Marketing Interactions

OCTOBER 5, 2022

Considering only 18% of companies rate their customer experience as excellent (best in class), improving retention programs can help you transform your customer relationships—and your revenue growth. Given the programs I’ve worked on recently, here are two ideas to get you started thinking about and strategizing your retention programs.

Ideal Customer Profiles 62

Ideal Customer Profiles B2B Marketing Enterprise Management Work Management 62

Marketing Interactions

AUGUST 1, 2021

This estimate is based on the finding that companies replace solutions, on average, every five years. Therefore, brand building is defined as a long-term strategy that focuses on building brand awareness so when buyers become in-market your company is top of mind. But this only works when there aren’t glaring gaps between the two.

Demand 69

Demand B2B Marketing Brand Identity Branding 69

Marketing Interactions

AUGUST 15, 2022

The company objective may be to drive growth but that rolls down to buying committee members in different flavors based on their roles and responsibilities to the company—one of the things you learn with buyer persona development. So, let’s take growth as the overall company mandate. But how you get it isn’t as straightforward.

Buyer Personas 75

Buyer Personas Ideal Customer Profiles B2B Gartner 75

Marketing Interactions

JULY 18, 2021

But it’s not working out very well. In The Experience Disconnect , marketers say the personalization they deliver most is the customer’s name, company name, and industry. Buyers say the most important personalization factors are the problem they’re looking to solve, their company, and their industry.

B2B Marketing 75

B2B Marketing Personalization B2B Planning 75

Marketing Interactions

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Ask them to include the role of the person, industry, company, the related problem, and product along with the question. Given the context of the entire conversation, this could result in the question they asked being about efficiency or about whether the process could still work as promised with automation, for example.

B2B 75

B2B B2B Sales Webinar Metrics Buy 75

Marketing Interactions

DECEMBER 21, 2021

This transaction is still less complex than buying a collaboration technology for a company with 1,000 users where you must gain the consensus of 10 colleagues with different priorities whom you don’t know all that well to make the purchase. The prospect of career advancement by transforming a part of your company is, yes, emotional.

B2B Marketing 80

B2B Marketing B2B Content Paid Search Agency 80

Marketing Interactions

SEPTEMBER 20, 2018

For SaaS and subscription companies, winning a customer is only the first step of the journey to customer lifetime value (LTV). This may seem doable when a company is small, but as customer volume grows, so do those requirements just to maintain a consistency in monthly recurring revenues (MRR). Expand Customer Relationships.

Marketing Funnels 87

Marketing Funnels Top of Funnel B2B Marketing Work Management 87

Marketing Interactions

MARCH 25, 2023

The top two industries (71%) – financial services and technology companies. As someone who reads a ton of B2B marketing content and works to help companies create meaningful, provocative, and forward-looking content, I agree it is hard to come by. Understand what the companies you’re targeting have in common.

B2B Marketing 91

B2B Marketing Content Marketing B2B Content 91

Marketing Interactions

OCTOBER 15, 2021

RevOps is showing such strength as a go-to-market strategic approach that Gartner predicts 75% of high-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model by 2025. Which all boils down to the relevance and resonance of their experiences with your company—irrespective of team involved. Why B2B Marketers are Well Placed to Play a Pivotal Role.

B2B Marketing 131

B2B Marketing Lead Ranking B2B Paid Search Agency 131

Marketing Interactions

JANUARY 3, 2022

I’ve worked on several projects lately where clients provided me with buyer personas to create customer retention programs. It’s a new division of the company, they don’t know us yet, so they’re new buyers…. The point is > a net new buyer is different than a customer or a buyer whose company is already a customer.

B2B 69

B2B Paid Search Agency Lead Ranking Lead Scoring 69

Marketing Interactions

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

ABM is a terrific vehicle for enabling marketers and sellers to work in parallel to help B2B buyers do their own discovery and complete their pre-buying work to enable them to buy what you’re selling. What this means is focusing on the buying committees within target accounts that fit your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP).

Ideal Customer Profiles 62

Ideal Customer Profiles Account Based Marketing B2B ABM 62

Marketing Interactions

JANUARY 9, 2022

When content works together to build a sum of knowledge, each piece adds depth to, and expands, on the others. Forward-looking content that distills the trends you see coming and identifies the challenges they’ll bring (along with how you’ll help them pivot) can serve to help customers continue to gain value from working with you.

B2B Thought Leadership 62

B2B Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Content 62

Marketing Interactions

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

Of course, it’s truly difficult to nail context if you haven’t done the work to understand your buyers and customers at different points in the life cycle. Assumptions are clearly not working. This is also a great format for thought leadership content from your company. Something is missing. That something is context.

Work Management 96

Work Management Marketing Management B2B Thought Leadership B2B 96

Marketing Interactions

JANUARY 25, 2022

The beginning of the year is when a lot of B2B companies look at what they want to accomplish this year as a clean slate. Company objectives shift due to market fluctuations, board consensus, or the CEO’s new hyper interest. Almost like you’re starting from scratch. Room for adjustments exists.

B2B Marketing 69

B2B Marketing B2B Budget Programs Marketing & Strategy 69

Marketing Interactions

SEPTEMBER 21, 2021

What does your company think? POV only works if you don’t waver. Very little of it takes a stand about what the company producing it thinks. The other outcome from POV is that it makes your content/company memorable. Fortunately for you, not many companies have one that’s provocative or memorable. So, get after it!

B2B Thought Leadership 69

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership B2B Content 69

Marketing Interactions

APRIL 26, 2022

How we want people to “perceive” our companies goes to branding, positioning, messaging, and, most of all, our communications and content. As the quest for personalization increases, B2B marketers are told they must focus on the people, not the company. Marketing is all about perception. Don’t Confuse Personalization for Humanness.

Top of Funnel 91

Top of Funnel B2B Content Terms and Conditions 91

Marketing Interactions

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

Marketing sends an MQL to sales and the rep starts over as if there’s no relationship established with the company. Once you’ve laid this all out, you’ll quickly see what works together and what doesn’t. With all the data we have, this is kind of criminal.

B2B 149

B2B Lead Ranking Marketing Qualified Leads Content 149

Marketing Interactions

SEPTEMBER 30, 2018

It’s beyond time for B2B marketers to buckle down and do the work needed to become and stay relevant with their prospects and customers. These two quadrants are based on an inside-out approach that puts the company and its products first. I could go on, but I think you get the point. Context: The Cornerstone of Relevance.

Relevance 58

Relevance B2B Marketing B2B Broadcasting 58

Marketing Interactions

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

Let’s work through it > an unwelcome situation could invite a variety of responses, including: Ignoring it and hoping it goes away. That all takes time, research and political negotiations depending on company culture. There’s wiggle room in that definition. It doesn’t mean buy something new. Asking someone else to deal with it.

Top of Funnel 88

Top of Funnel B2B Peer-to-peer Lead Ranking 88

Marketing Interactions

AUGUST 15, 2021

And, before you start yelling that you “have” to send everyone to sales, I’ve heard this antiquated notion shared by marketers in a variety of companies. Usually, these are sales driven companies that tolerate marketing as the fluffy cost center but don’t trust them with prospects beyond the form fill. Most companies do not.

Marketing Qualified Leads 62

Marketing Qualified Leads Lead Ranking Sales Qualified Leads High Quality Lead 62

Marketing Interactions

JUNE 27, 2021

Misperceptions they had to work to overcome—for them or for others on the buying committee. Account personas give you an understanding about the company. It’s mission, business objectives and core values to help you weave a thread of company/account relevance throughout your communications, content, and messaging.

Buyer Personas 111

Buyer Personas B2B Ideal Customer Profiles ABM 111

Marketing Interactions

AUGUST 24, 2021

And for buyers who have already done the work they need to do to decide they’re in market. We understand what it does, how it works, why it’s needed, and more. They’ve got work to do. But, even better, they’ll become advocates for your company and brand based on your helpfulness. Jobs to complete. Thinking to be done.

B2B Thought Leadership 62

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership B2B Gartner 62

Marketing Interactions

JULY 25, 2019

In my work building personas, I find that often to be a low-ball count. And content that tells a disconnected story will only result in confusion that causes buyers to have a lack of faith that your company knows what it’s talking about and has the expertise to help them solve the problem. Let’s take an example.

Relevance 73

Relevance Work Management Marketing Management B2B Sales 73

Marketing Interactions

JUNE 4, 2017

Pushing product: it’s what B2B companies have been doing for years. We have all these meetings and mandates about what the company wants to accomplish and rally our teams to create strategies and execute tactics to achieve them. ABM makes your company focus on the entirety of the buying or change management process.

Account Based Marketing 64

Account Based Marketing ABM Lead Scoring Lead Ranking 64

Marketing Interactions

APRIL 11, 2019

Email marketing was a thing, but back then we were all pretty much broadcasting about our products and how great our companies were. Then social media came along, and you could draw an audience to your company’s content outside of those you knew in your database. And, getting other departments involved, how would that work?

Peer-to-peer 53

Peer-to-peer Content Enterprise Management Broadcasting 53

Marketing Interactions

APRIL 18, 2019

What we forget is that we’ve bought into what our company is selling. When you’re working on mapping out your content marketing strategy, start with the action you want them to take and then back into it. Asking for big swings doesn’t work. The Problem is Lack of Buyer Context. Marketers don’t know their buyers’ context.

Buyer Personas 119

Buyer Personas Buying Cycle Case Studies Case Study 119

Marketing Interactions

JULY 25, 2021

All personalization that works effectively is reliant on context. We all know (at least I hope we do) that field merges for a person’s name or company are weak because often they are the only components (loosely) related to personalization. So, what, then, is just plain old personalization?

B2B Marketing 69

B2B Marketing B2B Paid Search Agency Buying Cycle 69

Marketing Interactions

MARCH 22, 2022

The way B2B companies qualify leads is based on what we want, rather than letting our buyers guide us. And I’d wager that if you look at the way your company applies BANT, need has an inside-out focus. But the way we define it is more like, the company could use our stuff because they fit in the parameters of our ICP.

Work Management 62

Work Management Marketing Management Ideal Customer Profiles Sales Qualified Leads 62

Marketing Interactions

MAY 21, 2018

Content serves as the champion of your company. of companies maintain consistent content scores across the various types of content on their websites. Financial Services companies fared a bit worse at 33.3% Research from a few years ago found that companies wasted $0.25 consistency with their content.

Cost 69

Cost Content Marketing Automation Services Work Management 69

Marketing Interactions

DECEMBER 26, 2016

They know that company and product-oriented content is not the most effective, but they still produce as much of it as content focused on the issues and problems their buyers face. And through client engagements, I also know it works. Download your copy of the State of the Conversation Report to see why we need to do the hard work.

Conversion 82

Conversion B2B Top of Funnel Stats 82

Marketing Interactions

MAY 23, 2018

But reconciling all of that to truly know what’s going on with content and programs across the company is harder than I remember it to be. This means that all the hard work marketing has done across the organization will be minimized. This becomes more critical with many marketers expected to drive at least 25% of company revenues.”.

Advertising Benchmark 83

Advertising Benchmark Marketing & Strategy B2B Content 83

Marketing Interactions

APRIL 14, 2019

However, if you say “doing X will allow your workforce to cut 5 steps out of a 10-step process, allowing them cut response time to service tickets in half,” those details will cause your buyer to sit up and ask just how that works (if your buyer is in charge of the help desk, for example). Use Marketing Automation to Increase “Turns”.

Conversion 86

Conversion Marketing Automation Services B2B Trigger Marketing 86

Marketing Interactions

OCTOBER 8, 2020

One of the fallacies that companies bought into with sales enablement is that more is better. Marketing and sales, working together, can use sales enablement to transform how buyers value sellers and engage them by using content to simplify buying. Use Sales Enablement to Put Content in Context.

Buy 77

Buy Peer-to-peer B2B Work Management 77

Marketing Interactions

DECEMBER 26, 2016

Nearly all B2B companies are using content marketing to attract and engage buyers. But getting it right is still a struggle for a majority of companies. The issue that is most prevalent today within B2B companies is a lack of communication due to silos of effort and separate agendas across teams. Collaboration. And it can be.

Lead Ranking 72

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Marketing Planning 72

Marketing Interactions

DECEMBER 29, 2016

Using content for marketing in B2B companies has caught on with a fervor that continues unabated. It boggles the mind that we’d keep doing more of something that we aren’t sure is working. But, what concerns me is that rather than trying to fix the effectiveness issue, marketers are running full steam ahead. Refine it some more.

B2B Marketing 81

B2B Marketing Content Marketing B2B Content 81

Marketing Interactions

NOVEMBER 29, 2021

Because for a reason that may have worked decades ago when information was scarce, the powers that be cannot get past the idea that filling out a form constitutes a lead. And search is one of the primary tactics’ buyers use to find content they’re interested in consuming, hence, your company. It’s easy to share a link.

B2B 62

B2B Work Management Marketing Management B2B Thought Leadership 62

Marketing Interactions

JUNE 23, 2017

Questions to Ask Salespeople: Who do you usually interact with at prospective companies? Based on the outcome of Step 1, define a list of contacts at customer companies that will represent the persona(s) you’re building. But each of these people essentially had the same role within their company—as well as within the buying process.

Buyer Personas 74

Buyer Personas Enterprise Management B2B Marketing Marketing & Strategy 74