WARNING: If you have corporate comms or brand stewards reading over your shoulder you might want to have them avert their eyes while you read this post.
As a B2B technology marketer my heart belongs to lead gen. Lead gen has always has been my bias and it always will be. And when developing marketing content I often make decisions that favor lead gen over branding and thought leadership.
Here are a couple of examples and tips for how I like to tune content marketing for optimal lead generation.
Amanda Nelson from the Salesforce marketing team reached out to me not long ago to discuss her infatuation with one of our most beloved event marketing tactics at Glance.
Glance pants.
Re-published below is Amanda’s ode to Glance pants. You can judge for yourself if it is (as she claims) “the most creative event marketing tactic you’ve ever seen.”
By Amanda L. Nelson
Originally published in the Salesforce AppExchange online magazine July 23, 2019
I’ve been in B2B marketing for a long time, and all too often I’ve seen Marketing and Sales organizations interact like squabbling step-brothers — grandstanding, backstabbing, and blaming each other for failure.
[Article re-posted from LinkedIn]
I was running through an Intro To Account-Based Marketing presentation with a client the other day and he asked if ABM is appropriate only for billion-dollar target accounts. The answer is no. Continue reading
Most B2B sales organizations have a long list of hundreds of top-tier target accounts. Choosing the right pilot accounts for your fledgling ABM program can make the difference between a promising initial success and a momentum-crushing failure.
In the 1989 film Field Of Dreams, Kevin Costner plays a farmer who hears a voice in his head advising him “if you build it, they will come.” He does what he is told and clears out some of the crops on his struggling farm to build a baseball field. “They” do indeed come. Ghostly baseball players emerge from the cornstalks to take the field. Costner’s long-dead dad comes from the corn to play a game of catch with him. And the final aerial shot shows a line of cars (presumably baseball-loving admission-paying spectators) making a pilgrimage to Costner’s baseball field.
“If you build it, they will come” has become a mantra for content marketing. Create valuable content and your prospects will find you, and they’ll show up ready to sign purchase orders. But marketers know it is a lot harder than that. It takes a lot of planning & preparation, disciplined execution, and collaboration across marketing & sales teams to make content marketing work and to convert it to business.
Here’s an example of a good content marketing campaign we created at SDL. Continue reading
By Bob Hebeisen
I wrote a while ago about an online tool called PowToon that lets you to easily create video marketing content and video infographics. It’s really a great content marketing tool, pretty easy to use, and I highly recommend it.
Well, I recently saw a Facebook post from PowToon where one of their users — a young student they are calling “M” — created a heartbreaking video about how he is being bullied in school. PowToon encouraged their community to make videos offering support to M… and in return, PowToon offered to give away a free 1-year subscription of PowToon Pro to any community member who submits a video by December 26th, 2016. Continue reading
by Bob Hebeisen
Fall is upon us, and it’s time to start developing your marketing plan for next year.
For hard-working marketing executives, it’s easy to fall into the trap of showing up for work each day and immediately diving into tactical mode. There are always emails from your sales executives to check, content creation projects to complete, nurture campaigns to tune up, and fires to fight. If you’re not careful you can easily lose days and weeks just going with the flow in tactical mode… neglecting your duties as the navigator of the marketing strategy.
by Bob Hebeisen
Click the image to visit this blog post on the Dimensional Insight blog
I did quite a lot of blog-writing myself at Dimensional Insight, and I reviewed and edited just about every post that was published. But my favorite blog was the series I did about using spreadsheets for business analytics. It was Dimensional Insight’s most popular blog post of 2013 and it continues to draw a steady stream of viewers to the Dimensional Insight web properties.
Here are 5 reasons I love this blog post so much.
By Bob Hebeisen
We wanted to spice up our marketing content with some simple videos, but didn’t want to pay through the nose for custom video creation. My boss suggested a tool called PowToon (www.powtoon.com). Their home page describes the service as “create animated videos and presentations…It’s free and it’s awesome”… and I tend to agree.
The PowToon interface is quite intuitive and easy to get used to — a mixture of PowerPoint and timeline-based video editing software:
Continue reading
Contact me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobhebeisen
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