The end goal is that these elements should combine to help inform an organization's future strategy for business, sales, and marketing. Also, much has been written over the past 2-3 years about the importance of buyer personas, but these articles, books, and blog posts have stressed them as profiles or lead-generation tools as opposed to a best practice that informs on business, sales, and marketing strategies that help best identify and reach buyers. Here Tony and I discuss the concept of and misperceptions about buyer personas, and what it takes to extract full value from them. MORE >>

To effectively market our solutions, it helps if there's a broad base of Junos skills within the organizations we're targeting. It hasn't altered our approach but it has given us the extra incentive we needed to build a program that helps expand our technical advocacy programs. headquarters is responsible for nurturing the program, delivering additional resources, and finding more interactive ways to engage with advocates, such as via live chat, Twitter, and YouTube. What was the catalyst for the campaign? Was the campaign targeted at prospects, customers, or both? MORE >>

Not only does this make it easier to find something to tweet about on a regular basis, it turns you into a valuable resource. Call Upon Tools – Take advantage of the variety of tools designed to help find folks to follow, shorten URLs and manage your tweet streams, including wefollow , bitly , TweetDeck , HootSuite , and CoTweet. Consistently Use Hashtags – To help others find the content you’re sharing, be sure to include hashtags in your tweets. Follow these seven principles to get started on the right path. How have you made Twitter work for you? MORE >>

Before you add something to your editorial calendar, ask yourself if this content will help you get closer to your business or marketing goals. Or, you hear people talk about starting a blog all of the time, but they don’t really have a specific plan for how it will help their business (not to mention how they’ll measure its success). If a particular type of content isn’t going to play a key role in helping you get closer to your business goals (such as helping customers move through the buying process), chances are, you don’t need it. Commit. MORE >>

Similarly, images elicit emotion, reinforce key messages, and can actually help readers remember content. If you pick images that convey humor or a concept and they aren’t cliché or trite, people will associate the images and words, which helps them retain the information. This is a mnemonic device ([link] The combination of strong copy and images create a way to help brains better remember information. Whether it's an eBook or other communications vehicle, it can be helpful to talk with a designer early in the process. wrote for AG Salesworks last fall. MORE >>