Never forget your customers are your best advocates: We all create case studies. Sit down. Brace yourself. According to a recent DemandGen report, 9 out of 10 business buyers say that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find you. Now ask yourself, in all honesty, will they? The fact is the b2b buy cycle is changing fundamentally – and vendors are on the back foot. The Internet has empowered buyers of business services and products with the ability to research, scope, specify, shortlist vendors, and even purchase, without us even getting a sniff of what they’re up to. Research your market. MORE >>

It’s the best thing for it. Read the best blogs from other agencies. There is nothing quite as tedious as reading yet another blog about what makes the perfect post. If I’ve read it once I’ve read it one thousand times. 600 – 800 words is the optimum. Always tweet about it on a Tuesday. And definitely start with a joke. Everyone loves a joke. It’s with great trepidation, therefore, that this blog post touching on that very topic is written. But don’t flick over to Facebook just yet. This isn’t the usual gumpf giving ’12 crazy tips to make the perfect blog post’. Not what you know. MORE >>

The simple wins are often the best when it comes to educating internally. Sitting in a meeting a couple of weeks ago a jovial sales chap began to rib the marketing director about the extent of his role. You marketing lot just stick a few pictures in PowerPoints and brochures don’t you?’. How we giggled. While these views are clearly archaic, it does highlight an on-going issue that we marketers face – ‘how do we show the real value we add to the business?’. For the majority of other departments this job is easy. Sales guys can show directly where they are adding to the bottom line. MORE >>

Whether it’s a case study, best practice guide or white paper, PDFs are great for sharing content on the web. 8.    Probably the best word cloud visualisation tool we’ve seen to date – [link]. Top Tweeting. Would you believe it? Another month has flown by and even in the holiday season of August the world of B2B online has continued to churn out a flurry of facts, stats and information to wet your knowledge whistle. And so it’s that time again, our top 10 tweets of the month for you to peruse at your will. – [link]. Not an Earnest guarantee. Wrong. Let us know. MORE >>

Give consideration to how you can support them at each stage in the sales cycle – from helping them best position offerings in the context of a prospects’ specific needs, giving them the content to build a compelling business case through to providing them with proof points, whether case studies or ROI calculators. Fire up your browser. Tap the words ‘Marketing and Sales Alignment’ into Google. Wait 0.10 seconds – and guess what – you’ll get a whopping 12 million search results. To misquote one beleaguered astronaut, “Houston, we have a problem.”. Marketing. Sales. What lead? MORE >>