Disclaimer: Consult with your primary care physician before beginning any fitness program. The following recommendations are my own. Your results may vary. Oh, and your physician probably won’t have any valuable advice about your B2B marketing fitness. That’s where I come in.

Topics: Marketing, B2B, social media, Inbound Marketing, content, podcasts

I’ve seen a few research studies recently that underscore how we should think about B2B marketing and what customers are trying to tell you as a marketer.

Topics: Marketing, B2B, content

Topics: blog, content, blogging

It’s the natural time of year to talk about how to spend marketing dollars.  As we make our plans for next year, it’s common to look for new concepts, new trends and directions, and to pay attention to what others are doing for clues about what’s working and what’s not.  That’s really the big challenge – marketing is so in-flux today, that the list of programs that always work is rapidly evolving and quite frankly different from company to company.  So we’re all paying close attention to what we can learn from others’ experiences and how to apply that to our own spending decisions.

Topics: social media, email marketing, 2014 ad planning, mobile marketing, Goldstein Group Communications, business-to-business, content

Allocating more budget to content creation . A friend began a marketing automation campaign, installed the software, was ready to go, and came to a screeching stop. “I didn’t realize,” he said to me later, “how much content I really needed to make these programs effective.” Although that’s true, that’s not necessarily new to engineering marketing. We’ve always known that engineers crave information. They love app notes, tutorials, handbooks, white papers, because there’s so much to learn, and technology evolves so rapidly. It just means that sending out catalogs can’t be our primary lead generation tool any longer, and that we have to devote more time and effort to creating other content – white papers, videos, infographics, etc. – that’s educational and engaging. So companies will be devoting more budget allocation to those items, and less to traditional marketing like print advertising. And that’s been taking place for quite a while now, of course.

However, a word of caution: content quality is still important. Some companies have begun to hire low quality bloggers to generate reams of content for a penny a word. That’s not going to work in an engineering world. The quality of what you publish speaks to the quality of your product or service. Don’t take shortcuts. It hasn’t worked before, and it won’t reflect well on your brand.

Topics: 2014 ad planning, Goldstein Group Communications, business-to-business, content