There are some key components of marketing that fit together to create a solid B2B marketing campaign plan that drives results and delivers desired business results. Ensure you are utilizing each of these when planning your B2B marketing campaign plans. 

Content creation can be a robust process depending on the amount of content you are publishing during a set timeframe. To keep your process organized and strategic (and to keep marketers sane), we’ve found a detailed content calendar is key. This post lists a few benefits of using a content calendar and a few items we think should be included on every content calendar to make it most efficient and beneficial.

Creating compelling B2B content is only half the battle when it comes to a solid content marketing strategy for your business. While your content must be grammatically correct, educational, formatted properly, and a good representation of your brand, it must also be strategically created following proven best practices that most inbound marketers follow. These tactics are what help ensure your content isn’t just interesting or nice to read, but ultimately driving prospects closer to doing business with you and taking some kind of action or next step.

Is it Time to Update Your Content Marketing Game?

I’m starting to believe that content marketing as part of executing a growth strategy is reaching a point of saturation and diminishing returns.

Quantity over quality. Poor writing. Lack of strategic focus. Advertorial. One and done efforts with little to no promotion. Hiring cheap and getting cheap results.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Good journalism can teach us a thing or two about creating blog posts. Journalists and inbound marketers who are dedicated to their craft have something in common: they commit to doing the things that engage their readers. 

Here are five lessons from journalism that companies can apply to their blog writing to increase engagement—and get better results.

At some point in your career, it’s likely that you’ll have a conversation with a C-suiter who will tell you that your marketing budget is being cut because the company must tighten its belt.

That conversation will quickly put a damper on how you think you’re being perceived by the company and will likely have a negative effect on your enthusiasm to champion some really great marketing ideas. 

It’s not that the C-suite doesn’t like you, or doesn’t appreciate your efforts, or like the work you’re doing. When you’re told that you face a budget cut, what this means is that you’re not showing value —a return on investment—for how the marketing budget is being spent.

There are a number of culprits that may be in play here:

When Pinterest first came onto the social media scene in 2010, most B2B marketers wrote it off as “a great place for mommy bloggers.” This perception, whether real or imagined, has led to a slower adoption of Pinterest by B2B marketers as an acceptable social media platform. Many B2B marketers default to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn when looking for ways to promote their products and increasing brand awareness. But’s that not all that Pinterest is good for.  

While Pinterest is a wonderful platform for curating images of things that you like, it’s also a great place for B2B marketers to educate leads and prospects about their offerings and to generate website traffic. Pinterest is also an ideal place to find inspiration and new ideas on a wide array of topics. At times, I have been so inspired by what I have found on Pinterest, it’s reminded me of the inspiration from a TED Talk, but with still images.  

During the 2016 HubSpot Inbound Conference last year, about midway through I got to a point where I was feeling overwhelmed with information about new products, updates to HubSpot, new books to read, and trying to remember all of the new people I had met that week. All the information was great, but it all came at once. Conferences like Inbound shouldn’t be the only opportunity that we have each year to learn and grow in our sales and marketing careers.

This morning I was reminded of my continued enthusiasm for learning when one of my friends asked on Facebook, “Does anyone know anything about Google Analytics?” I instantly knew that the best resource for this person was the Google Analytics Academy that I often visit to learn more about digital marketing and specifically how to better analyze website data using Google Analytics. When I sent over the link to the course, it prompted my memory regarding all of the great, free materials for sales and marketers that exists and I started to catalog them.  

It’s Official: “Always Be Helping” Replaces “Always Be Closing (ABC)” as Key to Business Development

Janice and I happened to catch that great David Mamet movie Glengarry Glen Ross a few days ago, with that chilling scene where Alec Baldwin harangues a pathetic group of real estate salesmen to “always be closing.”

There’s a lot of bad marketing out there—websites, emails, and landing pages that sound more like used car ads than anything else. (No offense to used car dealerships. . . .) The “experts” and the “gurus” fill the interwebs with grand pronouncements and declarations, claiming that their “world class” methods help “thousands” of “Fortune 500 companies” “crush it.”

People can sniff out a fraud from miles away, and even if you’re not one of them, you sure don’t want to sound like one. Here are 5 ways to keep yourself from sounding sleazy.