Marketing Strategy

Have you ever wandered by the cookie stand in the mall looking for samples?  Just one little bite that is virtually calorie-free is all you need!  After all, the first taste is the most powerful, tickling all of your taste buds and leaving you, for the most part, pretty satisfied.  Recently, the concept of Fractional CMO has come to my attention.  This blog post explores its value proposition and whether getting a piece of a senior marketing professional has the same effect as that “oh so wonderful” bite size morsel.

I love a good healthy marketing debate over a Cobb salad lunch! Last week, I went a few “rounds” during a discussion about the optimal positioning of a mid-sized professional services firm.  On one side of the ring was me – the experienced and competitive B2B marketer.  On the other side was a people-oriented Partner with over 30 years under his belt.  On the ropes - a business development professional who was new to the firm and to the professional services industry.  In the middle of the ring was the referee disguised as the firm’s Managing Partner.  We hadn’t even ordered our salads as the first round began!

For professional service firms, billable time is key to keeping the business profitable.  I hear the trepidation from some business owners who are wary of keeping their staff from 1.) taking valuable staff off billable time to write and 2.) unleashing knowledge to the world that competitors can freely read.  

Are you looking to draw more prospects to your Web site and generate more new leads? Hosting a webinar is one inbound marketing tool that can help you draw in qualified leads. I’ve recently read “The New Rules of Marketing  & PR,” by David Meerman Scott.  In the book, Scott defines webinars perfectly as, “online seminars that may include audio, video, or graphics (typically in the form of PowerPoint slides) and are often used by companies as a primer about a specific problem that the company’s services can solve.”

Why Customer Insight is King in B2B Marketing

The starting point for almost all B2B marketing initiatives involves gaining insight about the customer through surveys.  Regardless of whether I am doing a marketing plan, positioning study, advertisement, video, Web site or brochure, I begin the process by gaining a clear understanding of the needs, views and preferences of my clients’ target customers.  Marketri clients are typically surprised when they get the survey results.  What they thought was critical to their customers is oftentimes a “price to play” or simply not that important.   To create marketing strategies, plans and communications that connect and engage existing and potential customers, B2B marketers need to first understand what the buyers are likely seeking.  Here are some tips on how to maximize the value of your B2B marketing efforts through customer surveys:

This post is a guest blog post by Robert Denney, President at Robert Denney Associates, Inc., a provider of strategic management and marketing counsel to law firms, companies and non-profit organizations throughout the United States and parts of Canada for over 30 years.

Like me, you may be a “content curator” and not even know it. Lately, I have noticed a number of articles and blog posts with headlines referencing the concept of content curation. I have to admit, before reading these posts, I wasn’t quite sure what exactly it was. I am familiar with content marketing and have found it to be an excellent marketing tool both for Marketri and our clients, so I figured content curation was worth investigating.

You can imagine my surprise after researching this topic, only to discover that I was already curating content on a regular basis! So what exactly is this practice? Content curation is the process of sorting through the sometimes overwhelming amount of content that is on the Web, and presenting it to an audience in an organized and purposeful way to provide learning on a specific topic. This involves regularly reviewing content, scanning for the best pieces of information and selecting the most useful and relevant information to share with your audience to provide value. This could be anything from selecting content on a specific topic and sharing it on your Twitter feed, to creating a blog post that compiles links to other posts on a particular topic of interest.  For an excellent breakdown of content curation basics, take a look at this post from Beth Kanter.

In today’s economy, businesses with their dwindling budgets are constantly being forced to try to do more with less. The good news is that even companies with limited marketing resources can engage prospects and win new customers.  The solution is inbound marketing! Instead of throwing away money on traditional “push” advertising techniques, pull your customers in through inbound marketing.

Amid the constant influx of information that is streaming directly  to us via Web sites, blog posts, social media, and even the more traditional media brochures and qualification documents, it’s getting more and more difficult to express why you are the best at what you do for the particular audience you target.   As a B2B marketer with a focus on the professional services industries, I can’t stress enough the importance of “selling” people over services in this battle for differentiation. 

Creating and sharing content that contributes to thought leadership is an invaluable tool for building your business and drawing in potential buyers. As marketers serving B2B professional service firms, we often find ourselves explaining the importance of establishing thought leadership to our clients. So what exactly is thought leadership and why do you need it?