Why is it that B2B websites silo their content under tabs for products, industries, customer stories, resources, news, events, etc? Seeing that my last post was about a report that showed B2B websites were critical to marketing but not performing up to their potential, I thought I'd share some ideas about what your website must accomplish in order to start climbing that ladder of opportunity. It really doesn't have to be that difficult. After all, a B2B website must serve as a centralized hub for all of your online content marketing efforts. Orient Visitors Immediately. Always. MORE >>

In today's market environment it should be designed around the intersection of your company's strengths in relation to your customers' needs. Every company has a distinct value they provide that their customers need and want. " If you go look at your About paragraph, how many words are self-serving, self-focused blather that make you feel good about working there but don't do a thing to make you memorable to potential customers? Think about Joe in your development bullpen who really wants to blog about the new features he's creating for customers. MORE >>

Finally, I could talk about cost effectiveness from many different ways, including shortening time to sales, improving the quality of leads that impacts sales acceptance, customer retention and loyalty, lower cost of customer, and others. In line with my recent Shiny Object post , I thought I'd explore another argument in favor of B2B content marketing; namely improving the cost effectiveness of marketing. Obviously, I've got a counter for that. And those returns can be tied pretty darn closely to revenues. But it will. Lay out the costs and compare the pros and cons. MORE >>

customer misalignment. In my experience, each of these silos has their own budget and turf and it's really hard to gain overlays that enable the creation of consistency for the brand and for the customer experience. The issue really is that with the proliferation of digital channels, each of these marketing teams may be providing programs visible to customers that have no consistency of messaging or connection to the other initiatives also being presented. What a waste of resources and the opportunity to have our customers see us as awesome. Product marketing. MORE >>

For personas to become useful tools, they must be based on interviews gathered from salespeople, customer service interactions and the buyers (customers) themselves. They're useful to customer service, to salespeople, to lines of business, to product development and R&D. Or are they front and center driving your content strategy and customer-facing business processes? Many of the projects I do for companies start with buyer personas. But I'm noticing a trend I hadn't foreseen. Marketers are keeping buyer personas in the closet. Yep, it's true. MORE >>