Heather took us through Eloqua’s approach to content marketing – and, as we’ve been reiterating for the last few weeks, what makes the approach notable is its discipline and tight integration with customer needs and business outcomes. To sum it up, Eloqua segments potential customers in four ways, and aims particular kinds of content at each group: Suspects  - people who may, in any conceivable way, influence the buying process. This content should  not be commercial or gated – gates and sales pitches turn suspects off. How to determine a lead? MORE >>

Our resources in the Marketer’s Playbook will help you identify the design and content principles common in all best-in-class sales collateral and access tools to evaluate the collateral you already have. It’s a perennial complaint we hear from B2B marketers: “We did all this work to put together a great sales tool/piece of collateral/campaign, but Sales refuses to use it! What’s going on?” Others get frustrated and quit. So what seems to be the problem? Collateral development. Cornerstones B2B Marketing Marketing Communications Sales Support MORE >>

Smart companies craft well-planned content strategies that consider each of the channels and formats in which a key insight will work best – and work out when/how to push each idea. We recently polled B2B CMOs on their top priorities for next year and “Digital integration” came pretty high on the list.  Since buyers increasingly delay contact with Sales in order to do their own supplier research online, digital is a pretty hot topic for B2Bs.  That’s why most invest almost 15% of marcomm budget in digital and emerging channels (and even higher for B2B services). LinkedIn vs. Facebook). MORE >>

Content marketing is becoming a bigger part of many B2B marketers’ lives:  The Content Marketing Institute found that over 60% of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget over the next year, and over 90% of B2B marketers are using content marketing to build their brands.  These marketers are using an average of eight content tactics, including everything from blogs to whitepapers to infographics. To get content into your customers’ hands, it needs to be credible.  Integrate content into your other marketing efforts. MORE >>

Some of them take the easy route, proclaiming 2012 as the year of mobile marketing or the year of content marketing (uh, 2009 called, it wants its title back).  Among these five, the shift from just using to producing content was seen as the most near term while the ability of marketers to predict purchasing needs was thought to be the furthest out.  Editorial calendars will be as important to marketing departments as strategic plans with content purposefully and precisely plotted out according to company strategic priorities. Happy New Year!  Cornerstones B2B Marketing MORE >>