How to Create, Earn, Share and Spread your Brand Messaging B2B content marketing is the cornerstone of a brand’s online presence. More than just being a vehicle for sharing your brand’s messaging, though, content marketing can be -- and is -- an effective way to meet your organization’s bottom-line goals. With great content, you can attract new investors and customers, nurture cold leads and convert warm ones.  Without it, your organization will become a ghost --...

If you are a marketer in a product-led business, you HAVE to be a product-led marketer. In the SaaS industry, there are two popular models: enterprise-level price points with a sales-led approach to marketing and...a product-led approach.  Enterprise doesn’t need as much volume, but you need to account for a long sales cycle and the responsibility of closing deals will fall almost exclusively on the sales team.  Product-led growth is more about volume and...

Building a successful startup from the ground up will always involve some level of creative problem-solving and business savvy. But knowing how to build a startup that’s also an online marketplace comes with its own set of unique challenges. When I asked how he engineered an online marketplace that fulfilled both supply and demand needs in the construction industry and successfully raised $25M in capital, Jiyan Wei, Cofounder of BuildZoom, shared with us some great strategies that...

In the final episode of this 3-part series, you’ll hear how organizations can shift toward solution-based selling. In part 1 we covered aligning goals. In part 2 we talked about a framework for approaching alignment. In this final episode, we discuss solution-based selling. Most lost sales don’t go to the competitors, they go to no sale at all. That means the buyer was not able to effectively make a decision. Jeff Davis, author of Create Togetherness shares actionable...

In part 2 of this 3-part series, Jeff Davis, author of Create Togetherness  acknowledges that sales alignment is an evolution. In part 1, we discussed aligning sales and marketing by aligning KPIs. Today, we discuss the four stages companies typically advance through on the road to alignment.  Hidden Marketing - There may be a sales leader, but the CEO/Founder is often the marketing leader. Efforts are often reactionary and there is a very small small team. Sales-driven...

“I don’t want salespeople to be marketers or marketers to be salespeople. Instead, I want to help leverage each other to reach our goals. Jeff Davis Learning how to master sales and marketing alignment is an ongoing process for many organizations. But, if you want to outperform your competitors and optimize your sales process, it’s essential. You must first create aligned goals for your team, understand which sales and marketing configuration you currently have (and where you...

In an always-on world, broadcast media monitoring services help you stay current on all on how your brand, industry, and competitors are being covered in broadcast and cable television. This gives you a huge advantage when it comes to defending your brand and managing your reputation, particularly in the event of crisis or news media backlash of some kind. As part of the research I did for my Guide to News Media Monitoring, I spoke to TVEyes CEO David Ives about his platform and...

When it comes to creating a niche marketing strategy for B2Bs, there are no off-the-shelf options. It’s a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you can adapt the way you sell to match how customers like to buy. But doing that involves anticipating how they'll want to buy before they're actually buying that way because it takes time to get systems in place that can deliver on their ease-of-use expectations. This is particularly at a time when B2C giants like...

It’s not the best business that wins. It’s the business with best marketing. This means that marketing -- and digital marketing specifically during a pandemic -- is the single most important way to survive and thrive right now.  After all, it’s marketing’s job to communicate value, generate leads, bring in and win new clients.  Without clients, you don’t have a business, you just have a really expensive hobby. To be truly successful at B2B marketing, you may want...

While B2B lead generation has changed a lot since the Rolodex days, one thing has remained the same - word of mouth. If you want to translate the world of media into word of mouth, people have to be able to remember your message.  And people remember information best if it’s conveyed in a story. Storytelling in marketing has always been crucial. After all, as humans, we’re programmed to remember stories more than facts.  So, how do you tell a business-related story...

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to B2B lead generation is increasing lead quantity without compromising lead quality.  In the B2B growth marketing world, marketers of niche products and services simply don’t have a big pool of potential customers to draw from. Which is why they believe in marketing early and often.  The idea is to build awareness through B2B content marketing before the customer shops. But what happens all too often, is marketing hands the lead over...

What is sales enablement? Ask 10 people and get 12 different answers. In short, great sales enablement should help break down barriers within your organization, allowing sales and marketing to align against shared KPIs. In theory, that sounds great, but in practice, it doesn’t always happen. At least not as smoothly as we’d like.  To get some insights into what successful sales enablement does - and doesn’t - look like in business, I spoke to Roderick Jefferson, CEO of...

If you were to ask a room of digital marketing consultants, “What’s the best plan for creating content for startups?” the overwhelming majority of them would swear by the skyscraper blog post strategy. I’ll give you a hard and fast definition of the skyscraper technique deeper in this article, but from a big picture standpoint, it’s essentially about overwhelming the reader with an encyclopedia-style article that covers everything under the sun related to a search term. It’s a...

You wouldn’t expect to arrive at your destination without following directions. So why would anyone invest in B2B digital marketing without a roadmap? The reason so many fall short when it comes to data-driven marketing is they lack direction. And social media engagement, website usage, email marketing data are the digital breadcrumbs you use to find your way. In B2B customer journey mapping, your first order of business is making sure you’re accurately tracking how people...

If you’re marketing to a variety of online audiences, you’ve probably heard the term GDPR by now. But what is GDPR?  What’s CCPA?  And how do they impact you and your digital marketing team? Digital compliance is something that often gets overlooked. But it shouldn’t. Fines and penalties, while rare, could put you out of business if regulators decide to make an example out of you. To help you understand your GDPR and CCPA compliance requirements, I...

Are you losing potential customers because of bad user experience?You can have the greatest product ever, but if the user experience is poor, you’ll lose out on sales.  To help you know how to improve the customer experience on your site, I interviewed an expert on the matter, Darren Krape, Senior UX Designer at Amazon. I meet Darren when I led a seminar on Digital Diplomacy at the Dept. of State and he was a guest speaker. He had played a critical role in assisting the US...

B2B lead generation can feel like a difficult code to unlock.  Fortunately, you’re about to get some ideas on how to generate qualified leads with your content marketing efforts. Here are just a few of the insights I got about B2B growth marketing during a recent chat with David Cardiel, Head of Growth at Cision. What is lead generation? David Cardiel In short, lead generation is how you attract and convert customers who have shown interest in your...

If you're wondering what is growth marketing or what is a growth marketer, this post is for you. Digital marketer, entrepreneur & angel investor Neil Patel I’m a Los Angeles-based growth marketing consultant, and I had the honor of connecting with global lead generation and demand generation master Neil Patel. He graciously walked me step-by-step through what it takes to be a growth marketer.  In terms of credentials, here are some of his: US...

Search engine optimization is just one part of demand generation. Equally important are content marketing, social media, email marketing, a/b testing and conversion optimization.  In this episode, we go deep with demand gen maverick Gaetano DeNardi (@gaetano_nyc) about how to assess an existing site, increase its organic traffic through SEO, grow your email list and convert more leads to revenue. Gaetano led demand-generation at Saleshacker, growing traffic from 17,000 to...

B2B content marketing is the demand generation pillar in the SEMrush digital marketing strategy. SEMrush sells a SaaS platform that helps with SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media and competitive research. They have more than over 5M clients. I've been using SEMrush to support my B2B content marketing for years. I recently ran into Anna Lebedeva, their Head of Growth Marketing in Los Angeles. We had a chance to sit down and talk about B2B content marketing...

What is digital marketing strategy and how should you pivot as a result of the pandemic?  In this post, I’ll tell you how to evaluate digital marketing strategy in this time of uncertainty. Eric Siu is a digital marketing strategist who runs a modest, multi-million dollar empire that includes a SaaS company called ClickFlow (an SEO Experimentation Tool), a SaaS digital marketing agency and a portfolio of mega profitable, digital marketing oriented online media properties that...

If you want to market new technology products B2Bs you need to engage the CTO. Marketing to the CTO requires an understanding of who they are and what they do.  “A CTO is a sort of ombudsman for all parts of an organization's technologies,” says Ty Roberts, who currently runs strategic partnerships at TIDAL, JAY Z’s global music and entertainment platform committed to creating a deeper connection between artists and fans.  TIDAL is a pioneer in giving its subscribers exclusive...

Three time author and two time unicorn king Max Altshuler has perfected the art and science of finding customers who are ready to buy. The reason it's not all science is because account sourcing requires finding the middle ground between data and gut instinct. Max has played a key role building demand and nurturing leads at Udemy (I teach there) and Outreach, where he works now as vp marketing. And he founded Sales Hacker (and I've written for them). Udemy and Outreach...

If you want get booked to keynote SXSW 2021, now's the time to start planning. And what better way to start then by listening to this exclusive deep dive interview with Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Office at SXSW, about how he goes about making that decision? Welcome to my first episode of the new B2B Lead Gen podcast, hosted by yours truly, Eric Schwartzman. Many of you may know from On the Record...Online, an award-winning podcast I produced from 2005 to 2015. Highlights...