Chris Koch

JUNE 18, 2010

Clear, simple product that everyone understands, right? When Zane started out, he faced competition from much larger bike shops, so he couldn’t afford to compete on price of the product. For those of us struggling with B2B marketing and all its complexities, this will help clarify some core issues. Image via Wikipedia.

Wikipedia 100

Wikipedia Marketing Management Training Conference 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

Companies that made commodity products would tell me with straight faces that even their financial processes were unique—GAAP be damned—and that they needed to customize their software to fit “our ways of doing things.” Recommend products and services that you haven’t thoroughly researched and you will most likely be out of a job.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 18, 2012

And many who do would be better off getting some help. I’ll also name the writers that I have working with the SMEs as we are doing interviews and working towards the “final” products: white papers, videos, etc. I wanted to present the core arguments here to see what you think. What are your arguments (for and against)?

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Communities Transparency 100

Chris Koch

MAY 19, 2014

MakerBot , a manufacturer of desktop 3D printers priced at the level of a decent laptop, is the best known of companies producing a product that has already been raised to PC-level stature in terms of its potential impact on business and society. A CEO Who Lived the Crisis in Education.

Conference 100

Conference Education Viral Marketing Class 100

Chris Koch

MAY 14, 2010

We’re seeing companies use social media to bring customers into the product and service development processes to collaborate on new ideas and improvements. We need to create an idea engine within the organization to help SMEs come up with things to Twitter and blog about. Our subject matter experts (SMEs) are talking to customers.

Organic Leads 100

Organic Leads Social Media Social Marketing Organization 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 4, 2011

Publishers are left with a trickle of revenue and B2B companies discover just how uninterested a generic online audience is in their products and services. Does that help clarify what to do next? It’s a no win for everybody except the ad agencies. From the ashes of trade journalism, an opportunity for marketers. What do you think?

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Advertising Agencies B2B Marketing Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Recently, I was asked by a former ITSMA client to help put together a plan for a thought leadership program for a B2B technology company that sells both products and services. Answers to these questions will help drive the structure of the program and provide a foundation for achieving ROI goals.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing Paper 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Recently, I was asked by a former ITSMA client to help put together a plan for a thought leadership program for a B2B technology company that sells both products and services. Answers to these questions will help drive the structure of the program and provide a foundation for achieving ROI goals.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

I’m hearing a lot from clients and researchers about how vast swaths of salespeople need to be eliminated as companies transition from selling products to services and solutions. But I think we start slicing the genetic material a little too thinly when we separate the product salespeople from the services salespeople. Information.

Marketing Automation Services 100

Marketing Automation Services Consulting B2B Sales Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

I’m hearing a lot from clients and researchers about how vast swaths of salespeople need to be eliminated as companies transition from selling products to services and solutions. But I think we start slicing the genetic material a little too thinly when we separate the product salespeople from the services salespeople. Information.

Marketing Automation Services 100

Marketing Automation Services B2B Sales Consulting Marketing Automation 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 11, 2014

For example, what customer do you know of that would be willing to sit for hours in sub-zero temperatures just to get your product (okay, maybe Apple fans do that somewhere, but other than that, it works. Recognition programs can be as simple as an usher greeting season ticket holders by name as they take their seat.

Loyalty 100

Loyalty Eye-Tracking Mobile Marketing Stats 100

Chris Koch

JULY 28, 2010

This is especially true for services companies, who don’t have concrete products that can do the branding for them.). Another problem is that they may move on to another company, perhaps taking their audience and any brand cred they’ve helped you build with them (most people pick on Robert Scoble as an example of this).

Blogger 100

Blogger Wikipedia Work Management Social Media 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 5, 2010

First, it focuses the agency on some clear goals—cranking out press releases and getting press mentions—and gives the guard dogs a degree of separation that helps with risk management. This means that metrics are based on merely making contact and shoveling crap out the door rather than helping influencers meet their goals.

PR 100

PR Press Paid Search Agency Lead Ranking 100

Chris Koch

JULY 22, 2011

We help ease them into the idea that they need our services and solutions to solve these problems so that the experience of spending all that money feels a little less like stepping off a cliff. The highest production-value material I received upon discharge was a two-color, 24-page glossy magazine entitled “A Guide to Taking Warfarin.”

Work Management 100

Work Management Marketing Management Social Media B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

JULY 10, 2009

In my experience, IT prospects tend to lie about their titles and their level of interest because they’re afraid that they won’t get the best content or treatment if they admit that they’re trapped on the help desk instead of wielding that big stick of decision-making. But is that lead totally useless? I don’t think so.

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2010

For example, in the three categories I’ve looked at so far (there are six categories altogether), we have one company using analytics to predict customer buying patterns (and this ain’t diapers or laundry detergent, ladies and gents—we’re talking six-figure jumbles of complex products and services here). What is a waking dream?

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 15, 2010

But a quick read of our magazine showed that we didn’t write about products. If the vendors can’t help with the integration, IT can. This is where social media tools are helpful. PR people meanwhile should use their thick skins and relationship skills to help build the conversation in social media.

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

Most of the marketers I talk to are trying to reach a few top executives in big organizations who make buying decisions about big, complex products and services. This week, Jeremiah Owyang published a great framework of things that marketers have to do to listen well—including a list of vendors who help marketers listen.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

Most of the marketers I talk to are trying to reach a few top executives in big organizations who make buying decisions about big, complex products and services. This week, Jeremiah Owyang published a great framework of things that marketers have to do to listen well—including a list of vendors who help marketers listen.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

Marketers, meanwhile, didn’t have a wall, so they filled their content with self-aggrandizing references to their own products and services that pissed off readers and sent them to other sources for advice. What’s the point?

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Advertising Agencies Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

JULY 24, 2009

That lets them be more productive in marketing, by focusing effort and budget on the good stuff, and it lets them reduce the time to a sale by giving salespeople better tools to work with. The marketing funnel helps focus attention on a number of important issues: Qualify leads. But we need to start doing that.

Top of Funnel 100

Top of Funnel Lead Ranking Lead Scoring Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

JULY 24, 2009

That lets them be more productive in marketing, by focusing effort and budget on the good stuff, and it lets them reduce the time to a sale by giving salespeople better tools to work with. The marketing funnel helps focus attention on a number of important issues: Qualify leads. But we need to start doing that.

Lead Qualification 100

Lead Qualification Marketing Automation Services Lead Ranking Lead Scoring 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 22, 2010

This is the number of articles or blog posts that mention the product or service measured against the trend in sales. Here are some metrics, mostly for blogs, that help build engagement with customers and prospects. Bounce rate is a good metric for websites because it helps show whether people are finding what they’re looking for.

Social Media 100

Social Media ROI Lead Ranking RSS 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 5, 2009

They expected Ford to respond immediately to their requests for help. Meanwhile, the company kept up its emphasis on research and development so that customers would see that it was still committed to offering leading edge products. But customers had not bought their Explorers from a tire manufacturer; they had bought them from Ford.

Paid Search Agency 100

Paid Search Agency Companies Work Management Ethics 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2012

Connectedness equals productivity, as we discovered (eventually) with PCs and laptops in earlier times that began just as chaotically as mobile has. who is a veteran of corporate networking (he helped develop the first devices for connecting PCs on the corporate network). Far from it. But you can’t do this with one app.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Lock-In Marketing Management Paper 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

It may look better and read better than a brochure, but it’s still a brochure because it emphasizes our products and services over the needs of the people we are trying to reach. And in Gartner’s defense, sometimes IT can be so complex and confusing that it really does help to have an acronym for talking about things.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Gartner Planning 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 28, 2010

From Facebook to email to putting telephones on employees’ desks (remember, the telephone started as a “consumer” communication technology, too), companies think that every new wave is going to lead to gajillions in lost productivity. But influence in social media isn’t purely a numbers game (though numbers can certainly help).

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 16, 2010

Having this goal in the back of my mind helped push me to continue to blog about social media even though so many others were doing the same thing. At some point, I thought, all these little posts are going to add up to something bigger. Move beyond simple reuse.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

MAY 5, 2014

What has kept musicians and inventors in the basement for all those years wasn’t the promise of financial reward (though that certainly helped), it was that the costs of producing and distributing the thing they wanted to do were just too high for them to bear on their own. The Costs of Production Approach Zero for Everything.

Copyright 100

Copyright Distribution Youtube Internet Marketing 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 20, 2009

The need to maximize web hits means that trade journalists are being pushed to create more shorter stories that appeal to the largest possible audience—not a fertile ground for in-depth analyses of complex B2B products and services. Digital marketing has reached the budget tipping point—with help from the recession. Marketing factors.

Social Media 100

Social Media Social Marketing B2B Marketing Work Management 100