B2B Marketing Leaders, Can You Brief Your Consultants on Your Buyers? You hire specialists. But no matter how good they are at their jobs, you still have to brief them on your project. In my roles over the past several years, whether consulting solo or working alongside other talented agencies, one challenge has been a [...]
Building out buyer personas might not be the first step that comes to mind when starting a business, but understanding your customer base is crucial to success. Often this exercise boils down to demographics like age, gender, and income, but those things only tells you who your customer is, not how they think. If you [...]
It is a simple truth that businesses thrive when their customers want them to. In a time where stories of good or bad customer experiences can spread like wildfire, being a consumer-centric business is not option. Customers want businesses to cater to their needs, and go to great lengths to support business they feel do [...]
Every B2B technology business wants to be focused on the customer, from marketing efforts to product innovation. Part of customer-centricity involves truly connecting with prospects before they become customers. But according to a recent report from TrustRadius, many vendors fall short in this arena. The 2018 B2B Buying Disconnect Report highlights the difference between [...]
The key to commercial success, whether digitally or traditionally, is to find the right customer at the right time in the right place and present them the right content. Another more common way to think of it is solving for who, what, where and when. This has become a whole lot easier in the digital [...]
In business, it’s important to know who your primary audience is – if you don’t know who you’re marketing and selling to, it’s going to be tough to make a sale. Of course, you have a general idea of who you’re trying to sell your products to, but do you truly understand these people? How [...]
We're thrilled to be included in Gartner's 2016 Cool Vendors in Content Marketing, a listing of four innovative new technologies available to help marketers make the most of their content marketing efforts. (Registration is required to read the full report.) This recognition comes at a time when only 22% of companies claim to be effective [...]
Our friends at NetProspex (a D&B company) have published the 2016 Marketing Data Benchmark Report, a tradition that lives on from when both Apparao and myself worked at the organization in the past. The report is an analysis of a massive annual study that surveyed 695 million records in B2B companies’ databases and spoke with more than 500 marketers [...]
Part 1 of 2: The Confluence of Buyer Personas and Company Personas (look for part 2 coming soon with our partners at HG Data) The idea of creating buyer personas has long been used by marketers to create a human profile of our buyers. We’ve grown to understand the buyer beyond their job title which allows [...]
We've all been there. You're about to present to your board/boss/someone about the budget you need for next year, and a big part of that is persona development, maintenance, or persona management technology. You know deep down that personas lead to more EMPATHY in your organization, and are a vehicle for customer-centricity as your team members internalize [...]
