Seeing that my last post was about a report that showed B2B websites were critical to marketing but not performing up to their potential, I thought I'd share some ideas about what your website must accomplish in order to start climbing that ladder of opportunity. It really doesn't have to be that difficult. After all, a B2B website must serve as a centralized hub for all of your online content marketing efforts. Orient Visitors Immediately. You've got 3 seconds. This doesn't just mean for your homepage, it means for EVERY page. Speak Directly to Visitors. Always. Yes, I know. MORE >>

In line with my recent Shiny Object post , I thought I'd explore another argument in favor of B2B content marketing; namely improving the cost effectiveness of marketing. Considering that content marketing — done well — is a never-ending continuum , one of the obstacles for B2B marketers often times appears to be based on a cost-driven argument from the "con" perspective. Obviously, I've got a counter for that. And those returns can be tied pretty darn closely to revenues. If you're just starting out on a content marketing strategy, there is a lot of work to be done. MORE >>

Brand positioning is becoming critical as more B2B marketers turn to content marketing across a range of channels to cultivate standoffish, self-service buyers. Your corporate positioning should be used as the backbone for your content strategy. This is what will hold it all together to ensure consistency and keep your storylines on track—no matter the channel in use. The problem is that corporate positioning has traditionally been seen as a way to differentiate a company from its competition. Every company has a distinct value they provide that their customers need and want. Probably not many. MORE >>

Many of the projects I do for companies start with buyer personas. After all, it's a logical place to start as it's next to impossible to develop a content strategy without a keen understanding of the people involved in buying complex B2B product offerings. But I'm noticing a trend I hadn't foreseen. Marketers are keeping buyer personas in the closet. Yep, it's true. talk with a lot of marketers who insist they have buyer personas and some who have no clue that they do, but find them lurking in a file somewhere once they start looking. At all. But here's the real kicker. MORE >>

When alignment is discussed in marketing, the usual application is to sales and marketing alignment. This has been an ongoing conversation for nearly as long as I can remember. And I've been in the business environment for quite a while. The issue that comes up for me is that there are some alignment issues before we can even get to sales and marketing alignment that could have major implications for brands, if they took stock. What I'm talking about are two sources of fragmentation - the second driven by the first. marketing misalignment. customer misalignment. Apparently it's not. MORE >>