Chris Koch

JULY 10, 2009

As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects. We’re starting to see social media have a positive impact on driving traffic to websites and on lead generation. Increased lead generation” was farther down the list—24% are seeing it.

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. Professional services firms expect their consultants to be thought leaders and that expectation flows through everything those firms do, from recruiting, to training, to marketing.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. Professional services firms expect their consultants to be thought leaders and that expectation flows through everything those firms do, from recruiting, to training, to marketing.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing Paper 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 29, 2010

Okay, so it’s difficult to actually pull money out of buyers for your marketing content (though there are rare exceptions: McKinsey has been doing it for years with the McKinsey Quarterly). Make no mistake; buyers understand the prices behind marketing content. Image via Wikipedia. We’re the ones who don’t pay enough attention to it.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Thought Leadership Mobile Advertising 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 29, 2010

Okay, so it’s difficult to actually pull money out of buyers for your marketing content (though there are rare exceptions: McKinsey has been doing it for years with the McKinsey Quarterly). Make no mistake; buyers understand the prices behind marketing content. Image via Wikipedia. We’re the ones who don’t pay enough attention to it.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Thought Leadership Mobile Advertising 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 7, 2011

This week I was asked to speak on a panel about social media to a group of B2B marketers in financial services. It was great getting the perspective of marketers outside of technology. When we surveyed B2B marketers last year, 50% said they do not have a social media policy. Marketers can handle all that stuff.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Media Peer-to-peer 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 7, 2011

This week I was asked to speak on a panel about social media to a group of B2B marketers in financial services. It was great getting the perspective of marketers outside of technology. When we surveyed B2B marketers last year, 50% said they do not have a social media policy. Marketers can handle all that stuff.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Media Peer-to-peer 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.” Toyota’s market share wasn’t built by Toyota’s marketing; it was built by Consumer Reports.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 6, 2009

One of the great trends were seeing at ITSMA is increased automation of the lead process. It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales. But this trend has an unintended side effect: it exposes our content development processes (or lack thereof).

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Planning Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 6, 2009

One of the great trends were seeing at ITSMA is increased automation of the lead process. It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales. But this trend has an unintended side effect: it exposes our content development processes (or lack thereof).

Planning 100

Planning B2B Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 18, 2011

In fact, our most recent thought leadership survey found that few marketers are measuring much besides consumption of their marketing content. At the other end of the spectrum are the brochures that masquerade as idea marketing by making the offering descriptions longer and the production values higher. But hold the beverages.

Work Management 100

Work Management Thought Leadership Marketing Management Paper 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 15, 2010

We needed to hear from marketers who were out there day-to-day listening to CIOs’ problems and aspirations. Back then what marketers had to say was all about their offerings. Marketers and salespeople didn’t have to do much coaxing to get CIOs to buy, so why get complicated? But mostly we were. And why not? And why not?

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

MAY 21, 2010

The question that we’re asking Facebook is the question that we should be asking ourselves in our marketing: Do we really need all this information? of the time any link that you put in a tweet is going to lead to accessible content. It’s a gradual process—the currency of which is trust and exchange of value.

Privacy 100

Privacy B2B Marketing Lead Ranking B2B 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 11, 2011

There’s lots of talk out there these days about the need for a technology guru within the B2B marketing department. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but I wonder about the long-term need for a marketing technologist. In the short term, I think marketing has a lot of catching up to do in terms of technology.

Analytics 100

Analytics Paid Search Agency Marketing Management Loyalty 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 22, 2011

This shift in innovation has big implications for marketing. ITSMA’s social media research (free excerpt available) shows that marketing is responsible for monitoring social media and for training, governing, and supporting the organization in using social media. Marketing is in a similar position today to where IT was in the 90s.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Social Media 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

All of our talk about marketers becoming publishers is incomplete. 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. Marketing through association. Let me explain.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Advertising Agencies Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 25, 2011

I confirmed something I’ve been hearing in my research on idea marketing over the past month: idea marketing requires a deep commitment not just from marketing but from the entire organization. This process is usually facilitated by marketing. Appeal to their egos. The winning ideas are implemented.

Social Media 100

Social Media Organization Peer-to-peer SME 100

Chris Koch

MAY 1, 2009

Right now, it seems that the gap between sales and marketing is mostly papered over with technology. For example, the trend towards creating a closed-loop lead generation and nurturing process between marketing and sales is a positive step, but it seems like a bridge across the chasm rather than a true route to collaboration.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Cross-Selling B2B Sales Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 21, 2011

At ITSMA , we’ve been busy preparing for our annual State of the Marketing Profession briefing next Tuesday. It’s where we introduce some of the top findings from our annual budget survey of marketers. So we spend weeks leading up to the briefing arguing about what the numbers actually mean and what marketers should do.

Social Media 100

Social Media Budget Programs Paper Stats 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 5, 2010

The pressures on the guard dogs lead to a lot of problems: The emphasis is on risk avoidance. The process is incredibly expensive and inefficient. The process of getting subject matter experts placed in publications or other third-party content channels is awful for everyone involved. Now, it’s even harder to justify.

PR 100

PR Press Paid Search Agency Lead Ranking 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 16, 2009

Earlier this year I surveyed B2B marketers about their approaches to corporate blogging. These marketers take a direct role in finding and supporting internal bloggers and in helping them develop content. The blogs are an integrated part of the corporate marketing strategy and are usually hosted on the corporate website.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Blogger Thought Leadership Word of Mouth 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2010

I’ve been reading through applications for ITSMA’s Marketing Excellence Awards this week and I have been blown away by the quality of innovation and creativity that’s going on out there among our members (and other B2B companies)—I mean, I’m talking about a quantum leap over what I’ve seen in the three years that I’ve been mingling with these folks.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

AUGUST 13, 2010

But we’re in the era of social media now, so there are breadcrumbs in the forest that lead us to a fuller explanation of who Slater is and why he did what he did. Following the trail of bread crumbs leads us to a caring, thoughtful person. So what can we take away from all this as B2B marketing professionals? What do you think?

Social Media 100

Social Media Media SME B2B 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

I agree (journalism’s future will be determined by its ability to create a business model that pays better than the current one: giving away content for free and charging way too little for ads), but I think he missed the more important disruptive power that platforms like BrandVoice really do have: to disintermediate traditional marketing.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 25, 2009

One client summed it up by saying that there are two points of resistance in the process of bringing new things to market. The first comes at the beginning of the process—the “why” battle—where everyone takes pot shots at the new idea. We’re optimists at heart, and we like to trust that past success will lead to future success.

Research 100

Research Service Product Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 25, 2009

One client summed it up by saying that there are two points of resistance in the process of bringing new things to market. The first comes at the beginning of the process—the “why” battle—where everyone takes pot shots at the new idea. We’re optimists at heart, and we like to trust that past success will lead to future success.

Research 100

Research Service Product Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

The best documents don’t just tell employees what not to do; they also tell them what they should be doing to further the marketing goals of the company. Here are some recommendations based on a cross-section of social media policies from B2B companies, including social media policy examples from some leading B2B companies.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Guidelines B2B 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 5, 2009

Customers become highly sensitive to a company’s marketing and advertising messages in the aftermath of a crisis. If, for example, a company responds to a crisis by aggressively marketing itself to replace lost business without addressing the crisis or its impact, the company’s brand image will suffer.

Paid Search Agency 100

Paid Search Agency Companies Work Management Ethics 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Then Gartner did what it always does; it coined an acronym: TLM, or Thought Leadership Marketing. Having been a journalist for years, I know that these acronyms lead even the most feeble-minded of us journos to the next obvious question: What do you mean when you say (insert acronym here)? Idea marketing isn’t easy.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Gartner Planning 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 16, 2010

In the nearly three years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve been relentlessly chronicling my pursuit of the developing story of social media for B2B marketers and absorbing your comments and real-world stories. This week, we released my ITSMA Special Report: “How to Fit Social Media into your Overall Marketing Strategy and Make it Stick.”.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 1, 2010

It’s a warm-up for the great dialogues we’ll be having at MarketingProfs’ SocialTech conference later this month in San Jose, where I’ll be speaking about social media and the B2B buying process. If you’re in B2B marketing, you gotta go to this thing. Content is replacing salespeople in the earliest stages of the buying process.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer 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. External social media marketing is more important than internal social media collaboration.

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

JULY 29, 2011

McKinsey recently learned a difficult lesson about what happens when the world takes your thought leadership marketing seriously—and when you lack the ability to respond in the moment through social media. We understand how the language in the article could lead the reader to think the research was a prediction, but it is not.”.

Social Media 100

Social Media Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Companies 100