Buyer Personas for the B2B Marketer. While buyer personas have a long history  (starting to be widely publicized in the early 90′s), what I’ve seen from all the templates that I could find is they are mostly focused on the B2C market adding strong emphasis to demographics, which in the B2B world are not as relevant as say, the person’s title or role in the purchasing process. Another interesting development that is shaking the B2B space is the increase influence of social media in buying decisions. Infrastructure. Process Planning. Program Execution. MORE >>

The Effective Marketer Effectiveness is a discipline and it can be learned Home About the Effective Marketer Books Speaking B2B Marketing Summit Shows Old Problems Persist So it seems MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit 2010 is over and from what I read in their wrap up post , the same old problems plaguing marketers for the last 5 years are still here today. First of all, what is this summit? Sometimes we just need to be reminded of the obvious so that we can focus on the essential. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Like Be the first to like this post. MORE >>

Content Marketing b2b content marketing marketing challenge marketing focusWhether you have 5 or 50 people in your marketing team odds are that the demands for more whitepapers, a new website redesign, additional email campaigns, and overall more content creation are increasing. If recent reports like this one are any indication, marketers across the board are being pressured to produce more and more content. How do you do it? The answer is focus. I’ve seen big and small companies alike fall into this content creation trap. What’s wrong with this approach? MORE >>

While the key mission for Public Relations in most B2B companies is still related to brand recognition and market credibility, the increasing role of content marketing in assisting PR with such efforts is now being seen as critical at most leading companies. 'That is the title of a recent Aberdeen Group report, Publish or Perish: Content Marketing is the New PR,  which you can download for free (registration required) here. Content Marketing Leaders and Followers. 12% growth in year-over-year company revenue (vs 3.5% for followers). 20% year-over-year increase in media mentions (v 2.7% MORE >>

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit Boston 09/26-27 Boston, MA MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit SF 10/24-25 San Francisco, CA Dreamforce 2011 August 30-Sept 2 San Francisco, CA BlogWorld Expo October 14-16 Las Vegas, NV Conferences abound, but they are a great way to learn new things, network, and more importantly get out of the office and focus for a couple days. You’re note alone. few good events have come and gone, like the Digital Marketing Forum , MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Summit , and the Email Evolution Conference and I completely missed them. MORE >>