Content Marketing white paper on benchmarks, budgets, and trends from MarketingProfs and Junta42!
In his latest book titled Enchantment, Guy Kawasaki covers the principles that individuals and businesses can apply to achieve personal and professional success.
If you don’t have time to read the book, or are looking for a nice refresher, look no further. Here is a handy overview in the form of an Infographic: How to Achieve Enchantment.
Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, has provided inspiration to countless numbers of people since it was released over two decades ago. The seventh and final habit in the book focuses on continuous improvement, what Covey calls “sharpening the saw”.
What are the best ways for marketers to build and sustain their own expertise? Which books, which blogs, and which conferences, and which individuals drive us towards excellence?
Join us this Thursday for our next #B2Bchat event where we dive into these questions.
Q. What is the best marketing-related book you’ve read recently?
Q. Name a blog that you regularly draw inspiration from.
Q. Have you encouraged professional development for people you lead? What is your approach?
Q. What role can mentors play in a marketers’ professional development?
Q. How has social media changed the way marketers learn?
I’ve worked with several website designs and website redesigns over the years, and one thing that always strikes me about B2B sites is how much they all look the same. With a few exceptions, you’ll most often find a polished, sterile, brochure-like presence which is sure to appease the discerning B2B buyer. But is this what is really needed? Why do B2B websites follow a similar pattern, and are there opportunities to break the mould and still be successful?
Join us for our latest Twitter chat where we’ll discuss these questions and more. “Why are so many B2B website designs… Boring?” on #B2Bchat this Thursday, April 28 at 5:00pm Pacific. We look forward to your input!
Q. What are the first things that prospects look for on a B2B website?
Q. Does fun mean unprofessional? Which B2B companies have found the right balance?
Q. How often should a B2B site be redesigned?
Q. What is the fastest way to spice up your current B2B site?
Q. Who should give input into a site redesign?
Q. Are corporate websites losing out to the Facebook page?
I recently had the pleasure of reading Seth Godin’s latest book, Poke the Box. It’s a nice, light read and something that can be fit into an afternoon visit to your favorite coffee shop.
As with other Seth Godin books that I’ve read, the message first strikes you as self evident. “Of course this makes sense. Who wouldn’t know that?” But Seth has a way of taking the obvious, and using it as a means to teach a lesson.
I’d like to share some of the things that have stuck with me from this book. Incidentally, as I was reading it, Twitter provided a temporary outlet to tell the rest of the world what I was gleaning from the pages. There were a lot of bite-sized pieces of information, perfect for the 140 character limit on Twitter.
The basic premise of the book is that a lot of people are afraid of starting, of experimenting with new ideas, of ‘poking the box’ to see what happens.
“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth.
Not going all the way, and not starting.”
Siddhartha Gautama
The Starbucks story provides an example of how it’s ok to start, and be wrong at first. One of the founders, Jerry Baldwin, had a vision of a company that would sell coffee beans and tea leaves. His vision turned out to be wrong, and it was only after his business partner Howard Schultz visited Italy and developed a passion for espresso, that the company took the direction for which it is known today. Jerry Baldwin was wrong, but because he started, it allowed for the company to know it was wrong, then change direction.
The person who fails the most usually wins
Talk to any person who is successful and they will share with you their list of failures that helped bring them to where they are. If you fail only once, i.e. fail big, it’s game over. If you never fail, you’re either very lucky, or you’ve never tried succeeding. It is in allowing yourself multiple smaller failures, and learning from them, that you move forward to successes. Poke the box, figure out which ideas resonate, and then ship them.
Why is this message relevant now?
Today’s market is obsessed with novelty. In a world where information can spread quickly, the most remarkable ideas win.
Greetings! I'm Andrew Spoeth, and here you'll find a mix-match of gems on B2B marketing, social media, PR and technology. My day job has me working with the marketing team at Marketo, one of the hottest SaaS companies in Silicon Valley. You'll also occasionally find me speaking at industry events, and co-moderating a weekly chat on Twitter for marketers called #B2Bchat.
. It’s a nice, light read and something that can be fit into an afternoon visit to your favorite coffee shop.
