Your customers live in a world with competing priorities, differing opinions, and tight budgets, yet are being asked to find answers to real business problems. Can you repeat the business problems your customers are dealing with – in their own words? Beneath the business needs that your product may address, you also need to speak to the personal needs of your buyer. You have a great idea. You turned it into a product. It’s going to solve all kinds of problems. The company you work for is great (lucky you). You see it and you want everyone else to see it too. It’s natural. MORE >>

newsletters – Publish monthly and include product and company news, customer success stories, technical “how-to’s”, and business ideas. Do your topic justice by demonstrating a business problem and how it can be solved. It’s not an area you want to hand off to your already busy product managers or the new marketing coordinator you just hired. I just finished reading this year’s latest marketing survey results over at the Junta42 site. It’s interesting to see the popularity of different marketing content pieces as part of the overall marketing strategy. More inquiries? MORE >>

I skipped last week’s post since I was at the TDWI conference for business intelligence last week. We’ve retweeted links to great information and tweeted a mix of personal and business thoughts. It was a successful conference on a number of levels. One huge AHA (more like duh) moment for me was the reaction I got when meeting my social network friends in person for the first time. Let me set this up with a little background. As you know, I am a content marketer for high tech companies with a focus on BI. Where else would you find so many of your customers in one place? MORE >>

It’s important to understand this from a business perspective. The business climate is in perpetual motion. USP – A universal selling proposition (USP) is a short statement that is easy to remember and describes the benefits your customers will receive as a result of doing business with you – hence the word “proposition”. How do they like to do business? What motivates them in their business or career? Describe their line of business. If you sell to a variety of industries and different business sizes, create a persona for each one. Cool and hip? MORE >>

B2B marketers need to incorporate them into the overall strategy including the editorial calendar, yet be flexible enough to know when to change direction when business or technical trends shift. Who Says Geeks Aren’t Social? Think you won’t reach IT decision makers with social media? Think again! UBM’s 2011 Social Media and IT Marketing research shows that 69% of IT decision makers use LinkedIn and 44% use Twitter for professional use. Turns out IT decision makers are social too! Social media activities such as blogging and the use of Twitter require almost daily attention. MORE >>