It is very common to find marketing content from manufacturers and industrial companies that is all about how great their products are or that their technology is innovative. Sellers may be too close to the forest to see the trees and firmly believe their marketing content is helpful to their buyers. Buyers can easily find information about your products and that of your competition from their online research. So ask yourself this question, “Is my industrial marketing content really helping my buyers make a more informed decision and is it moving them closer them to a RFQ?”. MORE >>

Google’s induction of “Google Plus Your World” has made B2B marketers everywhere feel compelled (and rightly so) to incorporate social media into their marketing. The question from the corner office often becomes “how do I measure my ROI from social media activity?” ” Believe it or not, it can actually be done, and with Google Analytics. [.]. B2B Web Strategy Google Analytics MORE >>

Last week, I was lucky to join Joe Apfelbaum  of Ajax Union  and Ben Kirshner  of Elite SEM on a panel (ably moderated by Jules Kibbe of   TicketNetworkDirect ) for the Ticket Summit on the recent changes in search marketing. The attendees are ticket brokers an dpartner sthat move most of the seats for entertainment and sporting events in the U.S., so you can imagine that they have a fierce interest in search marketing. It fell to me to explain the dreaded Google Panda update of its search ranking algorithm. Dozens of human raters might visit the same site and Google averages their answers. MORE >>

B2B Buying Process Today © All rights reserved by Kenny Madden. In the business-to-business world, the quest to connect with decision-makers has been and most likely will continue to be the main challenge confronting B2B leaders.  Meeting this challenge successfully is the essential lifeblood of survival for many B2B companies.  While today’s continuing convergence of the Internet, social technologies, and Enterprise 2.0 platforms are increasing B2B visibility like never before, connecting with buyers and decision-makers is becoming increasingly elusive. What has been missing?  MORE >>

I had an intriguing demonstration yesterday from social CRM vendor Nimble. Since “social CRM” could mean just about anything, it’s important to explain what Nimble actually does: it combines traditional contact management with automated access to social media information about those contacts. That might not sound like much, but in practice it’s pretty darn slick. Here’s how it works. Say you’re selling a product related to, oh, circuit boards. For the users themselves, Nimble has one more advantage: its lets them stick with familiar communication tools. MORE >>